School climate is a broad term encompassing how students, teachers, and parents feel about a school’s culture and character. A new study by Jerome Graham and Aanchal Gidra of Michigan State University finds that Black students report worse perceptions of school climate than their peers—and that these gaps have widened over time.
Using seven years of data from the Georgia Elementary School Climate Survey (GESCS), the authors analyzed approximately 1.7 million responses from 3rd through 5th grade students across the 2016-17 to 2023-24 school years. The 11-question GESCS included statements such as “I feel safe at school” and “Teachers treat me with respect,” which students answered using a 4-point scale ranging from “always” to “never.” With higher numerical responses indicating better school climate, the authors averaged students’ responses into an index and compared trends across student subgroups and years, both within and between schools.
Compared to their white peers, Black students consistently reported less favorable perceptions of their school climate—a gap that more than doubled between 2017 and 2023. These gaps persist even after controlling for school characteristics such as student-teacher ratios, average teacher experience, student demographics, urbanity, and rates of bullying or disciplinary incidents. Hispanic students, whose responses were similar to those of white students earlier in the period, reported modestly lower school climate perceptions in later years. In contrast, Asian students reported perceptions that were similar or slightly more positive than their white peers’.
Graham and Gidra argue that these findings reflect entrenched racial inequalities that diminish Black students’ feelings of safety and belonging since the results persist across districts, schools, and grade levels.
While cautioning that school climate in the study is based on student-reported perception, not objective measures, the authors emphasize the importance of addressing persistent differences in perceptions of climate among racial groups, particularly in elementary schools where they may be overlooked. They also propose three ways to improve school climate: invest in teacher retention to establish longer-standing, and hence closer, relationships between students and teachers; reduce exclusionary discipline practices such as suspension and expulsion that are disproportionately used to punish students of color; and implement targeted anti-bullying initiatives.