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Eyes on the Baldrige prize: disparate school districts in New York and Alaska are first honored for quality approaches

School Administrator, August, 2002 by Jay Mathews

Much of the Chugach School District in Alaska can be reached only two ways, from the air in a small noisy plane straining to get over green and snow-covered mountains or from the sea in oily motorboats bouncing dizzily out of the port of Valdez on the heavy swells of Prince William Sound.

Finding the Pearl River, N.Y., School District is considerably easier. Just drive out of New York City, take the George Washington Bridge onto the Palisades Parkway for a lovely 20-mile drive up the Hudson River. There on the New Jersey border, just when you need to stop for gas and a soda, is the friendly bedroom community in the leafy suburban environs of Rockland County.

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It is hard to imagine two parts of the country less alike, and yet Chugach and Pearl River have become tightly linked in their mutual triumph over inertia, old rules and unfocused teaching. For the first time, the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award was bestowed on educational institutions and the two school districts--along with the University of Wisconsin-Stout--won the prize.

National Models

The Baldrige Award was established by Congress in 1987 in the midst of a corporate frenzy over perceived American failure to match the Japanese in attention to the small details of customer service and product reliability that led to big profits and strong stock prices. The award was named after the late U.S. secretary of commerce, a rodeo-riding renaissance man who had led the charge to replace the American fondness for quantity with a more long-lasting commitment to quality.

The Japanese have since discovered that well-made products are not the only things they need to keep their economy strong, but American businesspeople and government officials attribute much of the U.S. economic success over the last decade to the Baldrige philosophy. Meetings to discuss the lessons learned from Baldrige winners are well-attended. The winners in the categories of manufacturing, service and small business have become models for businesses throughout the country.

In 1999, the Commerce Department's Baldrige National Quality Program, headquartered at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md.(www.quality.nist.gov), announced it would offer new awards for achievements in education and health care. The education category was open to any elementary or secondary schools and school districts, colleges, universities and university systems, schools or colleges within a university, professional schools, community colleges, technical schools and charter schools. Thirty seven educational enterprises applied for an award, and the three winners of the 2001 prize were the first to receive one.

Heavy Documentation

It was not an easy award to get. It was not even easy to apply for. Competing educators had to show achievements in seven areas--leadership, strategic planning, student, stakeholder and market focus, information and analysis, faculty and staff focus, process management and organizational performance results. Then came 300 to 1,000 hours of outside review, including a site visit by teams of examiners for applicants who reach the final stages.

Most of the reports produced by this fine-tuned process are not fun to read. They appeal to the most obsessed devotees of management jargon. But the winners themselves have become very adept at telling their stories in clear English.

Richard DeLorenzo, the wise-cracking superintendent at the heart of the Chugach transformation, says the district underwent a comprehensive restructuring effort in 1994. It was a huge job in a difficult environment. The district covers 22,000 square miles of southcentral Alaska, some of the most rugged and least accessible territory in the United States. It has only 214 students and 30 staff members. Teachers not only need to know how to run a classroom but must be knowledgeable about wilderness and cold water safety and how to respond to a tsunami or a wandering bear.

When Chugach's board and staff decided to change their way of doing things eight years ago, annual staff turnover exceeded 50 percent. The district's Baldrige application cites the example of Ivan Velanoff, an Aleut middle schooler who in 1994 felt "no connection to his studies and [found it] difficult adjusting to the parade of teachers."

He could captain a boat through a severe storm and was excited by the stories his elders told of their hunting exploits. But learning at school was different. His father complained of being beaten by teachers for speaking the native Sugcestun language when he was a student. Ivan "was not disappointed when his 2nd, grade teacher left after one week. He did not attend school for a month while a new teacher was sought," the school district reported.

It was not surprising then that Chugach's scores on the California Achievement Test at the beginning of the effort to change the system were the lowest in Alaska. The average student was three years below grade level in reading. Local businesses said when they hired local youngsters, they could neither read nor do math very well. In 19 years, only one Chugach student had graduated from college.

Eyes on the Baldrige prize: disparate school districts in New York and Alaska are first honored for quality approaches

School Administrator, August, 2002 by Jay Mathews

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