Curriculum alignment audit of a charter school's expeditionary learning program

Curriculum

According to F.W. English's Deciding What to Teach and Test: Designing, Aligning and Auditing the Curriculum (the Milliennium Edition), every school must conduct an audit to assess their alignment and to develop procedures to bring the school into alignment.

On pages 119 through 123, English provides a checklist for every school to follow when conducting their audit. According to this checklist, an audit must evaluate the following areas: Board Policies, School Administrators and Supervisors, the Curriculum, Tests and Assessments, Budget Development, and Productivity.

The school that I am involved in is a charter school with an expeditionary learning curriculum focused on the arts. It is part of a public school district and is thus tied to the district's standards and benchmarks, along with its budget and staffing method. Further, the school exists in a low-income, highly diverse area of town, although open enrollment is available. Further, because of its charter status, class size is controlled and classes are not allowed to exceed more than twenty students per room. Under the federal No Child Left Behind mandates, the school is currently on the watch list and is in need of improving test scores and overall student achievement.

Board Policies: No

Because of the unique situation of the school's charter status among a public school district, the direction of the district is often in conflict with the direction of the school. The reason the school opted to utilize an expeditionary learning approach is because this method of teaching has demonstrated better results when used in low socio-economic status communities. Thus, the school's goals focus on hands-on experiences, all-encompassing lesson plans that tie in all subjects into a single theme, and specialized assessment processes. However, the Board Policies, and thus the entire school district's policies have specific standards and benchmarks that must be met. Unfortunately, these standards and benchmarks are tied to the district's curriculum and not the expeditionary learning curriculum and thus do not fit into the general flow of the process.

The Curriculum: No

As previously noted, the school is currently operating under numerous curriculums taken from various sources and therefore alignment is non-existence. At one level is the school district's mandated curriculum and testing that does not align with the theory of an expeditionary learning curriculum. On the other hand there is the lack of an aligned curriculum within the school. Instead teachers develop their own curriculum that is vaguely based on the expeditionary learning philosophy and simply provide assessment through the school district's procedures, which do not align with the curriculum used in study.

Tests and Assessments: No

Because of the previously discussed lack of clear curriculum alignment and district/school alignment, the test and assessments used in the school are all too often unrelated to the curriculum taught. Instead, a certain expeditionary curriculum is used, but its success is evaluated using non-expeditionary forms assessment. The result is that the test scores are in no way reflective of the curriculum approaches success or failure.

Budget Development: Yes

Due to its unique status as a charter school, the school is not tied directly into the district's budget. The school has access to numerous outside funding that is to be used to further develop the expeditionary nature of the school. For example, the school realizes its staff and administration lack the needed training to formulate an expeditionary school. Thus, funds were used to provide teachers and administrators with professional training and development throughout the year.

Productivity: Yes

The school's productivity is aligned with its curriculum. For example, numerous expeditions into the community have occurred throughout the academic year.