Study: Dilapidated Schools Tied to Low Test Scores

If you're attending a school with peeling paint, water-damaged ceilings, stained carpets, and decrepit flooring — a school in dire need of repairs — you're less likely to have higher grades and score well on tests.

This finding, which is well established in the scholarly literature on school performance, raised a question for researcher Lorraine Maxwell, a professor of human ecology at Cornell University: Why exactly are low-quality facilities associated with poor student outcomes?

In a new paper published this week by the Journal of Environmental Psychology that covered 236 New York City schools across the five boroughs, Maxwell found that school building condition, social climate and student attendance were all highly correlated with student performance and academic achievement.

In short: better school facilities mean better test scores.

Patch reached out to Maxwell, and she made it clear that her paper doesn't quite show that the condition of school buildings directly causes lower grades or poorer academic performance. Rather, it just shows that schools that score poorly on one measure are very likely to not do well on the other.

Do you think the school district should invest more in facility maintenance and upkeep? Let us know in the comments below.

However, there is a plausible story to be told about how these factors could be related. Bad school upkeep contributes to a negative school social climate, because students view the need for repairs as a sign that they are not a priority. When the school's social climate suffers, student's are less likely to attend school — and low attendance, unsurprisingly, can cause bad grades.

In a previous study of middle school students, Maxwell asked a group of children why school buildings might be important, and one responded, "Well, maybe if the school looked better, kids would want to come to school."

That's when she realized how important building quality could be.

"We knew before that school building condition was related to student outcomes, so we kept trying to find out why that is the case," she explained to Patch.

Previous research has found evidence that poor facility upkeep leads to low student attendance.

"I suspected that school building condition might be affecting the way students perceive the social climate, because our physical environment often gives cues to us about the social environment," Maxwell said.

Social climate of the schools was determined by student surveys of their perception of social qualities such as academic expectations, trust, communication and respect. Maxwell also used city data from its Building Condition and Assessment Survey, which ranks the facilities on 23 different quality metrics on a scale of 1 to 5, school attendance data, and student test scores on reading and math assessments for the New York State Report Card.

"New York City collects really good data," she noted. And perhaps more important, the city is exceptionally transparent with its data.

"They put up all this data on their website, parents can look at it. It's pretty amazing," Maxwell said. "Most school districts don't do this."

One of the reasons this kind of research is important is that there are large gaps between achievement of students across racial and socioeconomic lines. Policymakers and educators have long hoped to close this gap.

Some might take a skeptical view of Maxwell's findings and argue that all the variables she measures — school building quality, social climate, attendance and low test scores — also correlate with schools that have a high percentage of minority students and students from poor families. If this were right, it wouldn't be clear that the correlation between poor building condition and low test scores was all that meaningful.

However, when Maxwell controlled for the socio-economic status of a school's students and for the percentage of minority students, she found that the poor school condition was still highly predictive of low student achievement.

In fact, she found that building condition, social climate and attendance combined account for 70 percent of the variation in tests scores in schools across New York City. Attendance alone accounted for 48 percent of the differences.

"In the work that we do, we're happy if [the variables we research] explain 30 percent," she said.

So if improving building condition turns out to indeed be an effective way of improving school social climate and reducing absenteeism, it may be a very effective method of improving education citywide.

Maxwell cautions in the paper that we can't be sure her findings are generalizable to other school districts. She also writes notes that her study did not have detailed information about the family characteristics, aside from information about race and the proportion that were eligible for free or reduced price meals.

The nature of the study, which only looks at a "snapshot" of schools in time and does not analyze changes over the course of years, is inherently limited.

Nevertheless, Maxwell hopes the New York City Department of Education, and perhaps other districts as well, will pay attention to this research.

Patch reached out to the city for a comment on this research, but they did not respond by publication time.

In Maxwell's view, her research, and the work of others that she draws on, provides a strong mandate for investing more in the upkeep of our school's facilities.

Photo credit: Jim Henderson via Wikimedia Commons