Recommended from the field • U.S. Department of Education
The ED School Climate Surveys (EDSCLS)
A free, federally developed suite of surveys for measuring how students, staff, and families experience the climate of a school.
About this listing. The EDSCLS is not an Attendance USA instrument. We feature it because school climate is one of the conditions that gives students a reason to attend, and because it is free, well documented, and widely used. Attendance USA has no role in its development or ownership.
Attendance has two sides: the home conditions that make showing up possible, and the school conditions that make showing up worthwhile. The ED School Climate Surveys (EDSCLS), developed by the National Center for Education Statistics for the U.S. Department of Education, give schools, districts, and states a common way to measure the second side — how engaged, safe, and supported people feel inside a school building — from the perspective of the students, staff, and families who live it every day.
Released in 2016 with a web-based survey platform that education agencies can download and run on their own systems, the EDSCLS lets a school collect climate data locally, keep control of it, and compare its results with national benchmarks published by NCES. Pairing it with the PSSB, which measures each student’s personal bond to school, and the GG-FSI™, which measures family stability at home, gives an attendance team a fuller picture than a count of days missed can.
What it measures
The EDSCLS model organizes school climate into three domains and thirteen topics. Each survey asks respondents how strongly they agree with statements about their school on a four-point scale.
Engagement
- Cultural and linguistic competence
- Relationships
- School participation
Safety
- Emotional safety
- Physical safety
- Bullying and cyberbullying
- Substance abuse
- Emergency readiness and management
Environment
- Physical environment
- Instructional environment
- Physical health
- Mental health
- Discipline
Using it
- RespondentsMiddle and high school students; instructional staff; noninstructional staff and principals; parents and guardians
- TimeAbout 20–30 minutes for the student and staff surveys; 10–15 minutes for the parent/guardian survey
- LanguagesEnglish, with a Spanish version of the student questionnaire
- AdministrationOnline, through the free EDSCLS platform hosted on an agency’s own system; data stay with the school or district
- ScoresScale scores from 100 to 500 for each topic, with national benchmark ranges (least favorable, favorable, most favorable) for comparison
- DeveloperNational Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, in support of the Office of Safe and Healthy Students
Evidence
National benchmarks
NCES fielded the surveys to a nationally representative sample of schools and published a psychometric benchmarking report (Ye & Wang, 2017) that established the scale-score metric and the benchmark ranges schools use to interpret their results.
Independent validation
A 2020 study in AERA Open validated the student survey’s structure in a sample of urban middle and high school students (Ryberg et al., 2020).
Access & further reading
The questionnaires and the survey platform are free. The chapter on the EDSCLS in the open textbook Assessing Wellbeing in Schools is a good starting point; the NCES and Safe and Supportive Learning pages hold the questionnaires, the platform download, and the technical documentation.
To cite the technical report:
- Ryberg, R., et al. (2020). Measuring school climate: Validating the Education Department School Climate Survey in a sample of urban middle and high school students. AERA Open, 6(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/2332858420948024