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Illinois School Board Journal
November/December 2004
Learning is what Baldrige looks like
by Linda Dawson
Linda Dawson is IASB director of editorial services and Journal editor.
This is the fourth in a series following the progress of school reform in Illinois. This series seeks to share information from Decatur School District 61, as well as other Illinois districts, on journeys they envision will lead to increased student achievement.
A kindergartener draws pictures of words to use in writing a story. A second-grader colors 10 spaces on a graph to represent the number of right answers on this week's spelling test. Fourth-graders analyze the results of scores on this week's writing assignment and decide everyone should try harder next week to use "juicy" words. Charts in a seventh-grade classroom paint a vivid picture of what students liked - and disliked - about a lesson, rating what they learned and why.
After listening to all the theory of what a quality improvement process can do for education, this is what it looks like to have students engaged and responsible for their own learning. This is data-driven education. This is what Baldrige quality performance looks like in a classroom.
The classrooms above are part of Pekin Public School District 108, where Baldrige has become a way of life, not just something else for teachers and students to add to a long list of required paperwork. Pekin, like a growing number of districts across the nation, has embraced Baldrige as a framework for school improvement.
"Schools need tools to do reform," said Don White, Pekin Public's superintendent. "We use PDSA (plan, do, study, act) deep into the system. We use it at the district level as well as within our schools. We're looking for results, like a fact-check."
What they're getting is a process that helps teachers, as well as students, improve the way they do things ... and the ability to discern why the improvement occurred.
Using Baldrige in schools
District 108 began its Baldrige journey about four years ago, becoming another district in Illinois to adapt the quality assurance process, originally developed in the business sector, to education.
One of the most successful Illinois districts to adopt the Baldrige criteria has been Community Consolidated School District 15 in Palatine, which won a coveted 2003 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award based on its implementation of a wide variety of programs, leadership from the board of education and administration, and alignment of district mission, goals and student performance targets. District 15 specifically was cited in its award for intensive reading intervention in the early elementary grades, strategic planning, teacher mentoring and on-time bus delivery.
Another district, Glen Ellyn Community Consolidated School District 89, showcased students at the 2003 Joint Annual Conference in Chicago, demonstrating how children can take responsibility for their own learning, including conducting student-led parent-teacher conferences.
But it's one thing to see success and another to replicate it.
How does a district begin the process? How long will implementation take? What will it look like once it's up and running? And how can those who accept the potential of the process early on get everyone else to buy into the concept?
Although Pekin's first experience was less than stellar - participants only lasted half a day at their initial Baldrige training - the more they learned, the more they found to like.
"We were looking for a way to help teachers exhibit and embrace the joy of learning again," said Chuck Bowen, Pekin's assistant superintendent. What they found was Koality Kids, an education-friendly way schools can measure their improvement. The criteria used in Koality Kids, developed by the American Society for Quality, mesh with the seven core values in Baldrige. The program gives schools a way to measure how they're getting better, as well as providing a model for continuous improvement and a process for benchmarking.
"We like to think of it as a fence around the corral," Bowen explained. "Koality Kids defines the parameters, but not the daily creativity. It aligns the organization but allows the teacher to play with learning."
Even though the process is taking hold and showing results, it has been a gradual process. Not everyone in Pekin went to training all at once.
"Teachers approached this slowly," said Sloan Weinberg, a sixth-grade teacher at Washington Intermediate School. A small group of teachers went through the training and then shared with other staff. "We said, 'This is what we found,' and then built on that. From day one we have shown how it works in the classroom and the results. You trust it when it comes from a colleague."
Jennifer Heath, who team-teaches with Weinberg, said the staff began slowly, teaching the students how to use different measurement tools, such as affinity, fishbone and lotus diagrams. They began using the plus/delta evaluation tool - which helps weigh positive and negative aspects in decision-making - even to decide whether the door between their two classrooms should be open or shut.
Now that the students know and use the tools from the early grades on, they're becoming more independent and responsible for their own learning, the teachers agree. The students are becoming more self-reflective and recognizing where they need help
"You're past the fear of data. It's not a scary thing," Heath said. "It's more powerful than getting straight A's. It's going from a D to a C and knowing how and why."
And even the youngest students are able to determine that "why."
