The U.S. Department of Education’s School Climate Survey (EDSCLS) is a free, open-source school climate survey available for any local or state education agency to use to measure three domains of school climate: engagement, safety, and environment. The present study leverages EDSCLS data from 3,416 students from 26 middle and high schools in Washington, DC to confirm the factor structure of the survey using both single-level and multilevel confirmatory factor analyses. At the individual level, our findings paralleled those from the original validation study conducted by the U.S. Department of Education. At the school level, our findings suggested a simpler factor structure for the engagement and environment domains, and could not identify a reasonable well-fitting model for the safety domain. Particularly, as more states are considering school climate measurement for accountability systems, these findings suggest that simply using the individual-level structure may not yield valid measurement.

中文翻译：

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衡量学校气候：通过对城市中高中学生的抽样调查对教育部门的学校气候调查进行验证

美国教育部的学校气候调查（EDSCLS）是一项免费的开放源代码的学校气候调查，任何地方或州教育机构都可以使用它来测量学校气候的三个方面：参与度，安全性和环境。本研究利用来自华盛顿特区26所中学和中学的3,416名学生的EDSCLS数据，使用单级和多级确认因素分析来确定调查的因素结构。在个人层面上，我们的发现与美国教育部进行的原始验证研究相类似。在学校一级，我们的研究结果表明，参与和环境领域的因素结构较为简单，并且无法确定安全领域的合理拟合模型。尤其，