A recent article in the Christian Science Monitor described the value of analyzing data for high school educators. (“Numbers Game Grows in Education, Healthcare,” March 4, 2010–no link available). The article uses the California Partnership for Achieving Student Success (CalPASS) as an example of how “data-driven discoveries are helping to revitalize educators’ efforts.”

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

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