Baldrige Criteria Show Promise As Model For School Reform, No Child Left Behind Implementation

November 21, 2002

IOWA CITY, Iowa—A school reform plan based on the popular Baldrige business model may hold promise for fundamentally improving K-12 education in the United States, according to a report by ACT, the company best known for its college entrance exam. The report is the first thorough review of both research and application of the model, known as the Malcom Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence.

Issued by ACT's Office of Policy Research, the report suggests that research on the effectiveness of the Baldrige model in education is limited but that initial results regarding its use are encouraging. Schools and districts in Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina and other states have used the Baldrige criteria to improve education with positive results, including increased attendance, lower dropout rates, fewer failing grades and higher test scores.

The Baldrige model emphasizes data-driven decision making—basing decisions about allocation of resources on the data accumulated by a school system, including test scores, grades, suspensions, absenteeism, participation in extracurricular activities, teacher salaries, etc. According to the study's authors, this focus lends itself well to implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act, which calls for mandatory testing of students in grades 3 through 8, among other things.

"Baldrige is a perfect educational reform model to use with mandated assessments," said Richard J. Noeth, director of ACT's Office of Policy Research and a co-author of the report. "Testing provides educators with valuable data on what is and is not working when it comes to children's learning. That information can be used to decide how to distribute resources in such a way that would benefit the entire educational process in a particular school or district."

The Baldrige criteria were originally developed for the business world in response to concerns about the quality of American manufacturing in the 1970s. Educational strategists and leaders then began to investigate ways in which to apply the quality principles of the model to education. The Baldrige criteria, involving elements such as leadership, strategic planning, focus, analysis of information, and management, were developed and piloted in the 1980s.

The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, established in 1987 and awarded annually, has become one of the nation's highest honors in quality and performance excellence for business and industry. The award is named for Malcolm Baldrige, who served as U.S. Secretary of Commerce from 1981 until his death in 1987. In 2001, winners of the Baldrige Award were for the first time named in the category of education.

In its review of the existing research and application of the Baldrige criteria in education, ACT discovered a number of success stories around the U.S.:

At an urban high school, class-cutting was reduced by almost 40 percent, the number of failing students dropped from 151 to 11, and the dropout rate decreased from 13 percent to 2 percent.
At one school district, scores on the state achievement test increased, as did those on English as a second language tests, while library book circulation doubled.
One school district narrowed the gap between scores of African–American and Caucasian students from 41 percent to 9 percent on statewide fourth-grade language arts tests.
At a rural district, student use of the Internet grew from 5 percent to 93 percent, and the number of 12th graders who took college admission tests increased from none at all to 70 percent of the senior class.

The report makes clear that successful implementation of the Baldrige criteria is not necessarily easy to achieve. Educators have had trouble using accumulated data in decision making, and attempts to change the teaching-learning process have often proven to be difficult.

Nevertheless, the authors see promise in using the Baldrige model for school reform in the future, particularly as mandated testing increases. Because of the limited data available, the report recommends involving schools and districts in the Baldrige model on an introductory or pilot level and pushes for more studies to substantiate the positive results found in the research conducted so far.