Leander ISD has requested to conduct a curriculum management audit, which is a voluntary process by which we will gather feedback on practices supporting teaching and learning in our system.

This is a deficit audit, done voluntarily, that provides specific recommendations for improvement based on five audit standards.

Those standards are:

  • Governance and Leadership
  • Curriculum and Learning
  • Equality, Equity, and Connectivity
  • Feedback and Assessment
  • Productivity and Resource Use

An external audit team comprised of 10 professional educators from across the country will visit LISD during the week of Oct. 31-Nov. 4, 2016. The team will review curriculum documents and interview teachers, parents, administrators and principals and members of the Board of Trustees. The auditors will provide an online survey for teachers and campus administrators to collect information and perceptions from these key stakeholder groups. The audit team will also visit all schools in the system to interview principals and to determine how well the system’s expectations for teaching and learning are reflected in observed classroom activities.

The auditors will examine numerous factors of educational practice and programs throughout the system and how the system is working toward excellence across its schools. The curriculum auditing program will determine and recommend how the school system can improve in equitably providing quality achievement for all students. The LISD Board of Trustees and Superintendent Dan Troxell, Ph.D., have demonstrated support for continual improvement by requesting the audit and this critical analysis of the system.

It should be noted that an audit serves as an “exception report” — it limits its reporting to those areas in need of improvement rather than offering commendations, and the measure for quality is improved student learning. The audit report is intended to serve as a tool for establishing priorities for continued system growth and improvement.

Curriculum audits have been conducted in over 420 school districts and colleges in 48 states in the U.S. and in several foreign countries by the Curriculum Management Audit Center at Texas Association of School Administrators (TASA) and its licensing affiliate, Curriculum Management Solutions, Inc. (CMSi). CMSi is headquartered in Des Moines, IA and has been working with TASA for over 20 years. The audit team members for this project, led by Dr. Rosanne Stripling, are all licensed and trained by CMSi.