Dr. Shanette Porter
Director of Research and Senior Fellow
Mindset Scholars Network

"Can We Identify Effective Schools? The Role of School Climate"
Recent research suggests that high schools and educators effect long-run educational attainment by fostering both socioemotional development and achievement on standardized test scores. Motivated by the prior research, this work classifies Chicago high schools’ effectiveness based on their value added to an index of 9th graders’ socioemotional development and standardized test scores and examines whether organizational features predict the effectiveness index. We show that teacher and student survey reports of the five aspects of school climate in the 5Essentials framework – leadership quality, teacher collaboration, family involvement, supportiveness, and instructional rigor – collectively explain over 40 percent of the variation in the summary index of school effectiveness. School climate factors remain significantly associated with school effectiveness conditional on school demographics, characteristics, and type. Consistent with prior research, we find evidence that supportiveness, teacher collaboration, and instructional rigor may play particularly important roles in shaping adolescents’ outcomes. This is the first research to document that school climate is a strong predictor of schools’ causal effects on students’ long-run outcomes, which has important implications given recent policy on school climate (e.g., ESSA).