You are here
Teachers and School Climate: Effects on Student Outcomes and Academic Disparities
Student-teacher relationships are at the core of student experiences in schools and, arguably, fundamental to influencing student outcomes. Using a statewide, student-level school climate survey from Massachusetts, we investigate teachers’ contributions to school climate, which we refer to as climate value added (VA), and how it varies by student race/ethnicity. We first show that climate VA contributes to student learning: Teachers whose students report positive feelings about climate also contribute more to student test scores and to an aggregate of nontest student outcomes (student absences, suspensions, and grade progression). And teachers identified by students of color as contributing to better school climate have outsize effects on learning gains for these students. Differences in teachers’ climate effects across racial/ethnic groups are largest on topics aligned with cultural competency, school participation, and comfort with faculty. Lastly, we find that Black students assigned to Black teachers report better school climate than Black students assigned to other teachers.
Citation: Benjamin Backes, James Cowan, Dan Goldhaber, Roddy Theobald (2022). Teachers and School Climate: Effects on Student Outcomes and Academic Disparities. CALDER Working Paper No. 274-1022
You May Also Be Interested In
How Did It Get This Way? Disentangling the Sources of Teacher Quality Gaps Through Agent-Based Modeling
Dan Goldhaber, Matt Kasman, Vanessa Quince, Roddy Theobald, Malcolm Wolff
How Well Do Professional Reference Ratings Predict Teacher Performance?
Dan Goldhaber, Cyrus Grout, Malcolm Wolff
Teachers and Students’ Postsecondary Outcomes: Testing the Predictive Power of Test and Nontest Teacher Quality Measures
Benjamin Backes, James Cowan, Dan Goldhaber, Roddy Theobald