Examining Student Perspectives on Social Emotional Health and School Safety in Charter and Traditional Public Schools

The social emotional health of school-aged children and school safety have garnered increasing attention in recent years. Due to their expected innovation, charter schools may implement practices and programs that result in greater social emotional health and safety, but researchers are only now beginning to study the proposition.

This report used three years of data from a large, statewide survey of middle and high school students in Colorado to examine whether respondents in charter schools report greater social emotional health than peers in traditional public schools (TPS). The report also analyzed whether charter students perceive their school environments to be safer than their peers in TPS.

Results indicated students in both types of schools generally reported high levels of social emotional health and perceptions of school safety and very similar responses across the panel of questions. Consequently, few of the differences between school types were statistically significant. Such results suggest charter schools may not be implementing relevant practices and policies that differ from TPS, although ceiling effects may also help explain the results.