2016 - School Climate and Dropping Out of School in the Era of Accountability

Attribution: Kotok, Stephen, Ikoma, Sakiko, Bodovski, Katerina
University Affiliation: University of Texas, El Paso
Email:
Research Question:
1. To what degree do disciplinary order, disciplinary fairness, academic climate, and school attachment directly and indirectly predict a students’ likelihood to have ever dropped before the end of eleventh grade and at the end of eleventh grade? 2. To what extent does school attachment mediate the relationship between other school characteristics (climate, composition, and structure) and a students’ likelihood to dropout? 3. To what extent are compositional and structural characteristics of schools related to the school climate domains?
Published: Yes
Journal Name or Institutional Affiliation: American Journal of Education
Journal Entry: 122
Year: 2016
Findings:

– Their findings indicate that attending a high school with better disciplinary order and stronger school attachment for the students is associated with a decreased likelihood of dropping out, above and beyond individual characteristics.

-They found that higher school SES translated to better school attachment, disciplinary order, and academic climate. Yet, disciplinary climate was the most positively influenced by school SES, with a one standard deviation (SD) increase in school SES being associated with about half a unit increase in disciplinary climate.

-The percentage of minority students was inversely related to school attachment, controlling for model variables.

-There is an indirect effect of school composition on dropping out. The larger the percentage of minority students the less attached they feel to their school so they are more likely to drop out.

– The researchers found that attending a high school with better school attachment greatly reduced the odds of a student being a dropout.

-Attending a school with more disciplinary order also directly de- creased the likelihood that a student was currently identified as a dropout.

-They also found that both prior math achievement and student SES were again strong predictors of whether a student had ever dropped out.

Scholarship Types: Journal Article Reporting Empirical ResearchKeywords: DisciplineRacial CompositionSchool CharacteristicsSES CompositionRegions: NationalMethodologies: QuantitativeResearch Designs: Secondary Survey DataAnalysis Methods: Hierarchical Linear ModelingStructural equation model Sampling Frame:9th graders
Sampling Types: Random - StratifiedAnalysis Units: SchoolStudentData Types: Quantitative-Longitudinal
Data Description:

– The study uses restricted data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09), a nationally representative survey of high school freshmen conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)

-DV: Currently dropped out and ever dropped out.

–Currently dropped out indicates whether a student was currently dropped out at the end of his or her eleventh-grade year

–Ever dropped out is a binary measure indicating if a student had ever dropped out of high school, with never dropping out serving as the reference.

-They created four climate variables using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

-The academic climate variable was based on Likert-scale survey questions from the students’ teachers. The questions included whether teachers have high standards for student learning, have high standards for teaching, have clear goals for teaching, and have low expectations for some students (reverse coded).

-Disciplinary order was based on the school administrator responses describing the frequency of problems such as student disrespect of teachers, physical conflicts among students, use of drugs at school, the sale of drugs, student bullying, and verbal abuse of teachers.

-Disciplinary fairness was based on students’ perceptions of their teachers as fair and respectful.

-The school-attachment variable was based on student responses to questions about their schools such as whether students could talk to teachers about problems, whether they felt school pride, and how safe they felt at school.

-They included school-level compositional variables measuring percentage of minority (Black and Latino) students, percentage of English language learners, and school SES.

– Demographic in- formation was student race, gender, and family SES.

Theoretical Framework:
Relevance:
Archives: K-12 Integration, Desegregation, and Segregation Abstracts