Mitigating the effect of family poverty on academic and behavioral outcomes: The role of school climate in middle and high school

a r t i c l e i n f o The persistent achievement gap between students from poor families and their peers calls for research that examines risk factors associated with poverty and strategies for promoting resilience. Research demonstrates the impact of school climate on behavior and academic achievement, especially in high-poverty schools. The present study examines associations between family poverty, social supports, students' perceptions of school climate, behavior, and grades. Poverty is associated with poor grades and behavior, while positive perceptions of school climate are associated with positive grades and behavior. Perceptions of school climate moderate the association between poverty and behavior, such that students from poor families who perceive a positive school climate exhibit similar behaviors to their peers from higher income families. Implications for practice, policy, and research are discussed. A persistent achievement gap continues to place students from poor families at disproportionately high risk for dropout. The dropout rate among these students is ten times the rate among students from Specifically, students who participate in the free and reduced price lunch program are likely to perform poorly in reading and math The proposed explanations for this disparity include stressors that students experience in their homes, schools, and communities that result from a lack of resources The research literature provides evidence that social supports for students can moderate the impact of poverty and its associated stressors. Increasingly, research points to characteristics of the school environment as critical for learning and healthy development. School climates characterized by supportive relationships, emotional and physical safety, and shared goals for learning are associated with school connectedness and academic success (Cohen & Geier, 2010). A positive school climate may be especially important for students living in poverty (Eccles et al., 1993). The focus of this paper is to examine whether perceptions of school climate moderate the effects of family poverty on grades and behavior. 1.1. Risk and resilience from an ecological perspective Theoretical models of risk and resilience provide a useful framework for understanding why school climate may have a disproportionately strong effect on students from poor families. According to these models, youth outcomes are influenced by the accumulation of risk and protective factors. Protective factors may operate as compensatory factors or moderators of risk factors in predicting outcomes. Compensatory models of risk and resilience propose that protective factors increase the likelihood of positive outcomes independently and compensate for the effect …