Why School Culture Matters: 9 Reasons Culture Trumps Strategy

Q: What is the difference between school culture and school climate?

School culture generally refers to the shared beliefs, values, norms, and expectations that influence how a school operates, while school climate refers more to how members of the school community experience the environment at a given time. Gruenert and Whitaker describe culture as a group's personality and climate as its attitude. The concepts overlap, and definitions vary across research frameworks, but climate is generally considered more responsive to short-term changes while culture tends to change more gradually.

Q: Why does school culture matter more than strategy?

In this article's framework, school culture influences whether a strategy is accepted and consistently put into practice. Even a well-supported instructional approach may have limited impact if staff members do not trust leadership or support the change. Culture is not the only factor affecting implementation, however. Training, resources, time, staffing, leadership, organizational conditions, and implementation fidelity can also influence whether a strategy succeeds.

Q: Who is responsible for school culture?

Everyone in a school community can contribute to its culture, although people in leadership positions may have particularly substantial influence. Principals can shape expectations, relationships, priorities, and working conditions, while teachers, other staff, students, families, district policies, and broader organizational conditions also contribute. School culture therefore should not be attributed to a principal or any other single person alone.

Q: How long does it take to change a school's culture?

There is no universal timeline for changing school culture. Gruenert and Whitaker describe culture change in School Culture Rewired as sustained work rather than a quick intervention, and meaningful organizational change may take multiple years. Improvements in school climate can sometimes appear sooner, but a short-term change in attitudes or morale does not necessarily demonstrate that underlying beliefs, norms, and practices have changed.

Q: How do you measure something as vague as culture?

School culture can be examined through multiple sources of evidence rather than a single informal indicator. Observations of staff interactions, participation, collaboration, and communication can provide useful information, but they should not be treated as precise measures on their own. Schools seeking a more systematic assessment can use an established school culture or climate instrument and combine survey results with other evidence, such as interviews, focus groups, observations, and relevant school data.

By Jon Konen, Last Updated: September 4, 2026

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School culture matters because it can strongly influence whether a teaching strategy takes hold. Culture is the shared set of beliefs and norms behind how a school operates, and research associates it with student achievement, teacher retention, and staff morale. A strategy that cuts against the culture tends to struggle, however sound it looks on paper.

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PU #132 - The Top 1% of Highest Performing Schools: Culture in Common

Dr. Bill Daggett has spent years working with high-performing schools across the country. What he described to us was a pattern he kept seeing: the strongest of those schools had a culture you could feel. What he didn't find were schools that spent time only on instructional strategies and had a negative or nonexistent culture. The top 1% of these high-achieving schools had a school culture that was noticeable when you walked in; you knew right away you were in a school with a strong culture based on respectful relationships. If we know this, why don't more schools spend time on developing the culture? I understand it takes a great leader to decide to do this, but it seems so much easier than spending all the time, money, and resources on teaching strategies, technological devices, and instructional philosophies. One easy area to start would be to track what your administrator spends the most time on. Do they spend more time on activities that expand the culture, or are they bogged down in paperwork, mundane tasks, or sitting at their desk all day dealing with behaviors?

PU #133 - How Does the Administrator Treat Staff

Speaking of leaders, do administrators spend time growing their staff, modeling respectful relationships, and expecting that from everyone? I would hope everyone! Unfortunately, No Child Left Behind has left a sour taste in our mouth towards the word "accountability." If accountability is used correctly, administrators can expect employees to treat all stakeholders with respect in order to create trusting relationships. And nothing less! Employees should look first to their administrator for the sense of culture…how does he or she treat the employees? One easy area for a principal to start tracking is the number of contacts with employees per day…not so much the time, but the fact that you are connecting with as many employees as you can in quality conversations. One strategy is the morning walk-through with staff members before school starts. Check on them, ask them how they are doing, and how you can support them. These one-minute conversations lead to something so much bigger…a culture that cares!

PU #134 - How Do Staff Treat Other Staff

Culture can be seen quickly when you watch staff members interacting with each other. Tracking this may sound like a waste of time, but how they treat each other tells you a lot about how they will treat students. Do they constantly complain, argue, or even ignore other employees? I hope not! They should be able to work together comfortably, share a laugh, and know enough about each other to offer support when a colleague needs it. None of that requires anyone to discuss their personal life at work. Again, the administrator needs to model this first, create room for collegial working relationships, create opportunities to share, as well as provide other whole-staff experiences.

