When do trends in student behavior demand schoolwide policies and plans? How can we examine the school envi- ronment to see what positive changes we can make to a school's climate or culture? What tools are best suited to assessing how students and teachers view their school's climate or context for learning? This article takes a histori- cal approach to evaluating school cli- mate and offers practical guidance to modern measures of school culture. Systemic School Improvement to Meet Changing Student Needs To meet the needs of increasingly diverse student populations and the challenges of accountability-driven edu- cation systems, many mental health and education professionals have attempted to broaden the scope of their practice to include systemic prevention and inter- vention efforts. Ecological models have been proposed for the provision of edu- cational services that embrace this sys- temic focus (e.g., Sheridan & Gutkin, 2000). Within an ecological framework, students' behavioral difficulties demand an awareness of contextual variables (e.g., learning environment, community resources, and home context), as well as students' intra-individual characteris- tics. In their attempts to remediate and treat students' social-emotional and behavioral difficulties, practitioners are confronted with many extraneous fac- tors that are difficult to address or recti- fy (e.g., families' socioeconomic stand- ing, community safety and crime, and individual students' predisposition to disability and mental illness). School and classroom contexts, however, are factors that educators and communities can enhance or restructure to better meet students' needs (Lehr & Christenson, 2002). Although researchers in school psy- chology and special education have cre- ated measures of classroom environ- ment and interaction, researchers have generally given less attention to meas- ures of school context. This is unfortu- nate because classrooms, nested within schools, have climates that are directly or indirectly influenced by wider school contexts (Anderson, 1982). By under- standing and evaluating characteristics of the larger school context, educators can become aware of the following: • Schoolwide protective or risk factors that may influence intervention out- comes. • Resources within the larger school community to address students' needs. 10 ■ COUNCIL FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN TEACHING Exceptional Children, Vol. 37, No. 1, pp. 10-17. Copyright 2004 CEC. Evaluating School Climate and School Culture Andrew T . Roach • Thomas R. Kratochwill