TEACHER RETENTION AS A PREDICTOR OF STUDENT PERCEPTIONS OF SCHOOL CLIMATE

Abstract

This dissertation examines the relationship between teacher retention and student perceptions of school climate in an urban school district, both in individual school years and across multiple school years. This secondary analysis uses a school-level measure of teacher retention from New York City (NYC) public schools and measures of school climate constructed from the student version of the NYC School Surveys for 2014-2015 through 2018-2019. Specifically, I constructed an overall measure of school climate that was a school-level, unweighted mean and I used exploratory factor analysis which resulted in three factors (Teacher Support, Classroom Behavior, and School Safety). Using linear regression for individual school years, I found teacher retention rates collected in the fall were a significant, positive predictor of school-wide averages of student school climate survey scores collected in the spring. Using a fixed effects regression model of repeated measures I also found a significant, positive relationship between teacher retention and student perceptions of school climate over the five-year period. Teacher retention was a significant positive predictor of the Teacher Support factor in the fixed effects regression of repeated measures for 2015-2016 through 2018-2019 and also in three of the five individual school years. Teacher retention had a significant, positive relationship with the Classroom Behavior factor in each individual school year but was not significantly related in the multi-year model. Teacher retention was not significantly related to the School Safety factor in any individual school year nor in the multi-year model.