A new report suggests that school climate is directly correlated to things like teacher retention rates and student achievement.

NYU’s Research Alliance for New York City Schools has successfully measured some factors of school climate and found that certain elements are important to a school’s success.

"A first-of-its-kind study released Thursday found that significant gains in key measures of a school’s climate, like safety and academic expectations, can be linked to the equivalent of an extra month and a half of math instruction and, in some cases, a 25 percent reduction in teacher turnover,” said The New York Chalkbeat.

The report is based on 31,000 responses from teacher surveys over a four-year span and considers four measures of school climate:

• school safety and order
• leadership and professional development
• high academic expectations
• teacher relationships and collaboration

"Each measure, the report found, is independently linked to decreases in teacher turnover. And gains on two of those measures, high academic expectations and school safety, were directly connected to better scores on state math exams,” the article said.

While the study acknowledges further research needs to be done, it suggests that focusing on collecting school climate data could help schools make sweeping improvements.

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Article by Nicole Gorman, Education World Contributor

3/25/2016