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

As a result, we attribute the Comer school children's more negative impressions of school climate, compared to those of the children at the comparison schools, to the following conditions:

(1) The Comer school children tended to echo their more actively involved parents' voiced frustration over the failure of school personnel to get on with the business of education. The political turmoil surrounding the school closings and these parents' strong responses to it served to sensitize the children to the reality that something different was occurring for their parents, and that something was not at all pleasant.

(2) The Comer school children's responses were also influenced by the more activist, child-centered focus demanded of and evidenced by Comer school principals and teachers, many of whom were vocal critics of the school closings.

(3) The parents at the comparison schools, who were not similarly empowered to monitor and study their children's schooling experiences, were less prone to convey distress over the school closings or the state of the schools to their children. Consequently, these children were less likely to discern or to voice significant problems with the schools.

Our data indicate that children at both the Comer and comparison schools were getting other messages as well. For instance, between years one and two, both the African American and Latino children in the sample came to highly endorse those items on the school climate measure confirming the importance of performing well academically and following school rules for appropriate student behavior. The statements offered in these two items are clearly consistent with theoretical goals of the Comer model. This finding suggests that concurrence with these two ideals is a necessary proximal transition to incremental improvements in academic performance.

The racial/ethnic group differences in priority of various dimensions of school climate are also deserving of exploration because children's background may strongly influence what they designate as important to a positive school climate. For example, the emphasis that the African American schoolchildren in our sample placed on the importance of the teacher-student affective bond echoes a persistent theme in research on African American education (e.g., Epps, 1992; Lee & Slaughter-Defoe, 1995). Affective, nurturing teachers are persistently designated as important to the early learning and development of African American children, and frequently African American mothers are identified as the nurturant and teaching role model. Indeed, Comer (1988b) himself has described how his observations of and relationship with his own mother played a crucial role in the development of his model for reforming schools.

By contrast, at least in this study, the Latino children in the sample, the majority of whom were Mexican American, appeared more sensitive to cues in the total school environment, inclusive of peers and the classroom setting, in framing their perspectives on school climate. This possible dependence on social cues was described as early as 1974 by Ramirez and Castaneda, and has recently been discussed and critiqued by several authors who caution against premature stereotyping in this regard (Garcia, 1995; Irvine & York, 1995; Lomawaima, 1995). Therefore, the findings reported here should be viewed as descriptive and suggestive rather than definitive.