The Road To Quality
Reach New Heights in Performance and Achievement
Through the Baldrige
“What you aim for matters. What you measure
matters,” says Mike Ward. “Heaven help you if
what you aim for and what you measure are different.
Heaven help you if what you aim for and what you measure
are the same—and they’re the wrong
things!” These words coming from a quality engineer
would be commonplace, but coming from a state school
superintendent, they are not.
And Mike Ward is just that. As
superintendent of public instruction for the state of
North Carolina, Ward has been involved with the National
Association of Business’ Baldrige in Education
Initiative (BiE-IN) program. BiE-IN is a partnership of
26 national business and education organizations that are
managed by the National Alliance of Business and the
American Productivity and Quality Center. The program
supports states, districts and communities in
implementing a Baldrige-based improvement strategy for
schools. The belief is that the Malcolm Baldrige National
Quality Award Criteria provide educators, their
businesses and community partners with a framework to
transform the education system so that it has the
capacity to meet ever-increasing expectations for student
performance.
Formed in mid-1999, BiE-IN developed pilot
programs in six states: Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, New
Mexico, Ohio and Texas. The goal of the initiative was to
fundamentally transform education by convening
people—who may not have previously had an
opportunity to come together—in leadership roles to
determine what their education system needed to be about.
These leaders included state legislators, key education
groups and administrators. According to Peggy Siegel,
director of leadership/education initiatives for the
National Alliance of Business, the concept was to have
them define the specific measures that would accelerate
student performance.
“The beauty of the Baldrige Criteria
is that it is data driven and continuous. This strategy
has been most successful at the classroom level through
the use of data from statewide assessment tests as one
barometer which is supplemented with data coming directly
from the classes,” says Siegel. “Education
has never really been process focused. The Baldrige is
about stretching our education systems beyond having more
rigorous goals. It is about aligning the systems that
support students as they matriculate through the
school,” says Siegel.
Obviously school reform is a major issue for
most Americans. Hardly a day goes by without a public
official addressing the need to reform and improve our
nation’s schools. Typically, the approach has been
to pass a law, cross our fingers and hope that change
happens—the traditional top-down approach, which
falls back on the old mechanistic model that if we
mandate change, it will occur. But, according to Siegel,
“The Baldrige Criteria bust that concept wide open.
Educators who are starting to use the assessment and its
related Criteria are moving from being held accountable
to choosing to be accountable. BiE-IN works with the
pilot states to make sure those needs are
fulfilled.”
When she first came to Ohio, Susan Tave-Zelman wanted,
“to create a need for change.” With customer
satisfaction and customer service as priorities, Zelman
used Baldrige to totally reorganize Ohio’s
Department of Education. Now employee performance goals
are aligned and focused on being accountable to the
department’s key customers—local school
districts.
Customer focus is one Baldrige category that
might initially appear problematic for schools. Who are
their customers? If you are a second grade teacher in
rural Texas, who is your customer? Traditionally, parents
are thought of as customers. In simple terms, using a
Baldrige focus, teachers and students soon realize that
the direct customer for second grade is the third-grade
teacher. With a Baldrige approach, a second-grade teacher
is going to know what measures and key factors will be
critical for his or her students’ success with the
third-grade teacher.
Naturally any discussion of education reform
raises the cry of funding for our schools. How can we
have a superior product if we don’t have the
necessary funds to produce it? Even that query can be
answered using a data-driven model. Siegel recounts the
story of a superintendent in an upscale community outside
of Rochester, New York. The superintendent realized that
because of the wealth in the community, many parents were
sending their children to private schools. His
answer—he tracked market share. Not a radical
concept for business, which lives and dies by such
terminology, but innovative when applied to public
education. The superintendent was able to increase market
share by communicating data on what the school offered
and overall performance. Other systems use data to
provide quarterly reports to community and business
leaders, and as a result, are seeing improved efforts in
generating funds—whether through the legislator or
the electorate. “Anything that is data
driven,” Siegel states, “is effective in
developing and maintaining public support for
education.”
Siegel also contends that a major thrust of
BiE-IN is to help states connect the dots between all of
the available systems and data. “New Mexico had a
lot of random arrows,” states Mike Davis, education
chief for the state. “Success for every child means
a lot of different things to different people and there
were many competing plans on what to do.” For
Davis, Baldrige became the way to “line up all the
arrows together,” particularly after he saw
students in classrooms using Baldrige who were,
“making progress and taking responsibility for
their own learning.”
And that, according to Siegel, is perhaps
the ultimate goal of BiE-IN: “To establish school
systems that promote, enhance and develop a culture of
life-long learning. The challenge is to connect the dots.
It is not that we don’t know what to do, because we
do. It’s about taking a data-driven systems
approach to making life-long learning
happen.”
Currently the federal government is passing
the Elementary and Secondary Education Reauthorization
Act. This act has strong bipartisan support around
creating a performance-driven system in
education—merging accountability and flexibility at
the local level. The questions then become: How do you
create such a system? How do you take a variety of reform
activities to create true continuous improvement?
“Baldrige isn’t another program
or add-on,” notes Risa Regnier, an assistant to
Indiana’s state superintendent, “but a way of
looking at the organization and improving how you do what
you do. It’s not prescriptive, and therefore it
appeals to policymakers.” In fact, the Indiana
Legislature allows school districts to use Baldrige as an
alternative to the state’s performance-based
accountability program. “Baldrige can be used by
any district no matter where they are on the
spectrum,” adds Regnier.
“I was skeptical about using Baldrige
at first,” admits Nancy Gramsick, a Maryland
education executive. Maryland, like all states, did not
lack in education reforms. High-stakes-tests however
revealed that a number of kids were left behind.
“The need to address the disparity in performance
between minority and majority students, coupled with
overwhelming support from the education community for
using Baldrige, is what changed my mind,” notes
Grasmick.
As the two-year pilot program comes to a
close, what is next? Siegel’s hope is that the
reform will spread to other states. “We hope to
share the experience among the six states and position
them to tell their stories to others.” One new tool
that will help other states is an interactive database
currently being developed by BiE-IN. This database will
provide a just-in-time approach for teachers to talk to
each other and identify best practices being used from
the classroom to the district and state. “The hope
is that this will allow individuals to benchmark in a
much more rigorous manner,” notes Siegel.
The impetus for American companies to
embrace quality over 30 years ago was the competition
from Japan. So, what is the driving force for education
reform? It’s the call for accountability from our
school systems. Since the Baldrige Criteria are based on
the success of those companies that successfully met the
rallying call of global competitiveness, it is only
natural to believe that the same Criteria will aid those
school systems that face the challenge of new and more
rigorous standards for education. The end result?
Siegel’s dream of systems that promote, encourage
and make life long learning possible might become
reality.
August 2001 News for a
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