In Nancy Thompson's first-grade class at Willow Primary School, students color in the number of math questions they got right on a graph in their data notebooks, which are always kept in the center of their classroom tables. Then they turn to their calendars, where they color in the number of green lights for good behavior that they received for the week. Cheers go up when Thompson places a dot on the class graph three lines higher than it was last week - signifying behavior improvement.
Then Thompson asked her students why they thought their dot was higher, and hands went flying up across the classroom. Everyone had a reason:
And on and on the answers came from the 6-year-olds, who could recognize what they had done to improve and what they must do to succeed again the next week.
Even in the kindergarten classroom, where students were using a lotus graph of pictures to write a story, students know how to keep track of data. They have colorful graphs on the wall that measure who likes what kind of pizza and how the class is divided between Cubs and Cardinal fans - so they get the idea of graphing. A flow chart has pictures of what to do in the morning. Another chart records the number of students who can count to 100 - a line that is moving upward.
In all these classes, and in others as well, Pekin students are focusing on their own learning, seeing where they started, knowing where they must go and determining how they will get there.
That learning is reflected in State Report Card data. Students at Willow moved their overall performance on state tests up an amazing 20.5 percentage points (61.6 to 82.1) when comparing results from test years 2001-02 to 2002-03. On ISAT tests, students showed gains in grade 3 of nearly five percentage points in reading (69.7 to 74.2), more than 21 points in math (69 to 90.5) and almost 40 points in writing (44.7 to 83.9).
Getting started
As other districts in Illinois look for ways to improve student achievement, they're also looking at quality assurance processes to enhance that improvement. Decatur School District 61, which has committed much of its time to school reform for the past six years, began a true look this past school year at what the Baldrige process could do for the district. Representatives from various stakeholder groups, including board members, administrators, teachers, support staff, parents and the community participated in Baldrige training.
"I have been interested in the Baldrige criteria and the approach for about three years," said Jackie Goetter, District 61 board member. "The more I learned about it, the easier it was to see its application for many different kinds and sizes of organizations that wanted to continue to improve."
But even though she had been trained as a trainer through the Baldrige classroom series, she didn't have a classroom to work with ... until the 2003-04 school year. That's when she offered her knowledge and assistance to Janet Hale, a split fourth/fifth-grade teacher at Johns Hill Magnet School.
There, K-8 teachers had been looking for a process to help them evaluate the effectiveness of their program, according to Deanne Hillman, former Johns Hill principal and now SD 61's director of teaching and learning. Hillman also had been part of a small group from Decatur that observed Baldrige in Pekin's classrooms.
She and other teachers attended three different Baldrige sessions to get as much information on the process as they could, including workshops on how to implement the strategies in the building as a whole and the individual classrooms.
"I began to use Baldrige tools in faculty meetings, department meetings and action team meetings," Hillman said. "To prepare the staff, we researched, shared information, discussed Baldrige techniques in faculty meetings and updated steering committee members on a regular basis."
Now the magnet school, which has 550 K-8 students and a 45 percent free and reduced lunch population, has embarked on a three-year school improvement plan that calls for implementing QuESt, a model for comprehensive whole-school reform designed by Quality Educational Systems (QES) Inc. that aligns with Baldrige criteria, as well as requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act and Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration (CSRD).
According to QES's Web site (http://www.qes-quest.com/pages/1/index.htm) the QuESt model has been implemented in more than 150 elementary, middle and high schools in 19 states and is "specifically designed to improve all aspects of the school environment." Independent, third-party evaluations of the program are said to show QuESt as "a highly effective" model, with user schools scoring 44 percent higher on state criterion referenced tests than non-QuESt schools.
Hillman said nearly every classroom teacher and specialist at Johns Hill has expressed an interest in being trained in Baldrige techniques, but the biggest success so far has been implementation in Hale's classroom during the past year. Both Hale and Goetter dedicated a great deal of planning and time to the project, she said.
"The students became much more focused on making data-driven decisions and setting goals as individuals and as a class," Hillman said. They became more aware of what they were doing, how it related to Illinois Learning Standards and why they were taking part in activities.
But moving to total commitment to a quality assurance process like Baldrige takes time. It takes getting past the initial fear of data, as well as the resentment of business influences on education.
