Using Baldrige to Improve Education: A Rationale Based on Results

"My students are not widgets!" exclaimed an indignant educator in 1992. She was offended by the suggestion that total quality management principles used to improve performance in the private sector could be customized and applied successfully to improve the public schools.

Fortunately, a lot has changed during the past eight years. Several developments in particular have convinced an increasing number of educators that TQM--more precisely, the Malcolm Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excel-Lence--is worth another look.

Every state, except Iowa, has adopted (or is in the process of adopting) student performance standards. State policymakers are now implementing assessments to track progress in meeting state standards and creating accountability measures that reward success and deal decisively with low performance. Students unable to pass state proficiency tests may be denied a diploma. Principals and staff in schools designated as low performing may be reassigned or dismissed. The implication: Educators are in the hot seat and need a proven long-term strategy to drive their reform efforts.

More companies, having experienced the benefit of reskilling their own workforces within a systems context, are eager to support comparable leadership development opportunities for educators. Educators are demonstrating the value of Baldrige by using the criteria as an organizational assessment tool to improve student and system performance.

Connecting the dots

If most education reform efforts have fallen short, it's not because of inertia. The past 15 years have witnessed a flurry of activity. Numerous policymakers and educators have attempted valiantly to define the essence of schooling, articulate more rigorous education goals and standards, provide meaningful curricula, offer needed staff development, assess student performance, and assign accountability for results.

Unfortunately, the resources and commitment expended on those individual reforms far exceed their collective capacity to improve student performance. Why? Because the separate pieces are greater than their sum. They are, in essence, "random acts of improvement," to quote education leaders from Pinellas County Schools in Florida.

Ironically, U.S. school systems are where American companies were 15 to 20 years ago, when business leaders discovered that they could no longer compete in an international marketplace. For the first time, education leaders confront an equally formidable challenge: They must determine how to meet higher performance expectations, not just for some but all students. And their challenge is the more daunting because it is unfolding in public.

Fortunately, in formulating solutions, educators don't have to design an accountability model from scratch. They can learn from and improve upon the approach taken by successful companies such as Motorola and Xerox to reinvent themselves. In discovering the means to deliver quality products and services that satisfy customers, business leaders have transformed their organizations. The actions taken by such corporations in the 1980s also produced something of lasting value--a systemic improvement strategy and framework, first codified in the Baldrige criteria in 1987 and updated annually by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Since U.S. Congress extended the Baldrige Award to include education and health-care organizations, more than 40 states have put in place programs to recognize and accelerate the sharing of best practices within their borders. The Baldrige criteria give any organization, not just corporations, the means to respond to and anticipate changes in a world that will become even more fastpaced and complex.

Now educators also have the means to connect the dots.

Business leaders in places like Pinellas County; North Carolina; Freeport, Texas; and elsewhere first proposed using the Baldrige criteria in the early 1990s to transform education. Having experienced positive results inside their own companies, they were willing to support comparable reform efforts for and with their education partners.

That business intuition has been validated by concrete results:

* North Carolina and Texas lead the United States in student performance gains during the nineties, as well as ranking number 1 for the past three years, according to Site Selection magazine. Forty-five North Carolina school districts representing 70 percent of students statewide have voluntarily joined a partnership focused on implementing a Baldrige-based improvement strategy.

* Brazosport Independent School District in Freeport, Texas, is the largest district in the state to have all schools rated as exemplary. The district serves 13,500 students, 41.8 percent either Hispanic or African American and 36.4 percent economically disadvantaged. From 1997 to 98, more than 92 percent of all students passed state reading, math, and writing tests, representing an 80 percent gain in some schools. Brazosport is the first district to win the Texas Quality Award and also received a Baldrige site visit in November 1999.

* Pinellas County Schools in Tampa Bay, Florida, is the 22nd largest U.S. school district, with more than 110,000 students. In 1993, Pinellas was the first district to win Florida's Sterling (quality) Award. In 1998, Pinellas ranked number 1 in the state, based on multiple student performance measures. At Azalea Elementary, test scores jumped 20 percent in just two years among a student body that has a 40 percent annual mobility rate and is 52 percent economically disadvantaged. The reason: Students are taught to assume responsibility for their own learning.

When such results are shared, educators can't help but pay attention. Their growing interest in Baldrige is based on two additional motivators, exhaustion and accountability.

School people are simply wearing out from reform overload. Communities across the United States are virtual landfills of promising, yet disconnected, programs, projects, and innovations. Consequently, educators are beginning to view Baldrige as a welcome reclamation tool. Finally, they have a way to align the myriad of initiatives into a comprehensive, long-term systemic reform effort.

