Audit: TUSD effort to decrease discipline, improve achievement falls short

Discipline issues have risen and academic achievement has often fallen despite a five-year TUSD effort that involved dozens of employees tasked with advocating for the district’s underserved students, an audit found.

The $90,000 study of the role TUSD’s 62 learning support coordinators have at the district was called for by a national desegregation expert seeking to determine if the nearly $3 million spent annually on those positions is making a difference.

The evaluation was conducted by the District Management Council. It took into account student data, survey and focus group feedback and staff interviews to identify where the efforts fell short.

Tucson Unified School District’s support coordinators have been responsible for implementing and training staff on alternative discipline practices and instructional methods. They help identify student needs and support services with the expectation that discipline would decrease and attendance would increase among students they serve.

But over the last three years, in-school discipline has gone up 26 percent and out-of-school suspensions have increased by 4 percent. And attendance has declined slightly.

An analysis of the daily activity of the workers found they spent more time coordinating state tests — also part of their job description — than working on behavioral interventions, student advocacy and communicating with parents.

TUSD is not backing away from the use of the coordinators despite the findings.

Instead, TUSD is adopting recommendations from the evaluators to narrow the work duties for the coordinators, one of several reasons cited in the the effort’s lackluster success. Coordinating tests and promoting advanced learning experiences will no longer be on a coordinators’ to-do list.

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While learning support coordinators fell short in meeting goals, it’s not for lack of trying, the analysis found.

Rather, it cited insufficient training, lack of structure and, in some cases, administrators abusing the positions to meet unrelated campus needs. The analysis found that coordinators spent an average of 27 percent of their time on extraneous administrative duties.

Many coordinators split time between schools, which the analysis said is problematic even for the most well-intentioned employee when needs exceed their split-time attention.

There have been some successes with elementary schools making gains in AIMS passing scores between 2012 and 2014. But those improvements only applied to schools that have coordinators assigned solely to their campus. Scores have declined by 5 percent on the more than 70 percent of elementary schools that share a learning coordinator, the analysis showed.

The evaluators did not take a position on whether the district should continue the use of coordinators. However, it did make recommendations, including the placement of full-time coordinators at all elementary schools.

It also called for better supervision to ensure that deviations in job duties are in line with individual school needs.

It has also urged the district to do a better job of hiring for the job so that coordinators have skills that are better matched to the areas they must address.

The analysis noted that TUSD’s upper administration has already been working to better define the role of the learning coordinators and is committed to better monitoring.