Baldrige by Sector: Education

Why do so many education organizations around the country use the Education Criteria for Performance Excellence? The Baldrige Criteria provide a comprehensive way to achieve and sustain high performance across the entire organization. Education organizations such as business schools; community colleges; centuries-old universities; and K-12 school districts in Chicago, New York, North Carolina, and Oklahoma—as well as one covering 22,000 square miles in Alaska—use the Baldrige Criteria to improve their schools and their students’ education. Your education organization can do the same.

How Baldrige Relates
The Baldrige Criteria address all key areas of a running a successful education organization and are compatible with other performance improvement initiatives, such as School Improvement Planning, ISO 9000, Lean, and Six Sigma. Using the Baldrige framework, you can organize and integrate these approaches, improve productivity and effectiveness, and pursue performance excellence.

Improve Your Results
Whether your organization is a K-12 school or system, a community college, a university, or another type of education organization, the Baldrige Criteria are a valuable framework for measuring performance and planning in an uncertain environment. The Criteria help education organizations achieve and sustain the highest national levels of

student learning outcomes
- customer satisfaction and engagement
- product and service outcomes, and process efficiency
- workforce satisfaction and engagement
- budgetary, financial, and market results
- social responsibility

Source: The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the U.S. Commerce Department.
http://www.nist.gov/baldrige/enter/education.cfm 18 May 2010.

Criteria for Performance Excellence

No matter the size or nature of your organization, the Criteria are a guide in your journey toward performance excellence. They can help your organization align resources; improve communication, productivity, and effectiveness; and achieve strategic goals.


The Criteria work as an integrated framework for managing an organization. They are simply a set of questions focusing on critical aspects of management that contribute to performance excellence:

1) Leadership
2) Strategic planning
3) Customer focus
4) Measurement, analysis, and knowledge management
5) Workforce focus
6) Process management
7) Results

The Criteria serve two main purposes:

1) Identify Baldrige Award recipients to serve as role models for other organizations
2) Help organizations assess their improvement efforts, diagnose their overall performance management system, and identify their strengths and opportunities for improvement

There are three versions of the Criteria for Performance Excellence: business/nonprofit, education, and health care.


Source: The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the U.S. Commerce Department.http://www.nist.gov/baldrige/publications/criteria.cfm
18 May 2010.