Public schools are desperate for money. Their funding has been frozen or cut for years, when adjusted for inflation, while the demands on their resources have grown. So what would they do to save this kind of money?

• $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

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