Curriculum Auditing

Curriculum auditing refers to the practices, language, and values of audit culture as these are applied to curriculum, defined as the design, delivery, and evaluation of the formal content of K–higher education. Although the first known use of a curriculum audit, titled an educational performance audit, occurred in 1979 in the Columbus, Ohio, school district, curriculum auditing was initially formulated in the early 1970s as a way to establish public trust in schools by introducing auditing practices used in financial sectors. These practices were meant to ensure objectivity in evaluating the efficiency and performance of school curriculum. A curriculum audit replaces questions about the truth, beauty, and goodness of a curriculum and its social and political context, with questions about the planning, evaluation, effectiveness, and efficiency of the curriculum. In other words, a curriculum audit does not concern itself with the content or context of curriculum, but with how and to what extent curriculum is developed and successfully implemented. Furthermore, the measures used to monitor implementation and determine success are numerical and require the emplacement of a regulatory system that monitors the system itself. In other words, not only must there be in place practices that generate numerical data, but a self-monitoring system must exist to aggregate, disaggregate, make sense of, and employ the data produced to improve the curriculum and its delivery.

Informed by effective-schools research and organizational theory, both of which evaluate school practices and policies in terms of curriculum design and delivery and draw conclusions about curriculum quality control, a curriculum audit typically involves monitoring the extent to which particular standards are met. These standards are generally phrased in terms of the following: control, which refers to the clarity and flow of information within the overall chain of command of a school's curricular decision-making process; curricular direction, which refers to the overarching and specific performance objectives designated within and shaping the curriculum; connectivity and equity, which refer generally to the alignment between policy and operation and more specifically the alignment among courses, methods, outcomes, and to the equitable division of resources among all students; feedback or assessment, which refers to the data aggregation system that provides feedback and drives curricular decisions; and production, which refers to the extent to which the budget is driven by curricular needs.

A curriculum audit measures to what extent these standards are met. In order to measure success, each standard is broken down into discrete elements that can be measured. In other words, to answer, for example, whether there is proof that the chain of command used data generated by assessments to improve the curriculum, there needs to be evidence not only of change in curriculum but improvement based on quantitative data. To determine whether courses are aligned such that performance indicators incrementally demand more at each grade level, evidence must be produced of syllabi including performance objectives and of developmental consistency of objectives across grade level. To show that a feedback loop is in place such that teachers can benefit from data produced by standardized assessments, interpreted within the chain of command and returned to those teachers, improvement across time on scores on individually benchmarked assessments might be asked for.

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