Student Background, School Climate, School Disorder, and Student Achievement: An Empirical Study of New York City's Middle Schools

ABSTRACT

This study develops and tests a school disorder and student achievement model based upon the school climate framework. The model was fitted to 212 New York City middle schools using the Structural Equations Modeling Analysis method. The analysis shows that the model fits the data well based upon test statistics and goodness of fit indices. The model accounts for 82% of the variance of student achievement scores on state standardized examinations. The study supports the model hypothesis that poverty and minority status of student population predict school disorder. Lower level of student SES is also associated with lower level of academic achievement directly, and indirectly mediated through school disorder. School disorder affects student academic achievement directly and indirectly mediated by student attendance rate. The effect of school size is in the hypothesized direction, i.e., smaller schools tend to have lower disorder and higher learning. Nevertheless, the effect is small and statistically insignificant, after controlling for student background and school culture variables in the model. The evidence of the study implies that school culture as reflected in school disorder and student attendance hold great potential for improving student learning. The reduction of school size, as currently used by many school districts to improve student learning, may prove to be ineffective if applied alone. In the large context and in the long run, reducing urban poverty will help close the gap between high and low achieving schools.

KEYWORDS:

• Middle school
• student achievement
• school violence
• school safety
• school disorder

The authors would like to thank Deinya Phenix of the Institute for Education and Social Policy of New York University for her invaluable help in providing the data and initial review of the first draft of the paper. The authors also appreciate the participation and support of our graduate assistant, Melissa Popper, for her extensive literature search. The authors are grateful to Professor Judith Kafka and graduate assistant Barbara Beatus for their excellent advice and editing which brought the paper to the present form.