Education
What’s the Real Value of a College Education?
The Baldrige Criteria are all about asking the right questions to help you understand and improve how your organization operates. If your organization is a college or university, here are four fundamental questions recently posed by Fast Company:
- What do you really learn in college?
- Is what you learned in college really what’s producing the value?
- Or is it simply the mere fact of having a college degree?
- Or maybe there’s something more subtle going on—that is, people who go to college tend to be more motivated or hard-working and would have ended up succeeding whatever they did?
“Infographic of the Day: Is College Really Worth It?” by Cliff Kuang suggests answers to the these questions in an intriguing graphic. The key points are:
- Two million high school graduates enroll in college each year. One in three drops out after the first year, which wastes $9 billion.
- One out of five students can’t balance a checkbook.
- One out of two students can’t correctly analyze prose like news editorials. (How can a democracy function if our supposedly smartest young people cannot think critically?)
- The average college freshman spends over ten hours a week partying and eight hours a week studying—and more than 63 hours engaged with media and technology (games, cell phones, TV, social networks)
- 57% of students need six years or more to get their degree
Kenneth W. Monfort College of Business (MCB) received the Baldrige Award in 2004. In the Results…
2Feb2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedLessons from High-Performing K-12 Schools
If you’ve been looking for K-12 education processes and results to benchmark, check out The Education Trust. Each year it honors high-performing schools with its Dispelling the Myth Awards, about which it writes, “These schools don’t offer simple answers or easy solutions, but several common strategies emerge from their practices. They provide a rich curriculum coupled with strong, focused instruction. They have high expectations for all students. They use data to track student progress and individual student needs. And they employ purposeful professional development to improve teachers’ skills.”
The Education Trust’s Web site offers a number of reports and presentations that use success stories to address everything from value-added data to state accountability systems to the achievement gap between white, minority, and low-income students.
For example, you can download the following PowerPoint presentation: “Raising Achievement and Closing Gaps Between Groups: Lessons from Schools and Districts on the Performance Frontier.” The report begins with positive news about progress in reading and math in elementary and middle schools. The good news doesn’t extend to high school, however, where achievement in both reading and math has been flat since 1984.
And then the news gets worse. Of 29 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, the U.S. ranks 24th in math and in math problem-solving. We rank 21st in science out of 30 OECD countries. You can’t argue that the low achievers are holding us down because our…
15Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedA New Bottom Line for Schools – and the Rest of Us
Business thinking has corrupted our schools, according to Anthony Cody, a teacher and teacher-coach in Oakland, California. In an article posted December 3rd on Teacher magazine, Cody notes that business people saw a shocking flaw in our education system: “There was no bottom line. Unlike a business, schools had no balance sheet at the end of the year—no ‘metrics,’ no way to directly compare one school to another. No way to tell which school was a good return on our investment, and which was wasting the public’s money.”
To fix the flaw, a profit-minded accountability movement pushed for clear standards and tests to measure performance on those standards, and No Child Left Behind emerged.
It will not work. “As a culture and a species,” Cody writes, “we have too many problems that cannot be solved by a one-dimensional view of profit and loss.”
The truth is, focusing solely on revenue and profitability as the single bottom line for business doesn’t work, either. It’s why the balanced scorecard was born. It’s why the triple bottom line—giving environmental and social considerations equal weight to financial ones—has gained traction. And it’s a big reason we’re in the mess we’re in today with global warming and a broken healthcare system and greedy financial institutions and income that, for most Americans, hasn’t gotten much better in years. When all that matters is profit, nothing else matters.
Business thinking has corrupted…
3Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedInspiration for a New Education System
“For too long, we have educated people for a world that no longer exists.”
Russell Ackoff
A leader in systems thinking, Russell Ackoff has been called the “father of operations research.” He was a Wharton professor from 1964 to 1986 who continued to lecture and speak until his death at age 90 on October 29, 2009.
One of the areas he wrote and spoke about was education from kindergarten through college. In 2008 he teamed with Daniel Greenberg to write a book, Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track. In it, they wrote, “Mass education was explicitly developed to mold naturally unruly children into compliant, obedient young people. Inspired by the Industrial Revolution, schools were, and still are, designed and operated as much like factories as possible. Incoming students are treated as raw materials to be processed into saleable products. Creativity is actively suppressed, and in most schools conformity—which is anathema to creativity—is valued instead.”
