Abstract
This chapter describes a 30-year history of utilizing the curriculum management audit in the United States to improve pupil learning. The audit is based on notions of machine bureaucracy and is the epitome of organizational rationality and control. The audit standards and indicators are outlined along with the paradoxes of application, that is, improved means of internal control required to improve pupil learning as evidenced on mass administered tests more tightly circumscribes teacher autonomy and is the source of teacher resistance to pupil learning as measured by those tests. The second paradox is that teacher flexibility in adapting the curriculum is a requirement to maximize student learning, and while the curriculum content must be “tight,” its pacing, sequencing, and classroom reinforcement must remain highly localized, or “loose.” This is the “paradox of administration,” a concept as old as the audit itself in organizational theory. The work of Basil Bernstein in the UK is referenced as a different way of auditing an educational program with a different set of questions. However, such questions would bring into focus the power of the political elites who now exercise control of schooling and are not likely to be viewed favorably by them since it would expose their stake in preserving current socio-political-economic inequalities.
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English, F.W. (2011). Schools as Organizational Connectors and Reproducers of the Hierarchy of Learning Success. In: Townsend, T., MacBeath, J. (eds) International Handbook of Leadership for Learning. Springer International Handbooks of Education, vol 25. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1350-5_49
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