Engaging Schools Fostering High School Students' Motivation to Learn (2004) / Chapter Skim
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4. Climate, Organization, Composition, and Size of Schools
4. Climate, Organization, Composition, and Size of Schools
Pages 97-119
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From page 97... ...
The inclusion of studies that focused on student achievement as the outcome is based on the assumption that gains in achievement imply increased engagement. SCHOOL CLIMATE Conceptualizing School Climate School climate refers to the values, norms, beliefs, and sentiments associated with routine practices and social interaction in schools.
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From page 98... ...
Gottfredson, HybI, Gottfredson, and Castandeda, 19861. Although the design of the qualitative and correlational studies reviewed in this chapter limit the degree to which causal conclusions can be drawn, the evidence is consistent enough to give substantial confidence in a conclusion that qualities and factors related to school climate can affect student engagement and learning.
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From page 99... ...
A relative newcomer to conceptualizations of school climate is the notion of "academic press." In a series of publications, Shouse (1996a, 1996b, 1997) and Phillips (1997)
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From page 100... ...
subsequent study examined in greater detail the elements of a communally organized school, and demonstrated the importance of the school community to the quality of both public schools and Catholic schools. In contrast to much of the earlier literature, it provided quantitative evidence on the effects of school community and has served as the prototype for many of the more recent efforts to demonstrate the importance of school climate for adolescents' school attachment, engagement, and achievement.
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From page 101... ...
104) describes the characteristics of communally organized schools as follows: Rather than formal and affectively neutral relationships, members of communally organized schools share a common mission.
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From page 102... ...
Bryk and Schneider found that in schools with the highest achievement, nearly all teachers reported strong relational trust characterizing their interactions with the principal; three-fourths reported strong relational trust with fellow teachers, and 57 percent reported trusting relationships with parents. In bottom-quartile schools, fewer than half had trusting relationships with the principal, only a third with fellow teachers, and 40 percent reported trusting relationships with parents.
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From page 103... ...
Taken together, the evidence suggests that student engagement and learning are fostered by a school climate characterized by an ethic of caring and supportive relationships; respect, fairness, and trust; and teachers' sense of shared responsibility and efficacy related to student learning. The evidence is clear, however, that a communitarian climate is not sufficient to increase academic engagement and learning.
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From page 104... ...
conclude, "average achievement in low-SES Esocioeconomic status] schools having high levels of both academic press and communality, in fact, rivaled that of schools serving more affluent students; the least academically effective low-SES schools were those that combined strong communality and weak academic press.
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From page 105... ...
Taken together, the evidence suggests that high schools need to convey a clearly articulated and coherent set of values that focus on learning and achievement in the context of close and caring relationships with adults and peers. Policies for "Trouble-Makers" Policies for how to deal with behavior problems have direct implications for the school climate as well as for the trouble-making students' own engagement especially their persistence in school.
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From page 106... ...
"Zero-tolerance" policies and alternative school programs for disruptive students do not address the day-to-day challenges related to discipline that classroom teachers in many urban schools encounter. To a substantial degree, implementing the kind of engaging instruction described in Chapter 3 in a caring, respectful social context should reduce discipline problems.
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From page 107... ...
They are, however, compatible with findings suggesting that students are more engaged in academic tasks when they are in a trusting, caring and respectful social context. SCHOOL ORGANIZATION By organization we mean how teachers and students are sorted and how instruction is delivered.
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From page 108... ...
Variations of these design features are currently being encouraged by the Gates Foundation, and implemented in many small high schools throughout the country.4 Although they are relatively new to the world of secondary education, they show considerable promise of achieving the kind of school climate and learning environments that the evidence suggests should engage students in academic work. Another organizational feature of high schools, tracking, has been studied extensively.
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From page 109... ...
attributed the lower dropout rates and higher average achievement that they found in Catholic schools to less curricular tracking. Similarly, in their study of 4,450 sophomores in 160 public and Catholic high schools from the High School and Beyond data set, Bryk and Thum (1989)
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From page 110... ...
A common strategy to make advanced courses accessible to low-income students and students of color who have in the past been disproportionately placed in remedial or vocational tracks is to give students the choice of taking more advanced courses. Although choice theoretically provides opportunities for all students to be held to high expectations and to be engaged in challenging learning experiences, in reality, students end up being sorted, or they sort themselves along the same class and ethnic lines that applied to more formal tracking structures.
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From page 111... ...
To be effective, such a policy decision would need to be accompanied by concerted efforts to create a social climate that informed and encouraged lowincome students and students of color to participate in a rigorous and challenging curriculum. Special efforts also would have to be made at the classroom level to ensure that all students felt valued, respected, and included.
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From page 112... ...
SCHOOL COMPOSITION Policy decisions at the district level can affect the distribution of students among schools, and the evidence suggests that those policies affect student engagement and learning. Although we know little about the mechanisms involved, correlational evidence suggests that the social composition of students in a school influences student achievement above and beyond the effects of student characteristics at an individual level .
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From page 113... ...
Research has shown that several aspects of student composition are associated with student performance: the average socioeconomic status of the students in the school, their average academic skills, and the schools' racial and ethnic composition. Schools serving relatively more students from high socioeconomic backgrounds and with high academic skills have lower school dropout rates, lower absentee rates (Bryk and Thum, 1989)
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From page 114... ...
In contrast to these studies, which found a linear relationship between school size and achievement, Lee's analyses of the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS 88) showed a curvilinear relationship (Lee, 2001; see also Lee, V
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From page 115... ...
The evidence on greater achievement equity in small schools suggests that school size may be especially important for economically disadvantaged students. Taking a somewhat different approach to examining possible differential effects of school size on students from different economic backgrounds, Howley and Bicke!
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From page 116... ...
Very few studies have documented directly these kinds of possible mediators of the effect of size on student engagement. One exception is a study of Chicago elementary schools, in which students in small schools were more likely to report "academic press" (the feeling that teachers challenged them to reach high levels of academic performance)
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From page 117... ...
The small schools that are least effective are those that are simply small in size, but have developed neither curricula nor assessment systems that demand rigorous engagement and performance by all (Wesley et al., 20001. Some caution in interpreting the research on school size is in order because selection bias most likely contributes to the positive findings discussed.
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From page 118... ...
Promising strategies for promoting caring relationships include decreasing the size of schools and the number of students seen by each teacher and the number of teachers seen by each student, block scheduling' and looping. Research on school organization suggests that tracking undermines engagement for students in the lower tracks, but that merely offering more choices to those students does not eliminate differential course taking.
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From page 119... ...
But the evidence suggests that this is a strategy worth investigating, and studies are underway that will provide useful information on the potential of this school reform strategy.
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