You could start by firing the incompetent 5% across the U.S. but then you would need 185,000 new teachers to replace them. So Lemov asked another question: “What if we could make all teachers a little better?”

Sounds great, but what makes some teachers better? He decided he had better find out. He started with a great teacher in New Jersey, observing and videotaping him in action. He found another teacher and repeated the process, and then another, and another. Five years later he had recorded and analyzed hundreds of hours of videotape. He put his findings in a book: Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College.

His techniques are concrete, specific, and actionable. Here’s an example:

“When you want them to follow your directions, stand still. If you’re walking around passing out papers, it looks like the directions are no more important than all of the other things you’re doing. Show that your directions matter. Stand still. They’ll respond.”

The article describes two other techniques that are in the book: (1) star teachers circulate around the whole space of their classrooms while less experienced teachers rarely leave the space between the blackboard and the first row of desks; and, (2) great teachers start class before the opening bell rings with a “Do Now” assignment on the board. As Lemov notes, making the first five minutes of class productive time instead of transition time is like adding 15 extra class periods to the school year.

The Baldrige model values identifying, sharing, and implementing best practices. Lemov’s book is all about best-practice teaching.

To read more about best practices in education, click on these articles:

• Lessons from High-Performing K-12 Schools
• A New Bottom Line for Schools – and the Rest of Us
• Inspiration for a New Education System
• Reinventing Education with Baldrige
• Baldrige and K-12: Not for the Faint-Hearted

On his blog, Seth Godin lists five reasons he thinks higher education is about to crash and burn:

1. Most colleges are organized to give an average education to average students. We no longer live in an industrial economy that demands standardized students. In a networked, global economy, we need to teach students how to think critically, solve problems, work together, and be creative. Most colleges fail to do that for the majority of their students.

2. College has gotten expensive far faster than wages have gone up. Godin includes a chart that shows the inflation of tuition and fees compared to medical costs and the cost of living. Since 1978, tuition and fees have risen by a factor of 9.5, medical costs by a factor of 6, and the cost of living by a factor of 3.2. We hear a lot of outrage over medical costs, which suggests that outrage over the cost of college is likely not far behind.

3. The definition of “best” is under siege. According to Godin, colleges send millions of pieces of junk mail to high school students to boost the number of applicants so that they can reject more of them, which raises their rank in US News. As Godin writes, “Why bother making your education more useful if you can more easily make it appear to be more useful?”

4. The correlation between a typical college degree and success is suspect. Data show that a degree “doesn’t translate into better career opportunities, a better job, or more happiness.”

5. Accreditation isn’t the solution, it’s the problem. Uniform accreditation programs fail to produce the right product: the leaders and problem-solvers that we need.

Like the K-12 schools they draw from, colleges need to rethink their missions and visions, the needs of society and of their students, and the knowledge and skills that are truly essential to produce intelligent, productive, curious, confident students. Failing to do that, they will become increasingly irrelevant in a rapidly changing world.

To read more about Baldrige and higher education, click on these articles:

• What’s the Real Value of a College Education?
• Inspiration for a New Education System
• MHA Programs Fail to Prepare Students
• Accreditation through Baldrige
• Baldrige Goes to College

• $4 million saved through energy savings
• $300,000 saved by changing the utilization of preferred healthcare providers
• $366,000 saved my changing how it manages and controls its database
• $2 million saved annually by shifting how it purchased energy
• $4 million saved over a three-year period through a cooperative interagency bidding process for employees’ healthcare services

The three school districts that realized these savings are part of an education reform project, called North Star, developed by the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC). You can read a white paper on the project here. What the districts did to save this kind of money was to implement a North Star plan with seven components:

1. Learn from existing North Star schools to spread reform faster and more cost-efficiently
2. Identify processes and outcomes, gaps, and best practices in a process and outcome measurement database available at APQC—if you contribute your district’s data
3. Public training on process and performance management (PPM)
4. Finding, learning, sharing, and comparing data and best practices in PPM
5. Virtual networking through communities of practice
6. A process maturity model for assessing your PPM system
7. A PPM knowledge database

The focus of the North Star project is on two areas that are prominent in the Baldrige model: process and performance management. As Jack Grayson, founder, chairman and CEO of APQC and the author of the white paper, wrote, “the bulk of schools and districts don’t map their processes, don’t measure them, and don’t compare them. They don’t think across functions to improve them, don’t have process owners, and don’t manage their processes.”

When they start doing this, they save money at the same time that they do a better job of teaching students. One of the companies in the study, the one that saw $4 million in energy savings, is Iredell-Statesville Schools, a Baldrige Award winner in 2008. Here’s what else it achieved:

• Increased cohort graduation rates from 64% in 2003 to 81% in 2008
• Per-pupil operations expenditures among the lowest in North Carolina
• Among the state’s top ten school systems academically
• End-of-Grade Reading Composite improved from 75% of students proficient in 2001 to 91% proficient in 2007

IS-S and the other school districts that have won the Baldrige Award and participated in the North Star project have proven that process and performance management deliver results. Districts that ignore this lesson are likely wasting money they desperately need.

To read more about Baldrige and education, click on these articles:

• Lessons from High-Performing K-12 Schools
• A New Bottom Line for Schools—and the Rest of Us
• Inspiration for a New Education System
• Reinventing Education with Baldrige
• Integrating Baldrige Big Time

CalPASS has a database of more than 355 million student records from kindergarten through college. It uses business intelligence software to analyze the data and provides reports on its findings.

