Audit Culture

Audit culture, in general, refers to the implementation across a wide range of businesses and institutions of systems of regulation, in which questions of quality are subsumed by logics of management. The term began to be employed in the 1990s by British accountants, anthropologists, and sociologists to refer to the increasing use of regulatory mechanisms, designed to monitor and measure performance, in fields other than accounting, insurance, and finance, where the mechanisms originated. More recently, the term has been used to refer to and theorize the emergence within the human services of these regulatory practices and the language and values accompanying them. For example, terms such as performance outcomes, quality assurance, accountability, transparency, efficiency, best practices, stakeholder, benchmarking, and value added circulate within and anchor the discourses that constitute audit culture. The values that shape audit culture are primarily those of objectivity, efficiency, and productivity. These values inform and are sustained by setting measurable performance outcomes; generating quantitative data to evaluate and inform programs, policies, and interventions; and monitoring and rewarding progress in achieving numerical goals.

Within curriculum studies, the concept of audit culture is used to refer to the adoption by educators of what are often referred to as the practices and discourses of standards and accountability and to the consequences of that adoption. The concept has proved helpful in understanding the transformation that has occurred in education during the last decade, when, at all levels of schooling, audit has emerged as the preferred way to hold schools accountable and to determine whether federal, state, and local spending on education produces benefits. In the United States, examples of audit culture include No Child Left Behind's emphasis on quantitatively measuring learning by using high-stakes testing; the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education's insistence on performance standards, numerical data, and the deployment of data aggregation systems; state and local movements to tie teacher pay to test scores; and colleges' benchmarking student writing and measuring value added through standardized tests. [Page 60]The spread in Europe of the Bologna Process, which seeks to standardize curriculum and diploma requirements, and the implementation at all levels and throughout most of the developed countries of procedures that standardize teaching and the curriculum, quantify student learning, and hold teachers and administrators responsible for numerical results further exemplify the practices constituting audit culture.

Curriculum theorists have been critical of audit culture overall, but have focused particularly on two aspects of audit culture. The first concerns the way audit culture renders schools, teachers, and the curriculum auditable. The second concerns the relationships between audit culture and neoliberal economic interests.