Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence → About: An Introduction to Baldrige

An Introduction to Baldrige

What are the Malcolm Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence?
Baldrige Core Values & Categories
What is the purpose of the Baldrige Education Criteria?

What are the Malcolm Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence?

"The Criteria were created in 1987 and named posthumously for former Secretary of Commerce, Malcolm Baldrige. Designed to help American business and industry gain a competitive edge in the global market, the Criteria reflect current best thinking on organizational practice. The education version of the Criteria [Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence] was created in 1998 as a [framework] for understanding and improving school performance." (Shipley & Caldwell, 2000, p. 5)

Baldrige is a systematic process for helping organizations make systemic change. Baldrige is all about performance excellence. Baldrige is:
 a measure of parts and connections:
How good are the parts?
How good are the connections between the parts?
 a blueprint for building good, well-connected parts.
 a process for determining which parts and which
  connections add value and which do not.
(Shipley, 2001, p. 18)

Baldrige Core Values & Categories

The Criteria, comprised of eleven Core Values/Best Practices and seven Categories, provide a dynamic framework for continuous improvement. The categories and Core Values/Best Practices help organizations assess how well they are doing and are practical and useful for school improvement planning.

Core Values/Best Practices Categories
The Criteria are built upon the following set of eleven interrelated Core Values that describe Best Practices required of schools focused on performance excellence:
  1. Visionary leadership
  2. Learning-centered education
  3. Organizational and personal learning
  4. Valuing faculty, staff, and partners
  5. Agility
  6. Focus on the future
  7. Managing for innovation
  8. Management by fact
  9. Social responsibility
  10. Focus on results and creating value
  11. Systems perspective
Core Values/Best Practices 		The Core Values/Best Practices are embodied in seven Categories, as follows:
  1. Leadership
  2. Strategic Planning
  3. Student and Stakeholder Focus
  4. Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management
  5. Faculty and Staff Focus
  6. Process Management
  7. Performance Results
Categories

What is the purpose of the Baldrige Education Criteria?

The Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence is a framework for continuous improvement aimed at getting the results that are important to an organization. The framework is designed to help organizations use an aligned approach to organizational performance management. The Baldrige framework:

  • Is not prescriptive
  • Supports a systems approach to organization-wide goal alignment
  • Supports a goal-based means to diagnose the effectiveness of an organization and to devise an improvement plan from that diagnosis

The Malcolm Baldrige Education Criteria provide the basis for assessment and feedback to organizations and create the foundation for an organization's continuous improvement journey. The criteria have three important purposes:

  1. To help improve performance practices, capabilities, and results,
  2. To facilitate communication and sharing of best practices information and organizations of all types, and
  3. To serve as a working tool for understanding and improving performance and for guiding planning and opportunities for learning.

November 23, 2010 | Maintained by Web Services | Content Manager: Michael Perich