One study found that students who stopped taking English courses after 10^th grade required the same level of remediation in community college as students who continued to take advanced English courses through 12^th grade. Teachers naturally wondered how this could be true, which caused them to examine the differences between what they were teaching and the expectations of community colleges. According to Brad Phillips, executive director of CalPASS, “educators learned that high-school courses emphasized literature, while community-college courses covered writing and grammar, and four-year colleges emphasized analysis and argumentation. As a result, officials changed high-school teaching to create better alignment.”

From a Baldrige perspective, this means that high school teachers identified community colleges and four-year colleges as their customers, identified their customers’ requirements, and changed their curricula to better meet those requirements.

That’s an excellent start but I’m not sure it will solve the bigger problem, which is preparing high school students to succeed in life. The changes high school officials made should help their students be better prepared for college, but are colleges preparing their students to succeed after they graduate? Are they teaching the right things in English? How do they know? Where are the data from employers, graduate programs, and graduated students that show the effectiveness of English taught in college?

High school officials either made an assumption that colleges know what students should learn in English or they made colleges their most important customers. Neither assumption does their students justice. The danger is, as Russell Ackoff wrote, that “for too long, we have educated people for a world that no longer exists.”

To read more about Baldrige and education, click on these articles:

• What’s the Real Value of a College Education?
• Lessons from High-Performing K-12 Schools
• Inspiration for a New Education System
• Reinventing Education with Baldrige
• Education: Fix the System
• Colleges as Dissatisfied Stakeholders

• 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 section of its application summary, available here, it responds directly to the first two questions above:

• What do you really learn in college? The ETS Field Achievement Test in Business is the U.S. standard benchmarking measure of business core knowledge administered to seniors. MCB’s overall performance improved from 66% in 1993-94 to 90% in 2003-2004, putting it in the top 10%. MCB can identify exactly what its students learn in college.

• Is what you learned in college really what’s producing the value? More than 90% of employers rate MCB’s program quality good or excellent and 95% are satisfied with the MCB graduates they have hired. 100% of parents agree that “MCB is providing my son/daughter with the knowledge necessary to succeed in his/her area of emphasis.” Graduating students are asked to rate the value of the investment they made in their business degrees. They put MCB in the top 2.5% of business schools in the country. Students, employers, and parents agree that what students learned in college produced the value.

As the data show, one way colleges can provide definitive and positive responses to the value of the education they provide is by integrating the Baldrige model.

To read more about Baldrige and education, click on these articles:

• A New Bottom Line for Schools—and the Rest of Us
• Inspiration for a New Education System
• MHA Programs Fail to Prepare Students
• Accreditation through Baldrige
• Baldrige Goes to College

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 24^th in math and in math problem-solving. We rank 21^st in science out of 30 OECD countries. You can’t argue that the low achievers are holding us down because our high socio-economic students rank 23^rd out of 29 OECD countries in math. You can’t even argue that immigrants are hurting our scores because the U.S. ranks 21^st out of 30 OECD countries when only taking “native students” scores into account.

The presentation continues with devastating statistics about the education of minority and low-income students. As the report concludes, “Kids who come in a little behind, leave a lot behind.”

So what do the high performers, the schools that have closed this gap, do? Six things:

1. They focus on what they can do, rather than what they can’t. They don’t waste time collecting data on the conditions from which low-income and minority students come. Instead, they focus on what they can change to help their students succeed.
2. They don’t leave anything about teaching and learning to chance. High-performing schools and districts have clear and specific goals for what students should learn in every grade and the order in which they should learn things, provide teachers with a common curriculum and assignments, have a regular vehicle to assure common marking standards, assess students every four to eight weeks to measure progress, and act immediately on the results of those assessments.
3. They set their goals high.
4. They put all kids—not just some—in a demanding high school core curriculum. And those demanding courses are not just demanding in name. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the single biggest predictor of post-high school success is the quality and intensity of the high school curriculum.
5. Principals are hugely important, ever present, but not the only leaders in the school. In high-performing schools, teachers regularly observe other teachers, have time to plan and work collaboratively, and take on many other leadership tasks at the school. New teachers get generous and careful support and acculturation.
6. Good schools know how much teachers matter and they act on that knowledge. High-performing schools and districts work hard to attract and hold good teachers, make sure that their best are assigned to the students who most need them, and chase out teachers who are not “good enough” for their kids.

To reach more about Baldrige and education, check out:

• Reinventing Education with Baldrige
• Integrating Baldrige Big Time
• Education: PDSA + Quality Tools = AYP
• Education: Fix the System
• Baldrige and K-12: Not for the Faint-Hearted

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 education. It’s corrupted healthcare. It’s even corrupted business. New thinking is needed. “We must not trade our judgment and our students’ fundamental human needs for a single-minded focus on test scores,” says Cody, “any more than we should allow life on our planet to continue to suffer from a single-minded focus on profit.”

The Baldrige model provides a new way of thinking about how to run an organization to the benefit of all stakeholders. But the model only goes so far. As a nation, we have to decide what we want our organizations to achieve.

Business and political leaders have tried to do that for us and look where it’s gotten us. We can do better.

To learn more about improving education from a Baldrige perspective, read:

• Inspiration for a New Education System
• Reinventing Education with Baldrige
• Integrating Baldrige Big Time
• Education: Fix the System
• Colleges as Dissatisfied Stakeholders
• Baldrige and K-12: Not for the Faint-Hearted