The Information Age is burdened by an antiquated education system and everybody—and all institutions—suffer as a result.
Democracy suffers from ignorant citizens who cannot think critically about the issues before them, who are easily manipulated by lies and distortions, and who weaken government by allowing self-serving special interests to dictate the agenda. That’s a failure of our education system.
Business suffers from ignorant employees who cannot solve a problem or come up with a creative idea or act…
19Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedReinventing Education with Baldrige
In the United States, one-third of eighth graders are proficient in reading. One-third of high school students do not graduate on time. One-third of first-year college students require remediation in either math or English.
Is it any surprise that one-third of K-12 teachers approve of how their schools are run?
The figures come from a study of school performance by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Center for American Progress, and Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute. The fact that these three organizations can write a report together when they rarely agree on anything suggests that this is not just a right-wing or left-wing issue.
The study evaluated state performance in eight categories: school management; finance; staffing—hiring and evaluation; staffing—removing ineffective teachers; data; pipeline to postsecondary; technology; and state reform environment. You can see how your state did here. You can read about the methodology behind the grades here.
The report offers a blunt assessment: “Our school system needs far-reaching innovation. It is archaic and broken, a relic of a time when high school graduates could expect to live prosperous lives…And while the challenges are many—inflexible regulations, excessive bureaucracy, a dearth of fresh thinking—the bottom line is that most education institutions simply lack the tools, incentives, and opportunities to reinvent themselves in profoundly more effective ways.”
The report’s sponsors “propose a framework for change intended to address the structural problems facing our nation’s…
10Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedIntegrating Baldrige Big Time
Few K-12 school districts have integrated the Baldrige model as completely as Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS), the 16th largest school system in the country with 200 schools and 22,000 employees serving 142,000 students. Montgomery County, Maryland, is located in the northern suburbs of Washington D.C.
MCPS began its Baldrige journey in 2000 when it received grant funding to implement the Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence. It conducted its first Baldrige self-assessment that year, the results of which were presented to its Board of Education in January, 2001. Many of the recommendations in that report have been implemented and other opportunities for improvement continue to be addressed today.
MCPS established a Baldrige Leadership Team in 2002 to guide the implementation of the Baldrige Criteria. The team meets monthly to review and improve deployment.
MCPS applied for the Baldrige Award in 2004. In 2005, it received Maryland’s Baldrige-based quality award, the U.S. Senate Productivity Award. It continues to integrate the Baldrige model, including training all schools on using Baldrige as the framework for school improvement planning and developing a guide for classroom teachers on how to help students become co-producers of their learning.
In my experience, few organizations of any type have integrated the Baldrige model as thoroughly as MCPS, as evidenced by its Baldrige-guided Classroom Learning System. Teachers and students use processes and systems to guide class and individual student learning. As its Web site notes,…
3Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedEducation: PDSA + Quality Tools = AYP
In the spring of 2008, Community Consolidated District15 learned that eight of its schools had failed to meet adequate yearly progress (AYP) for reading. This is a common issue for school districts across the country that is often the result of student subgroups failing to meet the AYP standard.
District 15 serves 12,000 students in northwestern Chicago at 15 elementary schools, four junior high schools, a preschool early childhood center, and an alternative public day school. It received the Baldrige Award in 2003.
A lot has changed since then. Several key leaders retired. A referendum failed and $25 million had to be cut from the budget, which led to hiring several first-time teachers. Key positions that supported the Baldrige initiative were eliminated. New board members were elected. A new superintendent started in June 2008.
Under such conditions, a Baldrige mindset can easily disintegrate. The opposite happened at District 15. The PDSA cycle (plan-do-study-act) had become part of the district’s culture, as had the use of quality tools. In the summer of 2008, a team of principals and other district leaders was formed to tackle the AYP problem. The team analyzed test scores and discovered that the district’s intervention programs weren’t working. It developed a placement matrix to guide principals and staff to the most appropriate intervention program for a student’s specific learning needs.
The team also realized that the key to improving student learning…
2Oct2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
