24 Principal ■ March/April 2006 www.naesp.org

IN BRIEF

The Baldrige National Quality Program,

originally designed to promote excellence in American industry, has been

successfully adapted to education. The

Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence, organized into seven

Categories, provide a series of questions that allow education organizations to conduct self-assessments and

serve as a guide for systemwide excellence. The article describes how three

disparate school districts have used the

Criteria to improve their performance

and win the coveted Malcolm Baldrige

National Quality Award.

ASSESSING THE ASSESSMENTS

SELF-ASSESSMENT

FOR CONTINUOUS

IMPROVEMENT

The Baldrige

Program:

By constantly focusing on seven

indicators of quality, schools can

strive for excellence in every area of

leadership and performance.

Sandra Byrne and Christine Schaefer

I

n Palatine, Illinois, first graders monitor their progress

with individual file folders that contain a wealth of data

related to their learning. 

In the sprawling, mostly remote school district of Chugach,

Alaska, teachers build their skills through 30 inservice days

each year, with emphasis on leadership training. 

And in New York’s Pearl River School District, principals

collaborate with other school leaders, teachers, and community members in continuous improvement efforts. 
Although these three disparate 

public school districts are meeting the

needs of their diverse students and

communities through varying structures and practices, they share a common framework for realizing their

goals: the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence, the heart of the

Baldrige National Quality Program.

They also share the distinction of having received the prestigious Malcolm

Baldrige National Quality Award.

A Program Dedicated to Excellence

The Baldrige National Quality Program, based in the U.S. Department of

Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, was established

by an act of Congress in 1987 to recognize high performance by firms in the

private sector. The Baldrige Award is

based on the applicants’ responses to

seven essential Criteria composed of

acknowledged indicators of organizational excellence. 

When it subsequently became clear

that organizations in the education,

health care, and nonprofit sectors

could also adapt the Baldrige Criteria

to assess and improve themselves, 

Congress in 1998 expanded award eligibility to include these organizations.

The first education recipients—the

Chugach and Pearl River school districts—were selected in 2001, and the

Palatine Community Consolidated

School District 15 received the

Baldrige Award in 2003.

Measuring Educational Excellence

The Education Criteria for Performance Excellence (see sidebar) provide

a structure for any public or private

institution that offers teaching and 

instructional services to students.

Within each of the seven Categories, 

a series of questions are designed to

enable organizations to look at themselves both externally (i.e., at their 

students, parents, communities,

providers of their students’ future 

education, and their results) and 

internally (i.e., at their leadership, 

faculty and staff, planning, processes,

measures, and their results).

26 Principal ■ March/April 2006 www.naesp.org

The Baldrige 

Education Criteria 

T he Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence consist of

key questions in seven categories. What follows is a sampling that

does not include a number of questions in various subcategories.

Leadership:

How do senior leaders guide and sustain your organization?

How do senior leaders communicate with faculty and staff and encourage

high performance?

Strategic Planning:

How does your organization establish its strategy and strategic objectives?

How does your organization convert its strategic objectives into action

plans?

Student, Stakeholder, and Market Focus:

How does your organization determine the requirements, expectations,

and preferences of students, stakeholders, and markets to ensure the relevance of your educational programs, offerings, and services?

How does your organization build relationships to attract, satisfy, and 

retain students and stakeholders; increase student and stakeholder loyalty;

and develop new program and service opportunities?

Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management:

How does your organization measure, analyze, align, review, and improve

student and operational performance data at all levels and in all parts of

your organization?

How does your organization ensure the quality and availability of needed

data for faculty and staff, students and stakeholders, and suppliers and 

partners?

Faculty and Staff Focus:

How do compensation, career progression, and related workforce 

practices enable faculty, staff, and the organization to achieve high 

performance?

How does your organization’s education, training, and career development build faculty and staff knowledge, skills, and capabilities?

Process Management:

How does your organization identify and manage its key processes for 

creating student and stakeholder value and maximizing student learning 

and success?

What are your processes for budgetary and financial management and

continuity of operations in an emergency?

Organizational Performance Results:

What are your current levels and trends in key measures or indicators of

student learning and improvement in student learning?

What are your current levels and trends in key measures or indicators 

of budgetary and financial performance, including measures of cost 

containment?
Since the principal goals of education organizations are teaching and

learning, the Criteria help education

organizations focus on well-conceived

and well-executed assessment strategies; year-to-year improvement in key

performance indicators—-especially

student learning; and demonstrated

leadership in performance improvement relative to comparable organizations and appropriate benchmarks. 

