The impact of school climate in social-normative expectations in low and high SES schools.

This study examined the associations among race/ethnicity, school climate, and social-normative expectations (expectations about peers' future achievement) in high and low socioeconomic status (SES) schools, with a particular focus on school climate as a process that might influence social-normative expectations. Results showed that more positive perceptions of school climate were significantly associated with higher levels of social-normative expectations in both low and high SES settings. Additionally, identifying as Black was negatively associated with social-normative expectations in both high and low SES schools. School climate significantly moderated the negative relationship between race and social-normative expectations in high SES schools; however, there was no moderation in low SES schools. In both high and low SES schools, school climate was a robust predictor of social-normative expectations, highlighting the importance of social-normative expectations as a metric of school climate improvement in both high and low SES schools. In conclusion, policies related to school culture and climate, school improvement, and turnaround should explicitly focus on the connection of racial and ethnic equity, specifically for Black and Latinx students, to reflect the range and reality of students' social-normative expectations.

The increasing impact of socioeconomics and race on standardized academic test scores across elementary, middle, and high school.

For students and schools, the current policy is to measure success via standardized testing. Yet the immutable factors of socioeconomic status (SES) and race have, consistently, been implicated in fostering an achievement gap. The current study explores, at the school-level, the impact of these factors on test scores. Percentage of students proficient for Language and Math was analyzed from 452 schools across the state of New Jersey. By high school, 52% of the variance in Language and 59% in Math test scores can be accounted for by SES and racial factors. At this level, a 1% increase in school minority population corresponds to a 0.19 decrease in percent Language proficient and 0.33 decrease for Math. These results have significant implications as they suggest that school-level interventions to improve academic achievement scores will be stymied by socioeconomic and racial factors and efforts to improve the achievement gap via testing have largely measured it.