Charles Tilley

The District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) has prioritized efforts to support students' social and emotional learning (SEL) competencies, such as perseverance and social awareness. To measure students' SEL competencies and the school experiences that promote SEL competencies (school climate), DCPS began administering annual surveys to students, teachers, and parents in 2017/18. DCPS partnered with the Mid-Atlantic Regional Educational Laboratory to study how the district could use these s...

This project expanded on previous work with Maryland on measuring school climate. In this follow-on work, the REL worked with MSDE to build its internal capacity to effectively employ the newly developed measure of school climate and its associated index by analyzing data from the spring 2019 survey. REL staff worked with MSDE staff to build skills to independently validate and revise the survey, develop a school climate index, and develop school-level reports on the student and staff surveys.