Parents' attitudes about their children's schools matter. Their views can shape their children's attitudes about school, affect their levels of family-school engagement, and influence their residential and school enrollment decisions. This paper describes the development of a survey scale to assess parent perceptions of the climate of their child's school. Our comprehensive scale development process incorporated feedback from academics and potential respondents from the outset of the design process to enhance scale quality. We conducted three studies with national samples of parents (n = 385; n = 253; n = 266) to gather evidence of scale score reliability and valid score inferences based on convergent/discriminant validity. Through confirmatory factor analysis we identified a theoretically grounded factor structure that fit the data well.Interestingly, we found no evidence that parental response patterns distinguish between academic and social elements of school climate. Furthermore, we found that parents of younger children, on average, had a more positive perception of the school's climate than parents of older children.We conclude by discussing how researchers and Pre-K -12 schools and districts can use the scale to aid school improvement efforts.

Scholars have proposed that immigrant optimism explains why some immigrant students outperform their United States‐born peers academically. Yet, immigrant optimism has not been directly measured. This study aims to test the immigrant optimism hypothesis by operationalizing it using the Children’s Hope Scale. Using structural equation modeling, the author examined the associations between hope, immigrant generation, citizenship status, and academic outcomes among a sample of 2,369 Latino 14‐ to 17‐year‐old students. Though no difference by immigrant generation was found, undocumented students were more hopeful than their documented peers. This finding suggests that the documentation status has an indirect relative effect on academic outcomes via hope. This article reexamines the immigrant optimism as a resource that could be fostered among Latino youth, regardless of immigrant status.

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This project creates the first educational pipeline for the state of Texas. It incorporates middle school as a key transition point, differentiates between advanced degree achievement among Latinas/os and Chicanas/os, and fashions a secondary pipeline with a narrower age range. Findings indicate that the move from eighth grade to ninth is a critical juncture; that more adult Latinas/os and Chicanas/os lack any academic credentials among all ethnic groups; and that current generations experience similar inequitable achievement rates as older generations.

and graduated high school at rates below the national average (McFarland et al., 2018). Despite these overall trends, immigration scholars have found that immigrant children tend to have fewer health problems, engage in less risky behaviors, and perform better in math and reading standardized tests than subsequent second and third immigrant generations (Hernandez, Denton, Macartney, & Blanchard, 2012). Kao and Tienda (1995) hypothesized that these high-achieving students benefit from "immigrant optimism" where the behavioral characteristics of immigrant parents serve to motivate the student, thereby providing an educational advantage.However, researchers have not operationalized the concept of "immigrant optimism," making it difficult to examine differences among immigration generations or other relevant characteristics, such as documentation status. Prior studies have linked educational outcomes to generational status and attributed those differences to immigrant optimism without measuring optimism itself. I propose that researchers consider a more precise mechanism, such as the function "hope" plays in how students manage academic challenges. This study aims to test the immigrant optimism hypothesis and complement the contributions of previous research. In particular, it uses the Children's Hope Scale to examine the relationships between hope, educational outcomes, immigrant generation, and documentation status.