Excellence in Illinois

Community Consolidated School

District 15 in Palatine, Illinois, serves a

diverse population of 13,000 students

in kindergarten through eighth grade.

More than one-third of the students

are of minority backgrounds and many

live in poverty. Educators throughout

the system began using the Baldrige

Criteria to measure and improve performance in 1998. 

Today, the district’s use of the

Baldrige framework for self-assessment

is systematic and the positive impact

can be seen in the results of academic

assessments. According to Kevin Jauch,

principal of Central Road Elementary

School, “We’ve been using quality tools

for so long that I don’t know how we’d

learn without them.” He cites as an example students’ tracking of their performance by using data folders. 

“Each student has an individual file

folder which has a copy of their classroom mission statement and/or their

personal one, run charts with spelling

scores, holistic assessment scores, reading level, number of books they have

read and demonstrated proficiency on,

academic and sometimes behavioral

goals, and any other pertinent data

that the teacher and student can use to

drive classroom instruction.”

Over the course of the school year,

often weekly, teacher and student

meet to discuss the contents of the

folder and the student’s progress.

“Goals are discussed and evaluated,

and new goals are set,” says Jauch. 

“Although the teacher and student do

this as a team, it is very empowering

for students, giving them ownership

of their education.”

Chugach: Baldrige in the Bush

The Chugach School District of

Alaska is unique in that while its central office is based in Anchorage, its 30

faculty and staff serve 214 students in

sites spanning 22,000 square miles of

largely isolated south-central Alaska. 

Chugach Superintendent Bob Crumley says his district chose Baldrige because of a need to build accountability

into its system. “Baldrige really gave us

a framework to measure our entire system rather than just look at student test

results on a couple of content areas.”

Doug Penn, principal of Chugach’s

three school sites, recalls how the district began using Baldrige as a quest

“for an outside benchmark to see how

we were doing.” Penn explains that

“the district was already doing things in

the seven areas of the Baldrige Criteria,

but we were not seeing the alignment.” 

Chugach’s other principal, Ty Mase,

who oversees several special programs,

adds that the retreat-style training for

all staff in the Baldrige Criteria helped

establish the framework’s use in the

district’s daily activities. Today “it’s so

embedded that we use it every day

without knowing it’s Baldrige.” 

Pearl River: “Good Is Never 

Good Enough” 

The Pearl River School District is 

located in Rockland County, New York,

approximately 20 miles north of New

York City. Like other organizations that

benefit from the Baldrige Criteria,

Pearl River has adapted its use of the

framework to its situation: “We have

taken what we have learned about the

Baldrige model and customized it to

our environment, developing a system

of continuous improvement,” says 

Sandra Cokeley, district director of

quality and community relations. 

Margo Furst, principal of Evans Park

Elementary School, explains that Pearl

River principals use Baldrige for continuous improvement by “always looking at assessment data, modifying as

necessary, not just annually but also

quarterly and more often.” 

Ellen Raffman, principal of Lincoln

Avenue Elementary School, points out

that Baldrige prepared her district to

meet requirements of the federal No

Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. “NCLB

was easy for us,” she says, “because we

had so many things in place.” Those

things include a standardized testing

and improvement process, and the

commitment of one hour each day at

all three district elementary schools in

which no new learning is introduced

so that students can hone their reading

and math skills. 

Carla Silberstein, principal of

Franklin Avenue Elementary School,

sums up how the district’s three elementary schools all use data to drive

performance. “We’re continually measuring our progress,” she says. “It’s a

never-ending process. Good is never

good enough.” P

Sandra Byrne is a member of the management team and the education sector

expert at the Baldrige National Quality

Program at the National Institute of

Standards and Technology. Her e-mail

address is Sandra.Byrne@nist.gov. 

Christine Schaefer is a member of the

publications management team and a

writer/editor at the Baldrige National

Quality Program. Her e-mail address is

Christine.Schaefer@nist.gov.

www.naesp.org Principal ■ March/April 2006 27

E D I T O R ’ S N O T E

The 2005 Baldrige Award recipients,

which were announced after this article

was written, include the Jenks Public

Schools in Jenks, Oklahoma. Information about Jenks may be found at the

district’s Web site, www.jenksps.org.

WEB RESOURCES

To read more about the Malcolm

Baldrige National Quality Award recipients or to download the Baldrige

Education Criteria for Performance

Excellence and other resources of

the Baldrige National Quality Program, visit the Baldrige Web site.

www.baldrige.nist.gov

The American Society for Quality,

the administrator of the Malcolm

Baldrige National Quality Award, describes common quality issues in education on its Web site.

www.asq.org/education/

why-quality/commonissues.html