Chapter 3: The Influence of Academic Press on Students’ Mathematics and Reading Achievement

The high stakes nature of accountability policy has heightened interest in school features that matter to student achievement. Academic press, or the extent to which academic excellence is valued and pursued for all students, is one organizational property that may aid schools in raising student achievement. The purpose of this paper is to determine whether academic press, based on teachers’ perceptions of collective teacher beliefs, is linked to differences among schools in students’ odds of passing state-mandated fourth grade mathematics and reading assessments implemented for accountability purposes.

We utilized a representative sample of elementary schools in Michigan to investigate the relationship between academic press and students’ odds of passing both the state fourth grade mathematics and reading assessments. Because of the multilevel nature of the data and the dichotomous outcomes, we employed hierarchical generalized linear modeling (HGLM) as our primary analytic method.

The level of academic press in schools significantly and positively predicted the odds of students passing both the fourth grade mathematics and reading assessments, even after accounting for the influence of student- and school-level sociodemographic covariates. Specifically, for every standard deviation increase in schools’ academic press, the odds of a student passing the mathematics and reading assessments increased by a factor of 1.20 and 1.17, respectively.