Not surprisingly, many educators want to invest their time and energy in an accountability model like Baldrige, with a proven track record for driving performance excellence and a reservoir of experienced champions within the educators' own business communities. If applied thoughtfully, the Baldrige criteria alter the tenor of accountability in education. Instead of reinforcing negative outcomes such as the threat of exposure and blame for not measuring up, a Baldrige-based accountability model can help states and communities reach consensus on education priorities, reinforce fact-based decision making, and identify ongoing opportunities for classrooms, schools, and districts to implement improvements.

If used consistently, Baldrige also enables educators to address the questions that have bedeviled them for decades: How do we really know what works? And how do we maximize the impact of such innovations--beyond the sheer force of charismatic leaders, fortunate timing, and anecdotal success stories?

Perhaps most promising, the long-term use of Baldrige can build the organizational capacity of the education system, with business and community support, to sustain student and system improvement over time.

The Baldrige in Education Initiative, BiE IN for short, was created to capitalize on the growing interest among educators to use the Baldrige criteria to raise student achievement. BiE IN, which also stands for "buy-in in spirit," builds common ground around the one thing about which everyone cares most: increasing learning opportunities and success for all students.

The National Alliance of Business and its partner, the American Productivity & Quality Center, initiated BiE IN and invited 22 other key national business and education organizations to join.

BiE IN has a lofty vision--to accelerate and scale up implementation of Baldrige criteria U.S.-wide in order to meet state performance standards and achieve excellence and equity in American public education. BiE IN will achieve that vision by implementing a three-fold strategy:

* Forge a National Leadership Infrastructure of key business and education organizations to build awareness of and support for using Baldrige to increase student and system performance.

* Create a State Leadership Consortium to accelerate--through coaching, training, networking, and dissemination of best practices--the rollout of Baldrige within and across the United States over the next two years. BiE IN will support state-community leadership teams in six states--Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, New Mexico, Ohio, and Texas--and share their lessons learned in real time with other states.

* Design and disseminate materials and provide technical support to all state and local stakeholders, including business partners, to enhance their success in using the Baldrige as a model.

Our task is less to convince educators to use Baldrige criteria to meet more rigorous standards but to align policy and practice and then build organizational capacity within education to speed up and sustain continuous improvement. It's an achievable goal.

The best thing about using the Baldrige is its potential for transforming education where it counts--in the classroom. Students play a unique role in quality-driven education systems: They're not the products but the active workers. The product they produce is learning, through the dynamic exchange with their peers and teachers. Students are also internal customers of learning, much like workers are internal customers of the new knowledge and skills they acquire on the job and that enhance their employability and competency. Once learned, that knowledge and skills become part of them.

Just listen to Emily Hopper, a fifth-grader at Azalea Elementary, describe how her classmates were gearing up for middle school:

"We really are tougher on ourselves because...now we're like in the third grading period, one grading period left, and then we're not going to be at Azalea anymore. We're going to be at a bigger school. As our teachers started telling us more about middle school, we started saying, 'OK, I think we better toughen up the rules a little....' We thought it was a little too easy on us."

When students assuming responsibility for their own learning becomes the norm rather than the exception, then we'll know we've arrived. No one would ever accuse Emily and her classmates of being treated like widgets. They wouldn't dare!"

"I can't make kids learn," admits Azalea Elementary principal Brenda Clark. "But when those kids have the data in their hands and understand they're responsible, then it becomes their mission. They're actively involved in making sure that our data goes higher because they want to be the best they can be."

BiE IN U.S. Partners

Achieve

American Association of School Administrators

American Business Conference

American Federation of Teachers

American Productivity & Quality Center

Business-Higher Education Reform

The Business Roundtable

Council of Chief State School Officers

Council of Growing Companies

Council of the Great City Schools

Council on Competitiveness

Education Commission of the States

International Council of School Accreditation Commissions

National Alliance of Business

National Association of Elementary School Principals

National Association of Secondary School Principals

National Association of Manufacturers

National Association of Partners in Education

National Association of State Boards of Education

National Conference of State Legislatures

National Education Association

National Education Goals Panel

National Governors' Association

National School Boards Association

U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Utility Business Education Coalition, Inc.

"We need to restore reason and stability within our schools so that educators and students are supported for making sound decisions and being accountable for the results," says Robert T. Jones, president and CEO, National Alliance of Business.

COPYRIGHT 2000 American Society for Training & Development, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group