Summary

In 1997, APQC launched an effort to help the education sector restructure and improve student achievement and system performance, drawing on the methodologies learned over the organization’s 30-year existence. It has projects under way in schools, districts, states, and the federal government. Its latest project is called North Star, an innovative effort to transform U.S. public K–12 education using process management.
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Case Study: APQC

Starting on the front end

For 33 years at APQC (American Productivity & Quality Center), we have worked with every major sector—principally business, but also healthcare, government, and military. About 10 years ago, I said that what we were missing was education, and we should take all that we have learned from these businesses worldwide—15% of our membership is international—and direct our expertise toward helping education systems.While I have a personal background in higher education, I decided that the place to begin is K-12—that’s where you prevent mistakes—you start on the front end. To get familiar with K-12, we performed 10 major benchmarking studies—deep, not just benchmarks. We brought as many 100 educators here to our center to dive into a particular process—to discover best practices and identify gaps.For example, the last process we studied was Data-Driven Decision Making—a four-month project involving 71 districts around the U.S. All in all, over the course of the 10 studies, we involved approximately 250 districts.

Getting to the how

During our research, we found that when we identified the gaps, very few districts knew what to do with that information; they understood the what and the why, but they didn’t know how to bridge those gaps. And so we decided to help by focusing on the missing how.To get to the how, I turned to one of tools we learned from business and industry world: process management; that is, as industry learned 20 years ago, you have to look at the process, not just the outcome, in order to enable change. Too much of our education system looks at only outcomes—test scores, graduation rates. You do need those outcomes, but you also need to know how to change those outcomes. Personally, I’m convinced that education can learn from the business sector, and if education doesn’t get off this outcomes-only focus, it never will change. You cannot improve a test score by looking only at the score—you must look at the process that generated the score. Following this conviction, by coupling process management with outcomes management, we developed a proven strategy for education transformation, as we demonstrate via our innovative and successful North Star Project—called “North Star” because of its inspiring, constant nature.

Following the North Star

For the 2009-10 school year, we enlisted 11 districts across the U.S. for North Star, including Montgomery County, Maryland, which has very good schools; Clark County (Las Vegas), Nevada; two Baldridge Award winners; and two very small districts—a variety of district types to show that the process-management solution can work across the board. The participating districts agreed to use process management system-wide; that is, not just for curriculum and instruction, but for all operations together as a whole, single system.We trained those districts on this holistic thinking and methodology. Then we had them select specific projects, and we coached them for three to four months to help them get their projects fully operational. We provided coaching and feedback—face to face, online, etc.—and then, at year end 2009, we took a look at the results:

  • We found $17.5 million in savings—actual, documented savings—from these 11 districts over and above what they would have done otherwise.

Needless to say, the 11 corresponding superintendents are overwhelmingly thrilled with the results.

Scaling around the globe

Thanks to this success, we’ve recruited 20 new U.S. districts—including Huston (Texas) ISD, the largest in the nation—to join in with the original 11. We want to take the project across the country and, via broadband, around the world—because the methodology is universal—process travels anywhere, geographically and across industries. Every teacher, in the U.S. or in Uganda, uses a process. We want to show how to improve those processes to achieve better outcomes. We also want to bring together all of our North Star participants into a formal community of practices, to encourage ongoing work and improvement.–C. Jackson Grayson
Chairman and Founder
APQC
Houston, Texas, U.S.