The impact of school facilities on student achievement, attendance, behavior, completion rate and teacher turnover rate in selected Texas high schools

The purpose of this study was to explore the possible relationship between school facility conditions and school outcomes such as student academic achievement, attendance, discipline, completion rate and teacher turnover rate. School facility condition for the participating schools was determined by the Total Learning Environment Assessment (TLEA) as completed by the principal or principal’s designee on high school campuses in Texas with enrollments between 1,000 and 2000 and economically disadvantaged enrollments less than 40%. Each school in the study population was organized by grades nine through twelve. Data for achievement, attendance, discipline, completion rate and teacher turnover rate were collected through the Public Education Information Management System (PEIMS) managed by the Texas Education Agency. Student achievement, attendance, discipline, completion rate and teacher turnover rate and their relation to school facilities were investigated using multiple regression models to compare sections and subsections of the TLEA with each of the five dependent variables. Major research findings of this study included the following: first, student achievement, attendance and completion rate measures were not found to be statistically significant in relation to school facility conditions as measured by the TLEA at the 0.05 level; second, discipline, or behavior, was found to be significantly related to the TLEA. This indicates that the subsections of the TLEA could be used to predict discipline factors for schools in the study population; third, teacher turnover rate was found to be related to the TLEA subsections of Specialized Learning Space and Support Space, with the correlation to Support Space being indirect. Literature from prior studies infers that relationships do exist between all five of the study’s dependent variables. However, this study only yielded significant findings in the areas of student discipline and teacher turnover. The researchers recommendations based upon this study include the following: administrators and designers should take into account factors such as interior environment and academic learning space when planning schools to positively impact student discipline; school design and construction should focus on specialized learning spaces and other academic areas more than administrative support spaces when striving to increase teacher satisfaction with physical working conditions