School climate and student behavior

Before making investments in school climate, city and county leaders should ensure this strategy addresses local needs.

The Urban Institute and Mathematica have developed indicator frameworks to help local leaders assess conditions related to upward mobility, identify barriers, and guide investments to address these challenges. These indicator frameworks can serve as a starting point for self-assessment, not as a comprehensive evaluation, and should be complemented by other forms of local knowledge.

The Urban Institute's Upward Mobility Framework identifies a set of key local conditions that shape communities’ ability to advance upward mobility and racial equity. Local leaders can use the Upward Mobility Framework to better understand the factors that improve upward mobility and prioritize areas of focus. Data reports for cities and counties can be created here.

Several indicators in the Upward Mobility Framework may be improved with investments in high-quality school climate interventions. To measure these indicators and determine if investments in this strategy could help, examine the following:

• Effective public education: Average per-grade change in English Language Arts achievement between the third and eighth grades. These data are available from Stanford University’s Education Data Archive.
• Preparation for college: Share of 19- and 20-year-olds with a high school degree. These data are available from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
• School economic diversity: Share of students attending high-poverty schools by student race or ethnicity. These data are available from the Urban Institute’s Education Data Portal.
• Safety from trauma: Number of deaths due to injury per 100,000 people. These data are available from the National Center for Health Statistics’ Mortality File and the CDC’s WONDER database.
• Just policing: Number of juveniles arrested per 100,000. High rates of juvenile arrests provide a strong indicator of overall system involvement and over-policing. These data are available from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crime Data Explorer.

Mathematica's Education-to-Workforce (E-W) Indicator Framework helps local leaders identify the data that matter most in helping students and young adults succeed. Local leaders can use the E-W framework to better understand education and workforce conditions in their communities and to identify strategies that can improve outcomes in these areas.

Several indicators in the E-W Framework may be improved with investments in high-quality school climate interventions. To measure these indicators and determine if investments in this strategy could help, examine the following:

• Equitable discipline practices: Differences in the rates at which students from key demographic subgroups ever experience different forms of school discipline (office referrals, suspensions, expulsions, restraint, and exclusion) relative to those students’ representation in their school population as a whole.
• Inclusive environments: Percentage of students reporting belonging in school.
• Mental and emotional well-being: Percentage of youth with mental or emotional health needs as identified by a universal screening tool.
• Positive behavior:
• School safety: Percentage of students reporting high levels of physical, mental, and emotional safety in school climate surveys.
• Self-management: Percentage of students reporting a high level of self-management on surveys such as the CORE Districts SEL Survey self-management scale (grades 5–12) or Shift and Persist scale for children.

• Consistency and transparency: Experts cite that students’ uncertainty over behavioral expectations often drives issues related to conduct. They recommend establishing clear behavioral norms for students in all school-related settings that have been agreed upon by supervisory staff and teachers. Furthermore, experts emphasize carrying out school climate intervention practices on a regular basis–not just as a response to an incident of negative student behavior. This will help normalize supportive relationships and practices in school culture, minimizing the stigma associated with taking a break, meeting with a school counselor or participating in a restorative circle or restorative conversation, for example, when an issue arises.

• Dedicated staff to coordinate and implement school-wide efforts: School climate interventions that necessitate school-wide intervention (such as Restorative Justice or Trauma-Informed Schools initiatives) require significant coordination and facilitation, beyond the capacity of existing staff and teachers. Many successful programs hire a staff person who is responsible for coordinating program activities, staff training, and monitoring and evaluation. They may be hired by the district and oversee program implementation across several schools.

• Appropriate training and support services for staff and teachers: Staff and teachers who are responsible wholly or in part for the implementation of school climate interventions should be provided necessary training on intervention practices and foundational topics such as restorative practices in education, trauma and harm, conflict and healing, and escalation prevention. These trainings should be made available during existing work time. Furthermore, staff should also be offered support services that are available to students, like mental health resources, in order to encourage culture change within the entire school ecosystem.

• Voluntary and flexible: Interventions, particularly those designed to address trauma or student mental health, are often most effective when students elect to participate themselves. Furthermore, because issues related to student behavior frequently arise due to a unique challenge a student is facing, allowing interventions to be flexible and decisions to be made that are right for a particular student will be most effective.

• Maintain high expectations around behavior and academic rigor: Some experts notice that when teachers and staff understand how systemic issues or family dynamics affect students, they might subconsciously expect less from those students both academically and behaviorally. This can result in a less rigorous educational experience for students from marginalized groups. Schools should provide supports for students to enable student development in light of the high level of stress and trauma some students experience, but should maintain a high level of academic rigor.

