School Climate Essential

An article in Education Leadership talks about ways that educators can assess their school's climate.  A growing body of research has confirmed climate is crucial to students' academic achievement and healthy development. "Although No Child Left Behind is full of rhetoric about the importance of character education and supportive learning environments," the authors state, "it only requires accountability systems to measure reading, math, physical violence, and (recently) science scores. These are all meaningful indicators of education quality, but education policymakers have become increasingly aware that NCLB-type accountability is too narrowly focused." The authors argue that school climate data is not only complementary to academic assessments, but measure and support learning. They report that researchers and the National School Climate Council (2007) agree that four major factors shape school climate: safety, relationships, teaching and learning, and the institutional environment.  Information about these four major factors can be found at the Center for Social and Emotional Education.

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