When the Peru district in Clinton County was faced with conducting a costly audit of its curriculum, educators realized the best people to determine what was being done and how to improve it were those in the trenches.

"The district had put so much money in curriculum work the superintendent thought it might be time to take a step back and see what direction we needed to go," said Cheryl Dodds, president of the Peru Association of Teachers.

The Peru AT participates in the NYSUT Local Action Project. LAP locals are trained in community outreach, political action and coalition-building.

"He was thinking of hiring an outside agency," she noted. "With all this emphasis on student and teacher accountability, our union thought this was an opportunity to step outside the box."

With Superintendent A. Paul Scott serving as facilitator, a group of educators from different subjects and grade levels met to discuss the audit criteria.

"So often an audit is something thrust upon others by people external from the organization," said Scott. "From the very beginning we focused on a partnership where we would examine in a collaborative process."

That meant not rushing anything, Scott added. Educators took four months just to develop the audit criteria.

Asking questions

Teachers developed a set of questions addressing written, delivered and assessed curriculum. "They also took into account the role of administration, and the role of the district as far as policies," Dodds said. "All aspects of the curriculum within the district were taken into account."

Several years ago the Peru middle school was identified as a school in need of improvement and had undergone an intense reworking of the curriculum. The committee decided to pilot the union-district audit with the grades 5-8 English language arts program.

"The teachers looked at curriculum maps, the texts that were being used, hard copies of materials that went along with the written curriculum and random student samplings," Dodds said. "They even did classroom walkthroughs." Two teams of four educators conducted the audits.

Auditors took note of every aspect of the curriculum. They even went so far as to compare how well tests matched up with standards at each grade level, known as "horizontal alignment," with how well content is taught from grade to grade, known as "vertical alignment."

Ground rules set

For the audit to be successful, some ground rules had to be established, Dodds and Scott agreed.

"In the greater North Country area there has never been a teachers bargaining unit collaborating with the district on an accountability initiative like this," Dodds said. "It's something that's quite ground-breaking and where there needs to be a lot of trust built between the district and teachers and vice versa."

Union and district agreed that any time things started being uncomfortable for either side, the process would be abandoned.

Other ground rules:

• Audits were not conducted by teachers on the same grade level. A fifth-grade teacher did not evaluate the curriculum in another fifth-grade classom.
• Materials were evaluated, not teachers.
• The process had to be be objective and completely confidential. "That was very important to building a level of trust," Dodds said.

The entire process took more than a year to complete. While the audit did not reveal major flaws or areas of concern with the curriculum, it provided educators, administrators and the school board a rare opportunity to fully evaluate all aspects of the program, Dodds said.

"There really were no big surprises anywhere," Dodds said.

The superintendent agreed. "The value for us has been as much the partnership as it's been the evaluation of the curriculum," Scott said. "It brought our district together because it's been a collaborative discussion since the beginning."

The audit team plans to tackle the district's social studies curriculum in the fall.

"Everybody involved has been satisfied with this pilot project," Dodds said. "It opens the doors in the future for teachers to really take ownership of what is going on."

- Clarisse Butler Banks