School Atmosphere Query

Mike Cole (mcole who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Fri, 16 Jul 1999 08:25:22 -0700 (PDT)

Dear Colleagues-
Below is a description of work conducted 20 years ago by
Michael Rutter on how "school atmosophere" ("culture") may have
effects that are discontinuous with those predictable from the
demographics of the surrounding communities. Does anyone know of
comparable work conducted in recent years?
mike
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School Atmosphere
Research demonstrates convincingly that the quality of children's experiences at
school can make a decisive difference in their academic success. Michael Rutter and
his colleagues (1979), for example, carried out a large-scale study of secondary
schools in central London, where housing conditions are poor, unemployment and
crime rates are high, levels of education among adults are low, and handicapping
psychiatric disorders are common. These are just the conditions that one might expect
would lead to poor educational achievement, and in many cases they do. Despite these
unfavorable conditions, some schools were more successful than others in educating
their students.
Rutter and his colleagues discovered that, contrary to expectations, the
successful schools were not more modern, their teachers were not better trained or
better paid, and their students did not have higher IQs or more favorable conditions at
home. The differences were traced to educational conditions within the schools. Four
conditions were found to be most important:

Academic emphasis. Schools that clearly demonstrated an expectation that students
were in school to master academic subjects produced higher levels of achievement.
These expectations were communicated in a variety of ways, such as the assignment of
homework and regular displays of excellent work on classroom bulletin boards. Figure
13.12 shows the relationship between the amount of homework assigned and the
average examination score pupils achieved. (See also Box 13.5.)
Teachers' behaviors. When teachers must stop to discipline individual children,
everyone tends to lose the thread of the lesson. Successful classrooms were those
where teachers could coordinate the entire class at one time; often these teachers
expected their students to work silently, on their own.
Distribution of rewards and punishments. The most successful classrooms were
those where punishment was less frequent than praise.
Student conditions. Schools in which students were free to use the buildings during
breaks and at lunchtime, had access to a telephone, and were expected to keep the
classrooms clean and pleasant produced better student achievement than schools that
were run entirely by adults.

The most intriguing finding was that in the successful schools, each individual
factor seemed to feed the others, creating an overall environment, or "school
atmosphere," conducive to success. This positive school atmosphere cannot be
legislated; it must be created by the staff and the students together. Each successful
school arrived at its own conducive atmosphere in its own way, taking its own distinctive
mix of approaches.