Audit: Written class plans scarce
Review finds about 80% of Stamford public schools’ core courses don’t have curricula committed to paper
“If teachers are going to teach it, the curriculum has to be written down somewhere and it can’t just be a state standard or something we purchase from the outside.”
Jeffrey Tuneberg, lead auditor with CMSi
STAMFORD — Four out of every five required courses of Stamford Public Schools — English, math, science or social stories — have no written curriculum, according to the findings of a yearlong audit.
Lead auditor Jeffrey Tuneberg, with company CMSi, said the expectation from the auditors was that 100 percent of core courses have a corresponding written curriculum.
But after conducting a review of 352 documents, visiting 317 classrooms and interviewing 234 staff members, administrators and Board of Education members, auditors found the curriculum lacking. Only 20 percent of classes in high school have a written curriculum. The figure for middle schools was 15 percent and for elementary schools, 21 percent.
“What we found is written curriculum is very limited overall and in some areas it was nonexistent,” Tuneberg said.
“If teachers are going to teach it, the curriculum has to be written down somewhere and it can’t just be a state standard or something we purchase from the outside,” he told educators Tuesday night. “It needs to be something that has the Stamford stamp of approval on it.”
Amy Beldotti, associate superintendent for teaching and learning, said the district has already made changes based on the audit findings, including resurrecting curriculum committees, which were set up in the past but have not been used in many years, she said.
“We have a lot more written curriculum in place,” she said.
“The good news is we have committees ready to go and they will continue the work.”
The findings from the audit, which began in August of last year, were presented during a meeting of the Stamford Board of Education’s Teaching, Learning and Community Committee. Auditors put together a roughly 300-page report on the findings, complete with recommendations to the district. The audit was a district-wide look at Stamford’s schools, and does not feature school-specific data nor comparisons between different buildings.
One of the discoveries was that Stamford’s curriculum policy is “woefully outdated,” Tuneberg said, as it hasn’t been updated since 2009 and did not appear to be in regular use.
“What we found in interviews with people is that it’s just not being used, at least not being used consistently throughout the district,” Tuneberg said, adding that many people who were interviewed for the audit were unaware of the policy’s existence.
Additionally, many job postings do not appear to link to the district’s curriculum.
“Everybody should have a link to the major mission of the school, not just to the function of their job,” he said.
The audit also found that classrooms are not periodically observed by administrators consistently across the district and that Stamford as a school system does not embrace any one instructional model. Auditors observed different styles in classrooms from the traditional lecture set-up in some classes to student-centered instruction in others that relies more on student participation.
Tuneberg said very few classes employed small group or project-based learning from the rooms that were observed.
Another finding was the district appeared to lack a plan to use data from student assessments.
“We expect some type of a district-monitored assessment to be in place to interpret the results to see if students are learning what we expect them to learn based on the written curriculum,” Tuneberg said. “Well, since you have very little written curriculum, you really don’t have assessments because there’s no written curriculum to go along with it.”
He said some of that work is being done inside of individual school buildings, but not district-wide.
While the audit discovered some of the district’s deficiencies, it also highlighted some positives.
“SPS exceeds other demographically similar districts on state assessments and far exceeds those districts on assessment results for highrisk students,” the report reads.
The audit includes a list of six recommendations. Among them is to update the district’s curriculum policy and to create consistency across the district in terms of what is being taught in classrooms. Another recommendation is to develop a district-wide assessment program to better evaluate the effectiveness of curriculum.
“They are not quick fixes…this is hard work that needs to be done,” Tuneberg said, estimating it could take from three to five years to implement the changes, and even longer to institutionalize them.
Board members mostly praised the work of the auditors in bringing the district’s deficiencies to light.
Member Andy George raised the concern that some parents feel there are too many assessments given to students and that teachers often teach to the test.
Tuneberg agreed that too much testing is not desirable, but said there are many ways to monitor student performance, and that assessments can be valuable if used correctly and consistently.
“The issue becomes not that we have more tests but that we coordinate the tests we give,” he said. “One teacher might write a classroom test at the end of a unit in her fourth grade math class that has no reflection of what’s going on in a fourth grade teacher’s math class down the road somewhere. There’s no consistency and there’s no coordination.”
He added, “With a lack of a written curriculum and a lack of a formalized assessment program in the district, really it’s like the Wild, Wild West, everybody is doing their own thing and it’s a bunch of free agent contractors working in a school district calling yourself a public school.”
Jackie Heftman, the only current member who served on the board in 2009 when the curriculum policy was adopted, expressed dismay over the policy seemingly getting little attention.
“Now we’re 13 years later understanding that a lot of it just never happened and so from a board perspective ... what do we need to do to ensure that the multitude of work that has to happen is happening so that 13 years from now we don’t look back and say, ‘Gee, it was great and it went on a shelf and nobody ever did it,’ ” she said.