The Impact of the Community Schools Strategy on Measures of School Culture and Climate

• In Event: The Role of Community Schools' Culture and Climate on Students, Teachers, Families, and Community

Abstract

Purpose and Theoretical Framework
Community school models have been implemented in a variety of settings in the United States and abroad. The New York City Community Schools Initiative (NYC-CS) represents the largest effort to instill a “whole child, whole school” strategy to improve educational opportunities and outcomes for urban youth. The NYC-CS uses a capacity-building approach to support community schools’ positive development along key capacity domains—continuous improvement, coordination, connectedness, and collaboration—that are geared toward improving school culture and climate (Author of Presentation 2, 2017).
Although there is an emerging body of literature on the impact of the community school strategy on student outcomes (Oakes, Maier, & Daniel, 2017), there is limited evidence showing how the program improves aspects of school climate and culture (see Co-Author of Presentation 3, 2019 for a notable exception). Therefore, in this paper we focus on the impact of NYC-CS on a series of measures of school culture and climate that are hypothesized to support student well-being and academic success. Specifically, we assess the impact of the NYC-CS strategy on measures of trust, supportive environment for students, collaborative teachers, and strong family-community ties that are derived from the New York City School Survey and aligned with the City’s Framework for Great Schools (NYCDOE, n.d.).
Methods and Evidence
Since schools’ selection to participate in the NYC-CS was non-random, we rely on quasi-experimental methods to generate plausibly causal estimates of the program’s impact. We begin by measuring how similar treatment and potential comparison schools are to each other on numerous baseline characteristics. Second, we estimate a multi-dimensional Mahalanobis distance measure that captures how similar potential comparison schools are to each treatment school at baseline. Third, we conduct a kernel matching approach whereby we match any non-community school to a community school if it is within a pre-specified distance. Finally, among the non-community schools within this Mahalanobis distance, a school is given more weight if they are closer to the matched community school and/or matched to multiple schools.
Results
Preliminary findings suggest the NYC-CS is having a positive impact on various measures of school climate and culture, particularly students’ sense of connectedness to adults and peers (within the domain of supportive environment), teachers’ sense of collective responsibility (within the domain of collaborative teachers), and opportunities for family engagement (within the domain of strong family-community ties). We intend to conduct further analysis of additional measures of school culture related to perceptions of trust, and we will also assess whether there is any heterogeneous impact as a function of schools’ grade level and size.
Scholarly Significance
These findings suggest that the community schools strategy, as implemented in New York City, is establishing positive and supportive environment for students, families and teachers that will likely have a positive impact on distal outcomes related to students’ academic success. These findings are likely to bolster the emerging body of research around the positive potential of the community schools strategy, particularly given the large scale of NYC-CS as it is currently being implemented.

Author

• William R. Johnston