• Be intentional about acknowledging systemic inequities: Students inevitably carry their out-of-school experiences into the school environment, and many issues related to school climate and student behavior are impacted by societal realities like systemic racism, xenophobia, and gender inequity and the resulting events such as community violence and housing insecurity. Experts encourage the use of open and honest dialogue among staff and between students and staff about how these realities are impacting situations that unfold at school.

• Employ a lens of curiosity: Experts encourage teachers and school staff to approach each situation related to student behavior from a point of curiosity, seeking first to understand the challenges the student may be facing versus making assumptions. This policy of inquisitiveness first may help school staff in avoiding unintentional biases when evaluating a situation.

• Teachers and school staff: Teachers and school staff are frequently responsible, wholly or in part, for implementing proactive and responsive interventions. Their personal relationships with students may be critical in understanding student needs. In cases where nonprofit partners deliver interventions, school staff and teachers can be critical in helping to identify and recruit students that may benefit from services.

• District and school leadership: Many school climate interventions require a culture change within the school, asking both students and staff to approach relationships differently. Experts observe that these efforts tend to be most successful when principals and other school leadership are invested and lead the change from the top. Furthermore, it may be necessary for school leadership to work with the district to ensure interventions are not at odds with district-wide policies related to discipline. Collaboratively reforming district-wide policies to eliminate overly punitive or exclusionary policies may be an important first step.

• Community-based organizations: Some interventions may partner with community-based organizations with particular expertise, such as in mentoring or group therapy, to deliver programs or support services in schools. The expertise and added capacity of external organizations can be crucial to program success.

• Parents and caregivers: Engaging parents and caregivers is critical, particularly when seeking to understand challenging student behavior. School staff and parents can partner to address needs or tailor services to the student’s particular context. It may also be necessary to secure parental consent for student participation in certain programs, like in-school mental health services.

• Philanthropy: Local funders may enable schools to implement or scale interventions that otherwise would be cost prohibitive within the school’s budget. In some successful examples, philanthropy has not only funded program operating costs, but also hired dedicated program coordinators and seconded the individual to the school.

• Ensure alignment with district-wide policies: Many interventions move away from traditional approaches to discipline, which may be in conflict with district-wide policies that mandate specific actions in certain scenarios. While experts note that changes should not be at the expense of student accountability, it may be required to collaborate with the district to amend overly punitive discipline policies that hinder the school’s ability to implement new interventions.

• Evaluate school climate from the student perspective: Experts suggest employing a “day in the student life” walk-through, wherein an adult spends a day shadowing a student. This process can reveal to staff significant discrepancies in climate experienced by students when moving between classrooms or other school common spaces like the hallway, recess, or lunch. Adults supervising these spaces may have different expectations of how students should behave in different spaces, contributing to perceived behavioral issues.

• Leverage early-adopters: Pursuing a culture change toward trauma-informed or restorative approaches to school climate and student behavior can be a slow endeavor. Early adopters of a new approach, including both students and staff, can be leveraged to generate buy-in among other students and staff, helping to illustrate the value of the intervention.

• Establish transition plans that support staff with new policies: Experts observe that in some cases where new approaches have been unsuccessful, new policies have failed to be paired with an adequate transition plan to manage the change to a new approach. For example, some schools have eliminated the use of classroom exclusion for disruptive behavior, without providing teachers processes or support mechanisms to handle situations as they arise in the classroom.

• Partner with parents: Many reform models include parental engagement and support in reinforcing healthy and safe behavior in school. This may include hosting workshops or ongoing courses to teach parents how to de-escalate or mediate behavior, creating clear lines of communication between parents and teachers, and including parent input when designing disciplinary procedures and reforms.

• Participation rates: Culture change can be near-impossible to quantify, but experts advise monitoring participation in the short-term to evaluate uptake. This may include metrics such as staff participation in professional development or training, the number of students participating in new programming.

• Student and staff perception of climate: Experts note that the intangible feeling of the school atmosphere can be an informative diagnostic. Qualitative surveys of both students and staff on morale and how they feel about the school environment may illuminate issues. Repeating these processes after implementation of an intervention can provide an indicator of success.

• Disciplinary rates: Reductions in disciplinary actions, including those resulting in classroom exclusion like suspensions, is a critical indicator of success. It is also imperative to evaluate these rates by student demographics to identify disparities in the frequency of disciplinary actions across groups. This is especially critical given the greater likelihood of experiencing discipline at school among Black students and other students of color.

• Social-emotional learning or holistic student assessments: Interventions that focus on developing students’ interpersonal or relational skills can be evaluated in terms of attainment of social-emotional learning skills. Assessment tools that may be employed include the Survey for Academic and Youth Outcomes and Holistic Student Assessment.