Preparing Students for Future Jobs: Update from a 2010 Baldrige Award Winner

This is a truly great and rich posting that captures the holistic effects of Baldrige “thinking” on the issues that major districts are currently struggling to respond to. And especially the CCSS “standards” that are beginning to generate pushback among many politicians, policymakers and some practitioners. In the interest of full disclosure, my strong reaction to this posting is influenced by my informal relationship with the MCPS that began formally as their Baldrige “advisor” for their original “Call to Action” strategic plan. And then, over the next 16 years, provided a unique window for viewing Baldrige criteria interacting with the daily work of schools and for my growing realization that I was not just benchmarking the “What’s” and “How’s” of Baldrige implementation… but was also capturing a more critical “Why.” -- It had generated a common framework for thinking – that offered a common answer to “Why” people do what they do individually and collectively to respond to the learning needs of children (individually and collectively.) As this way-of-thinking became a common “mental model” it served as a lens that offered a way to “see” the school “system” as a whole with a common focus, and within it, the interdependence of the classroom and the Boardroom. As a consequence, they began to govern, lead, and improve “systemically.” (Something reformers claim as their goal...but continually fail to achieve.) As the posting indicates, that perspective enabled them to see connections between the CCSS “standards” and their work as a "system." They back mapped from the new capacities these require in students to the new types of “capacity development” work this would require from them. (To understand what that required, I’d like to add this “Additional insight” to their concluding “Additional insight.” ) They noted rightly that “the critical thinking and academic skills that we are helping students build …(for instance, problem solving, collaboration, critical thinking, intellectual risk taking persistence, flexibility, and creativity) are vital to students’ future success in college and workplaces to prepare them for future success in their work.” What they didn’t say there was that those were the exact same skills they first had to develop themselves as a system-wide capacity. ...And that’s where the Baldrige’s effects were, and continue to be, most significant. Watching this happen was particularly rewarding for me because in the midst of it, in 2007, Education Week published “The Last Word: The Best Commentary and Controversy in American Education” over the previous 25 years… and included in it an earlier commentary of mine - Is There a Standard for Meeting Standards? ….that concluded with these words: ••••••• “If the current national-standards debate is an example, these local learnings about process standards and accountability are not effectively trickling up. Yet understanding the need for and feasibility of these ideas cannot wait for research to "prove'' their effectiveness. If schools are to have the support required to meet world-class standards, we must make visible this universal management process standard. Policymakers must become aware of the power of this type of process--one that systemically supports and enables its participants to learn how to improve and institutionalize improvements as part of the job. Federal and state policies must support local development of an accountable process infrastructure--framed by learning standards and fed by continuing assessment information--that aligns all roles and relationships to the core functions of teaching and learning. Without such a manageable, widely applicable process standard, the only thing bridging the gap between where schools are and where they must be will be the hides of local practitioners who once more will be blamed for not already knowing how to get there. Organizational transformation, the management expert W. Edwards Deming noted, is a "journey.'' To attempt that crossing without standard tools for navigating through dynamically changing conditions would not be tolerated in any modern endeavor ... except schools. “… •••••••• And now I was seeing how it could be done with the use of a “World Class” process standard – the Baldrige Criteria. (And while I won’t go into it here, the key was how they developed, and now sustain, that “accountable process infrastructure--framed by learning standards and fed by continuing assessment information--that aligns all roles and relationships to the core functions of teaching and learning.” There’s more about this “scaffolding” over their work on the website where I’ve been telling the MCPS story –