Measuring School Climate

The National Center for Education Statistics has released a new Technical Report today on Tuesday, October 30^th, entitled, Measuring School Climate Using the 2015 School Crime Supplement. This report examines the various facets of school climate including perceptions of school climate overall, school environment, school safety, and student engagement, by both student demographics and reported bullying or criminal victimization experiences.

Key findings for student characteristics were as follows:

• Overall school climate was scored higher by Asian students in comparison to all other racial subgroups. This indicates that Asian students, overall, reported more positively on the items making up each domain, resulting in a higher overall school climate score in comparison to the other subgroups.
• The engagement domain of school climate was the only subscale of school climate with a gender difference, where females expressed higher scores than males, indicating increased engagement with the school and school activities.
• In the environment domain, Asian students reported the highest scores among all race categories, as did students whose family income exceeded $50,000, indicating these groups of students had more positive perceptions of the school environment than other student groupings.
• In the safety domain, middle school students reported a higher score and felt safer at school and in the surrounding areas than high school students.
• For those students who reported being bullied, the differences in scores between bullied and not bullied was largest on the safety and overall school climate scales. For students who reported victimization, the largest differences were also on the safety and overall school climate scales; however, the differences in school climate scores between those who reported victimization and those who did not was smaller than that for bullying.

The SCS has been administered 11 times since 1989 to youth ages 12 through 18 attending grades 6 through 12 in both public and private schools. All the data presented in this report come from respondents who completed the 2015 SCS survey between January and June of 2015, representing a weighted population of 24,964,000 students during the 2014–15 school year.