What Are the Qualities of an Educated Person?

One of the Baldrige Criteria’s core values is a focus on results. If you look at the results of colleges and K-12 school districts that have won the Baldrige Award, you will find impressive results in graduation rates and improvements in core subject areas such as reading and math, but you will find scant evidence that our schools and colleges are producing educated students.

What are the qualities of an educated person? Certainly, proficiency in math and science and the ability to comprehend what you are reading are important qualities, but these are the basics. If you have these qualities and nothing else—and there is ample evidence that too many Americans lack even this minimum knowledge—you could not pass as an educated person.

I agree with Seth Godin, who said “we need to teach students how to think critically, solve problems, work together, and be creative.” To me, those are the qualities of an educated person, especially in the 21st century. You only have to look at the percentage of people in this country who deny global warming and evolution and support Sarah Palin to witness our national deficiency of critical thinking.

I know from experience that teaching critical thinking, problem solving, teamwork,…

School Districts Saving Money

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…

Reinventing 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…

Colleges as Dissatisfied Stakeholders

Colleges have a stake in the quality of education delivered by K-12 school districts. The Baldrige Criteria ask (3.2a1) how school districts listen to, among others, colleges “to obtain actionable information and to obtain feedback on your educational programs…”

Well, listen to this: Less than one-fourth of the class of 2009 who took the ACT test met college-readiness benchmarks on all areas of the test. Two-thirds met the benchmarks in English, slightly more than half in reading, 42% in math, and just 28% in science. And these are supposedly our smartest students.

In an online article on Education Week, Jon L. Erickson, the nonprofit ACT Inc.’s VP for educational services, listed the factors that contributed to the scores:

• Too many high schools lack a focus on college-readiness skills and the key standards to be mastered
• High school students are not taking the right courses
• The courses are not rigorous enough to deliver college-level skill and knowledge

Of course, colleges are not a school district’s only stakeholders. A school district must balance the need to better prepare students for college with the needs of other stakeholders including students, parents, businesses, communities, and the government, and those needs don’t align as often you would think.

But they surely align on…