School Climate, Discipline, and Safety: Gauging Educator Attitudes

Teachers and school-based administrators have valuable firsthand experience with school climate, discipline, and safety. To learn more about educators’ views on those topics, the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center conducted an online survey of teachers and school administrators who are registered users of edweek.org, the Education Week website. More than 1,300 respondents completed the survey, which was fielded in September 2012. Those respondents included administrators, teachers, and instructional specialists (such as curriculum coordinators and instructional coaches).

Results based on responses from administrators and public school teachers (including instructional specialists) are presented here. Although the sample for the survey is not statistically representative of the nation’s public school educators, it includes a diverse group of respondents with substantial variation by school poverty level and locale. The results offer important insights into the attitudes and opinions of the educators providing responses to the survey.