Climate Surveys Are a Crucial Data Source

Climate surveys are the secret data source that can help a lot of schools out of the trouble they've gotten themselves in with behavior and approaches to discipline reform.

So what is a climate survey?

In a lot of districts, staff and students are regularly given a survey asking them questions about what it's like to be in that school.

How are these things handled?

Do you experience this?

Do you feel this way?

There are lots of questions we can ask about the student and staff experience that give us a different type of firsthand evidence than we get from things like suspension statistics.

And often that's all that's available to researchers is those statistics about, you know, how many students were suspended out of school, how many students got in-school suspension.

You know, there's mandatory data collection and reporting on certain consequences.

But as I've said in other videos, there's not data on behavior.

There's not data on staff or student perceptions on any kind of national scale.

So it's up to each individual school and each individual district to determine whether to give any kind of climate survey to staff or students.

But I think that is an absolutely essential data source because what it can tell us is both What's happening in this school that might not be showing up in official statistics?

And how is it being handled?

And how it's handled really, I think, is the crucial question because we're always going to have differences in how many fights occur in a given school.

If the school's in a different neighborhood, it's going to have a different rate of any kind of behavior issue.

And it's never really been a huge safety problem for staff and a lot of, you know, that variation, you know, we can handle it.

But if we don't handle behavior problems effectively, right, like if there's a fight and nothing is done, well, that starts to create a major safety issue for staff and other students.

And that's precisely the kind of thing that will show up in a staff survey.

And I'm concerned that largely what we're eliminating in our profession is that procedural safety, that when something happens, we respond to it effectively.

We can't prevent everything from happening.

We can't change the fact that just things are going to occur, kids are going to make bad decisions, but we can choose to respond effectively and surveys, are a really crucial way that we can get a sense of whether a particular school is handling things effectively when they do come up.

And I have to give a ton of credit to my school administrators.

When I was a middle school teacher, we were probably the toughest school in the district, middle school wise, and our administrators were just very, very on top of responding to things.

And I always felt safe.

I always felt like things were going to be handled, steps were going to be taken to keep everyone safe.

But I get the sense in so many schools today that that's not the case, that we feel guilty about following through with consequences, that we even have laws against following through with consequences.

And as a result, more and more schools and more and more teachers and students are reporting just unsafe environments.

So let me know what the reality is around climate surveys.

Do you take them?

Do you make the data public?

Do you have access to the data?

Let me know.