Young African American and Latino children in high-poverty urban schools: How they perceive school climate

Journal of Negro Education, The, Winter 1996 by Slaughter-Defoe, Diana T, Carlson, Karen Glinert

For both African American and Latino children at year one and year two, whether teachers notice when effort is expended for school work (item 18) had a consistently high (greater than .50) factor loading. However, high factor loadings were also obtained for three of the four racial/ethnic and year groups regarding children's perceptions of whether or not teachers cared about them (item 22), and whether or not students were comfortable addressing a teacher-posed question about schoolwork (item 20). Further, negative peer relations (items 10 through 12) were not stressed in the first factor by any of the four child populations.

Beyond this, the African American and Latino youngsters appeared to differ in terms of the paths emphasized relative to perceptions of school climate. For example, the African American children in the year one sample emphasized interactive teacher-child relations (items 17-22) as the most important dimension of school climate. Apart from noticing when students put forth their best effort, these students indicated that teachers who cared listened to them, were available to comfort them and help them with school work and with problems. By contrast, Latino children stressed teacher fairness, caring, and praise for effort in year one (items 15, 22, 18), but even in grade three, aspects of the larger school environment (e.g., items 13 and 14) were apparently important to them. For these children, the moral order associated with the school as an institution was of great importance.

An emphasis on the quality of teacher-child relations was of continued importance to the year-two cohort of African American third-graders. However, by contrast, among the smaller numbers of Latino students assessed in the second year, the emphasis on peers and the whole school environment (items 3, 5, and 14) was found to be especially strong. Nonetheless, in year two but not year one of the evaluation, both African American and Latino third-graders stressed the importance of children following school rules and performing well in class (items 2 and 6).

DISCUSSION

These preliminary descriptive data suggest that the 24-item measure used to assess young children's perceptions of climate is reasonably reliable and sensitive to both annual changes in overall school climate and to broad variations in the dimensions of the schooling experience that are especially important for diverse cultural groups. Happily, the Comer and comparison school children were found not to differ in year one; but differences were seen in year two and, surprisingly, those differences favored the students in the comparison group. These results, too, are reliable and valid, and are closely linked to issues of implementation of the Comer process in Chicago.

For example, at the beginning of academic year 1993-94, Chicago's public school children were "locked out" of their schools on three separate occasions due to labor and management disputes between the city's board of education, the Chicago Teachers' Union, and the state legislature. As a result, our community field testers were unable to interview children until about a month after the schools finally opened. By that time, members of the city's educational communities, including its schoolchildren and their parents, were especially aggravated by the school closings. Parents at the more activist schools openly protested this state of affairs, even bringing their children with them to public discussions and protest marches. Many of the parents from the Comer schools were among these protesters, their heightened involvement fueled in part by the SDP's emphasis on stimulating and activating children's caregivers to question some of their most cherished and long-standing beliefs and values about schooling.