Chandler Unified spotlights balanced-assessment framework and Tableau dashboards to monitor attendance, guide instruction

Chandler Unified School District presenters used a Sept. 10 study session to show board members how a districtwide balanced-assessment framework and more than 1,000 Tableau visualizations are being used at the district, school, teacher and student levels to guide instruction and address attendance and learning gaps.

The district’s assessment team framed the work as a continuous loop of curriculum, instruction and assessment. “The balanced assessment framework, is basically just that all assessment has a purpose,” said the district’s assessment team lead during the presentation.

Why it matters: District leaders told the board the system is intended to help schools find students who need extra support earlier and to give teachers and principals actionable views of students’ attendance, behavior and academic performance. Presenters said the visualizations combine data from Infinite Campus and other sources and are refreshed overnight.

What was shown: Dr. Kenton Woods, research team lead, described the Tableau deployment and analytics: “We have about 1,100 different data visualizations across 275 workbooks and 50 projects,” he said, and noted the dashboards can show year-over-year statewide assessment results, peer-school comparisons and cohort enrollment trends.

Principals and teachers gave classroom- and school-level examples. Amanda Cook, principal of Bogle Junior High School, said staff use a “student success indicator” view — attendance, behavior and classes — to identify students for study-skills classes. Cook walked the board through a case in which a seventh-grade student moved from “extreme” to “moderate” risk after being placed in study skills and receiving targeted support: “The student is thriving. The student is doing very well.”

At Conley Elementary, principal Lisa Shore described a granular attendance strategy informed by Tableau reports. Shore said the school uses a targeted team they call “attendance heroes” to adopt chronically absent students, set goals and address barriers to daily attendance. She credited data exports from Tableau with helping the team find students “in boundary” and out-of-boundary students who may have transportation barriers.

Third-grade teacher Lauren Mosher described a teacher view that shows an attendance distribution for her class and allows daily tracking: “At this point in time in my class, 36.8 percent of my students have moderate or extreme attendance concerns,” she said, and added that she shares the data with students to build classroom buy-in for improvement.

Hamilton High and other sites showed teacher dashboards and student-level “baseball-card” views. Emma Straus, a math teacher and district alum, demonstrated a student profile that shows testing, vision/hearing checks, program participation, home language and historical grades across schools: “You can see their absences,” she said, noting that seasonal absences can explain later academic struggles and help teachers plan supports.

District supports and next steps: Presenters stressed the district provides professional development, templates and a research team to help site staff interpret data and plan instruction. Woods said district leadership and principals have been rolled into the Tableau rollout over the past decade and that the dashboards are now used by counselors and teachers as well as site administrators.

No board action was taken on the presentation. The district said materials and the Tableau views are available on the CUSD assessment website and that staff will return to the board if members request deeper demonstrations or site visits.

Ending: Board members praised the district team and the teachers and principals who presented. The session concluded when the board moved from the study session to the regular meeting later that evening.