Montgomery County Public Schools, Rockville, MD

Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence → Baldrige for Parents → Overview

Overview of Baldrige

What are the Malcolm Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence?
Why Baldrige?
Who are the “stakeholders” in a Baldrige school?

What are the Malcolm Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence?

The Baldrige Criteria are a model for continuous improvement and perfomance excellence .

Facts about Baldrige

  • designed to help American business and industry gain a competitive edge in the global market
  • built around eleven Core Values or Best Practices and seven Categories
  • created in 1987 for business and adapted for educational use in 1998
  • named posthumously for former Secretary of Commerce, Malcolm Baldrige

What the Criteria Do

  • reflect current best thinking on organizational practice
  • provide a means for self-assessment to help organizations evaluate how well they are doing
  • provide a dynamic framework for continuous improvement

Baldrige in Education

The education version of the Criteria, the Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence, was created in 1998 to create schools and classrooms that lead to quality learning for all students.

Baldrige Helps Schools Assess Themselves

The school assesses itself by asking:

  • How well are all students doing?
  • How can we improve the learning of all students?

The school also looks at other factors that impact student achievement such as:

School data center
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  • What are the levels of satisfaction and dissatisfaction of students, parents, and teachers?
  • How well does the leadership of the school communicate with stakeholders and monitor the progress of all students?
  • Does the school have goals in place and action plans to achieve those goals?
  • How well and how often does the school collect and analyze data? How is that communicated to the community?
  • What resources, including opportunities for training, does the school have in place to support student achievement?

Why Baldrige?

Baldrige was adopted by the Board of Education as the model for continuous improvement for all offices and schools.

Reasons to Use Baldrige

The Baldrige framework:

  • has a reputation for rigor and results among numerous school systems across the nation
  • uses a systems approach for performance excellence and continuous improvement focused on academic success for all students
  • is the best current research in what it takes to make organizations get better
  • helps build good classroom learning systems by engaging students in the process

Who are the “Stakeholders” in a Baldrige School?

The Baldrige process allows everyone to have a stake in the education of students. Parents, teachers, students, administrators, and community members work together to build a common vision, mission, core values, and goals that address the needs of all students.

Stakeholders are defined as individuals or groups of individuals who have a "stake" or interest in the overall performance of the school.

Examples of Stakeholder Groups

Parents at school meeting
  • Students (K-5), including subsets of students according to race, ethnicity, gender, disability status, English proficiency, and economically disadvantaged.
  • Faculty/Staff including:
    • Principal/administration
    • Supporting services staff (office, building services, cafeteria workers, etc.)
    • Classroom teachers
    • Staff teachers & specialists (reading specialist, special educators, counselor, staff development teacher, etc.)
  • Parents or guardians
  • Community members

Stakeholder Groups Have Different Needs

The Baldrige process assumes that each stakeholder group may have different needs, issues and concerns. The process emphasizes the need to ensure consistent and ongoing input and feedback from all stakeholders when developing and evaluating the school's improvement plan. (Adapted from College Gardens ES web site)

More About Baldrige

In-depth information about the Baldrige process can be found elsewhere on this web site.

Related Topics in Baldrige for Parents

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