Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award

The Baldrige Performance Excellence Program is a national public-private partnership run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

The Baldrige Program educates organizations in performance excellence management and administers the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award the nation's highest Presidential honor for performance excellence through innovation, improvement and visionary leadership.

The Baldrige Program's main focus areas are to help organizations achieve best-in-class levels of performance; identify and recognize role-model organizations; identify and share best management practices, principles, and strategies.

• The Baldrige National Quality Award process enables us to evaluate our entire organization through a team of trained third-party examiners.
• We will receive a feedback report indicating the areas for us to continue to improve and accelerate our journey to excellence.
• Use of the Baldrige Performance Excellence Criteria correlates strongly with improved outcomes.

Our goal is to improve the Alamo Colleges District system by improving in all areas.

We want to be the best we can be in meeting the needs of all our stakeholders.

Consequently, we have assessed ourselves against the Baldrige Criteria as a way to obtain actionable feedback to accelerate our journey towards performance excellence.

Examiners will assess our entire organization.

They will identify the strengths they find as well as our opportunities for improvement. They will also identify exemplary areas that we could share as "best practices" with other organizations of higher education in the nation.

All Baldrige award applicants receive detailed feedback from the Baldrige examiners. The Baldrige Feedback Reports often contain comments on as many as 100 areas of strength and opportunity.  Surveys show that more than 90% of applicants use the received feedback in their strategic planning and decision making.

In order to be eligible to apply for the Baldrige Award, organizations must earn the award at their respective state level. The Alamo Colleges District applied for the Texas Award for Performance Excellence (TAPE) – led by the Quality Texas Foundation – in October 2015, received a site visit in January 2016, and was awarded the 2016 TAPE later that year.

The award was the culmination of a nine-year journey and reflected the outstanding dedication of the college teams, district leadership – led by Chancellor Emeritus Bruce H. Leslie (2006-2018) – and the strong leadership of the Alamo Colleges District Board of Trustees. TAPE recipients are selected based on the same performance criteria used at the national level for the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, which awards the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.

As a state awardee, the ACD was then eligible to submit its application for the 2018 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in April 2018. The Alamo Colleges District was the first community college system in the nation to be awarded the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.

Demonstrating the relevance and value of the Baldrige Excellence Framework to organizations of multiple sizes and sectors, a few awards are given annually across six industries (manufacturing, service, small business, education, health care, and nonprofit) representing every major region of the United States. In 2023, the Alamo Colleges District – with guidance from Chancellor Mike Flores – began its journey to pursue a second Baldrige award.

In October 2024, the Alamo Colleges District was named a recipient of the 2024 Malcolm Baldrige Award and made history as the only institution of higher education to receive the award twice in the history of the program. The ACD was one of five organizations in the United States – and the only education organization – to receive the 2024 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.