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 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

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