What We Do
APQC Education helps school districts do MORE with less!
The American Productivity and Quality Center Education Team supports the transformation of education through Process and Performance Management, and Benchmarking and Best Practices, empowering school districts to improve efficiency and effectiveness.
APQC Education North Star Vision
The North Star project is our vision to transform the U.S. public education system. Using an approach based on over 30 years experience with thousands of global organizations, APQC Education conducted a pilot program in 2009 with 10 school districts to illustrate the impact of our work. In one year, these 10 school districts saved $17.5 million dollars and released over 40,000 instructional hours back into the classroom. Since then the North Star Community of school districts has tripled in size and new members are seeing comparable results! Our goal is to see EVERY school district in the United States similarly transformed.
APQC Education Services
Process and Performance Management
APQC Education equips districts with Process and Performance Management methodology – a leadership approach that promotes effectiveness and efficiency by linking process performance to outcomes. The key premise to this transformative methodology is that instructional and operational processes (e.g., teacher hiring, professional development, curriculum alignment, data utilization) must change in order to improve outcomes (e.g. graduation rates, instructional strategies, test scores, facilities expenses). At APQC Education, we fundamentally value outcome measures but believe that the Achilles’ heel of education in the United States is the lack of focus on process. Our Process and Performance services have been designed to directly address this fundamental weakness in education reform efforts by teaching districts how to manage their processes.
Benchmarking and Best Practices
APQC Education conducts benchmarking and best-practice research in order to help schools and school districts:
- Learn what works and why
- Get answers from best-practice districts
- Improve their processes
Over a hundred districts across the country have used APQC Education’s benchmarking methodology to help discover and transfer best practices in areas such as math and science instruction, recruiting highly qualified teachers, managing information technology, data-driven decision making and many other topics critical to improving student achievement.
Knowledge Base
The APQC Education Knowledge Base provides you with instant access to our database of actionable knowledge including North Star Community project storyboards, benchmarking study results, case studies, articles, tools and templates. Support continuous improvement in your district with validated data and proven strategies compiled from APQC’s work with hundreds of school districts.
When focusing on continuous improvement for your system, how do you know where to start? To help you answer this question, APQC Education offers Organizational Assessments. Our CEO and Founder, Dr. Jack Grayson helped found the Malcolm Baldrige Award in the early 1980’s, and we are proud to offer a Baldrige-aligned organizational assessment customized for school districts. Additionally, we offer a process management assessment that helps you measure the vitality and maturity of your internal process management systems.
CONTACT US TODAY and let us know how APQC Education's Services can help your organization.