"There is some resentment because this is a business-driven thing," Pekin's Superintendent White said. "We need to get passed that.
"This is nothing more than building quality into the system."
Laying the foundation for that quality is a function of the school board. Board members like Goetter, who could see how the district could benefit from Baldrige, can bring their information to the entire board, which can encourage staff to look into the process.
Even though Decatur has a number of reform models in place at all levels in the district, Goetter sees Baldrige as a way to enhance what the schools are practicing now, whether it's Modern Red Schoolhouse, Accelerated Schools, Turning Points, Ventures or Expeditionary Learning/ Outward Bound - all of which are represented in D-61.
"Baldrige can help our schools and individual classes implement and better manage their reform models," Goetter said. "Our board of education adopted a resolution last winter to encourage others in the district to study Baldrige and implement the approach if they so desire."
Now, as in districts like Pekin, Palatine and Glen Ellyn, only time will tell whether Baldrige can make a difference.
Resolving business-focused concerns
One of the biggest Baldrige criteria hurdles for the education community to get past is its business focus. But those in local school districts who have made it a point to immerse themselves in quality improvement have found ways to take the best from Baldrige and mesh it with processes that seem to make more sense for schools.
Perry Soldwedel, the former Pekin Public School District 108 superintendent who got the Baldrige process started in that district, could sense teachers and other administrators shying away from the business models they first encountered in Baldrige. In fact, they were so turned off during their first Baldrige training, Soldwedel's assistant superintendent Chuck Bowen remembers they walked out after half a day.
But Soldwedel also sensed that they liked some things - especially the accountability built into the process at the student level.
So what he encouraged in Pekin was a blend of Baldrige with the concepts espoused by the Professional Learning Community model - a more people-oriented system based on staff development and collaboration.
"We didn't use the 'B' word," Soldwedel said. Instead, they took all the good things they could find from both systems and used what they could be comfortable with. They were "doing" Baldrige without calling it that, so the name became irrelevant.
That blend of systems also is the basis for "Critical Friends," a group developed by the Consortium for Educational Change, Soldwedel said. Critical Friends offers an opportunity for school districts to submit to an external audit of their quality improvement processes without going through the more rigorous Baldrige national or state award process.
According to the CEC Web site, "CEC Districts/Schools that have used this process have found it to be a powerful way 'to hold a mirror up to the system' and to give them significant data for subsequent strategic planning."
The process involves completion of a quality-based assessment document by the district, three days of conversation between stakeholder groups and the Critical Friends Team, oral feedback at the end of the visit and a written report within two months.
The Lincoln Award, on the other hand, which is attainable from Illinois' statewide Baldrige group, The Lincoln Foundation for Business Excellence, is a much more rigorous process, Soldwedel said. "It took five years to be at a place where we (Pekin) even met the criteria for application."
With adaptations such as these, which seem to make more sense to the education community, more and more schools and districts are looking at Baldrige criteria as a way to drive the school improvement process.
For more information, see the CEC Web site at: http://www.cecillinois.org/
Editor's note: Perry Soldwedel, now chairman of the national advisory board for the American Society for Quality based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, also works as a consultant with the Consortium for Educational Change based in Lombard, Illinois, training teachers and coaching administrators in the quality improvement process.
What is Baldrige?
The Baldrige National Quality Program was created in 1987 to recognize businesses that are outstanding in seven areas: leadership; strategic planning; customer and market focus; information and analysis; human resource focus; process management; and business results. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which is part of the U.S. Commerce Department, manages the program named for Malcolm Baldrige, who served as Commerce Secretary from 1981 until his death in a rodeo accident in 1987.
Former-secretary Baldrige saw quality management as the key to U.S. prosperity and long-term strength. The award that carries his name does not recognize specific products or services. Rather, it recognizes achievements in quality and performance by honoring organizations in five categories: manufacturing, service, small business, education and health care.
The awards program represents a standard of excellence designed to help U.S. organizations achieve world-class quality.
Illinois is a member of a six-state, 26-organization partnership known as the Baldrige in Education Initiative (BiEIN) that uses Baldridge Quality Criteria as a framework for improving student achievement, and also has a statewide Baldrige group - The Lincoln Foundation for Business Excellence.
For more information about the programs, please refer to the following Web sites: