Electronic Theses and Dissertations

AN ANALYSIS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TEACHERS PERCEPTIONS OF SCHOOL DISCIPLINARY CLIMATE AND FIVE ORGANIZATIONAL PRODUCTIVITY MEASURES

Jason Bolden

Data is provided by the student.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate relationships between five school productivity measures at 248 Tennessee high schools and educators perceptions of these institutions climate for student discipline. Grounded in archived accountability information stored on the Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) website, these five productivity measures were the student attendance, graduation, suspension, event dropout, and cohort dropout rates computed for the 2012-2013 academic year. For these same institutions, the perceived disciplinary climate was calculated from responses to a seven-item section on managing student conduct appearing on the 2013 state-wide administration of the Teaching, Empowering, Leading, and Learning survey in Tennessee (TELL Tennessee). After controlling for both student and faculty demographic characteristics, perceptions of the schools disciplinary climate proved to be coextensive with three of the five measures of school productivity employed in this study. In a multiple regression context, positive associations were uncovered between a mean score on the seven policies and practices that address student conduct issues and ensure a safe school environment and the schools concurrent attendance rate and its concurrent graduation rate. Negatively linked, on the other hand, was a score on schools disciplinary climate and the schools concurrent event dropout rate. Zero-order correlations between perceptions of the schools disciplinary climate and the schools concurrent suspension rate and its concurrent cohort dropout were also revealed, but these relationships did not remain statistically significant when covariates pertinent to students and faculty were taken into account.