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

Biggest Obstacle

DeLorenzo notes that a small staff like his was just as resistant to change as a huge payroll in a major metropolitan school district. There were three kinds of staffers, he says. Twenty percent were what he called the "omnivores," teachers ready to try anything. Sixty percent were the "Missouri people," skeptics who folded their arms and waited for the reformers to prove--or to "show me" as the Missouri motto says--that what they were suggesting would work. And then there were the 20 percent DeLorenzo called the "OMDBs," or Over My Dead Body.

"The great obstacle was tradition," says Chugach's assistant superintendent, Bob Crumley. That included the tradition of ignoring the ideas of the people who were doing the teaching. So the Chugach school leaders gathered together what quality gurus call the stakeholders--staff members, current and past students, parents, school board members and business and community leaders. They shared their views of what was wrong and agreed to work on and measure their progress toward improvements on five goals: basic skills, individual needs of students, character development, transition skills and technology.

They junked the old system of credit hours and grade levels after getting a waiver from the Alaska Department of Education and installed an individualized, student-centered approach. Each student would be judged on his or her ability to achieve proficiency in 10 areas of performance: reading, writing, mathematics, social sciences, science, technology, cultural awareness and expression, personal/social/health, career development and service learning.

Students worked at their own developmentally appropriate pace. Some achieved proficiency at high school graduation level as early as age 14. Others met the requirement at 21. Once students reached what was called "master level four" midway to graduation, they received a wireless laptop computer to help accelerate their progress and use modem technology to beat back the inconvenience and isolation of their mountainous and watery environments.

In their Baldrige application, the district reported that Ivan Velanoff, the once-shy student who preferred to stay away from school, created a bar graph on his computer to get a view of his reading achievement. He reviewed the results with his dad and his teacher. "They celebrated colossal gains in the targeted areas and made plans to deal with word and passage comprehension," the district report said.

Overcoming the skepticism that greets any new venture took time. Crumley says that when district leaders told stakeholders they were actually going to adopt their ideas, they didn't believe it. But "when stakeholders saw us acting upon their input, the trust began to grow," he says.

Performance Pay

One crucial barrier was teacher compensation. "As administrators who had worked through the teaching field, we were frustrated with the salary schedule that equated a teacher's worth to the amount of time they had been employed by the district," Crumley says. "We knew that there were numerous young teachers who were performing at very high levels, yet receiving a fraction of the salary that the veterans were earning."