Curriculum Management Audit Expected to Recommend Changes
July 9, 2007 - The Curriculum Management Audit requested by Superintendent Del Burns is due in August and school administrators expect the audit to provide a roadmap for change to improve instruction for students.Donna Hargens, WCPSS Chief Academic Officer, says the audit will critically look at the school system, its policies and administration and make a number of suggestions to improve teaching and learning. This will be a "discrepancy audit" listing what needs improvement; not a report citing what the school system is doing right.
“Just like new teachers coming to our school for the first time, the Phi Delta Kappa audit team arrived in Wake County seeking to learn the policies and guidelines for teaching in our classrooms,” said Hargens. “The auditors compared what they found in reviewing documents and spending time in our schools with standards developed over the years from auditing school districts that help schools best support academics. Their audit will tell us what they found and what they recommend.”
The 26-week audit process involved a team of 23 external auditors from 12 different states. They were provided 50,000 pages of documents and talked to more than 262 school staff members, parents, students and community members. Sixty people from the community signed up online and each had a 15 minute interview with an auditor.
Hargens says the school system will be measured against five standards:
- Governance and control;
- Direction and learner expectations;
- Connectivity and consistency;
- Assessment and feedback; and
- Productivity and efficiency.
“We expect to receive recommendations to improve our core business of instructing students,” said Hargens. “Some of the recommendations may require changes to the way we have been doing business and some will drive changes in school system spending.”
In North Carolina, the state has established an instructional process where learning objectives for each grade level are in the Standard Course of Study. Schools are expected to help students learn this information over the course of the school year. State accountability tests are administered to measure student success in mastering these objectives.
Hargens says the WCPSS Instructional Services Division supports schools in this instructional process by helping them ask and respond to three questions (Dufour, Dufour, Eaker, & Karhanek, 2004):
- What do we want students to learn?
- How will we know when each student has acquired the essential knowledge and skills?
- What happens in our school when a student does, or does not learn?
Hargens says that administrators have helped schools address these questions by understanding the use of professional learning communities to use testing data and to work together in meeting students’ needs. Administrators have been developing formative assessments for teachers to measure what students are learning. These are the blue diamond tests students will be taking.
Hargens says the curriculum management audit will help the school district standardize all of this so that when a new teacher comes to the school district they will be able to find what they need immediately. The process and steps will be clear.
Hargens said the audit will be used to help move WCPSS from a good to a great school system.
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