PU #135 - How Does the Staff Treat the Community

This may be the most difficult aspect of culture for teachers to ascertain, but it is how the staff connects with the community. How does the staff create a culture that inspires community members to take part? How can you get community and business partnerships into your school? Staff members have to create opportunities for students to get out of the school and into the community. Whether students share their learning or are just on a field trip, we must encourage students to connect with our local community members and businesses. This also works in the opposite direction; we must encourage our community to volunteer, attend, and not just participate, but be engaged in our school. Activities such as volunteers helping prepare before an assembly, a Back to School Night, or even a PTA event help make the workload manageable, but also let us "go bigger" with the events. For example, in our school we have Parent / Teacher Conferences in the fall. That alone can be enough. BUT, we have community partners that come in and help us with a clothing drive, a clothing giveaway, and free daycare for students while parents are in with teachers, run activities for those students, and even provide a snack. In addition, the PTA runs a book fair, and several organizations set up informational booths (Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, etc.). Parent / Teacher Conference night turns into a fall super-event for our learning community. When events such as this get momentum, the community starts talking, and more people want to help and support our schools. We try to find a place for everyone who wants to help.

PU #136 - How Does Staff Treat Families

A strong three-legged stool in education involves the student, the teacher, and the family. A positive culture starts with this foundational belief. Families are the first teacher and most prominent teacher in this three-legged stool analogy. Engaging families, not just asking them to participate, is key. We need to engage with parents and ask them what we can do to support them and their students at home. Also, we need to let parents know how they can support students at school. This two-way communication is imperative; the more support we can get from families, the better positioned we are as teachers. One idea of communication that has changed the family engagement level is the Remind app. Teachers get families signed up, and they can receive information instantaneously on their smartphones. Families seem to read text messages more frequently and better than our school's website, or even other social media. Culture building can begin there!

PU #137 - How Does the Staff Treat Students

In a 10-minute walk-through on any campus, you can see staff members engaged in conversations with students. Are the conversations done in a respectful manner, are kids responding with respect, and does the interaction seem positive? You can give a directive with positive language, a smile on your face, and in a respectful tone. A pet peeve of mine is when a staff member goes negative…they use an alarming tone with students and seem angry. I always ask, do you want the behavior changed? If so, a positive mindset and a respectful tone give you a better chance. Some behavior has causes that need more than a change in tone, and those students need individualized support.

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PU #138 - Relationship Building: Comes Down to Trust

Building trust is thrown around so much in education; I feel like it is never defined with specific examples on how to build it. Trust is the underlying backbone of a positive culture. Do staff members trust that the decisions being made by administration are best for kids? Do parents trust the teachers with the educational decisions based on what's best for their son or daughter? When staff or parents tell you, "I trust that what you are doing is correct for my student," then you know trust is being built. Shared decision-making, continued communication, and follow-through are three keys in building and keeping trusting relationships. One thing you can try is using a school-wide parent survey. Don't be afraid to ask tough questions that get down to any trust issues. Then do something about it!

PU #139 - Make Sure to Have Fun

When culture is the first priority, it can be FUN! Interactions between all stakeholders are filled with joking, laughs, and learning experiences that are actually FUN! Students like coming to school every day.

PU #140 - Positive Learning Environment

Culture starts with a positive learning environment. What does a positive learning environment look like? The eight aspects above give you a pretty good idea on how to build it. When all pistons are firing, your school can transform into a place where everyone wants to be.

Many administrators may not want to hear this, but making culture the first priority should be what we are all working on! The ongoing mantra in our schools should be stated everywhere: "You are part of this culture; make it a place where you want to work and learn!"

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School Culture vs. School Climate

School leaders use these two words as though they mean the same thing, and they don't. Steve Gruenert, who chairs the educational leadership department at Indiana State University, and Todd Whitaker, a professor of educational leadership at the University of Missouri, draw the line this way in School Culture Rewired: culture is the group's personality, and climate is its current mood. Culture is what a school believes. Climate is how those beliefs feel to walk into on a given Tuesday.

The distinction is practical rather than academic. Climate is the more responsive of the two, which is why a good stretch of weeks can lift the mood in a building. Culture sits underneath it and shifts more slowly, because it is built from accumulated habit about how people here treat each other. Their point is that a new initiative can improve the mood for a while and leave the underlying place unchanged. These are conceptual distinctions drawn from their work rather than measured timelines, and how quickly either one moves will vary by school.

Dimension	School culture	School climate
What it is	Shared beliefs, norms, and unwritten rules about how things are done	The collective mood or attitude in the building right now
How fast it moves	Slower moving. Built from accumulated habit over time	More responsive. Shifts with events and leadership
How you read it	Look at what gets rewarded, tolerated, and laughed at	Ask people how they feel about coming to work
What it tells a leader	What the building is likely to resist or absorb	Whether a change effort is landing yet

Gruenert's framing for principals is that climate is the diagnostic and culture is the target. You read the climate to get a sense of the culture, then you work on the culture itself. ASCD's summary of their second edition puts the sequence the same way: shifting a school means addressing both the attitude and the personality behind it. For anyone tracking the nine relationships above, that is the reason the tracking matters. Counting staff contacts or running a trust survey gives you observations about climate, and those observations are suggestive of the culture rather than a measure of it. A school that wants a defensible read should use one of the validated school climate and culture instruments rather than informal counts alone.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between school culture and school climate?

Culture is the set of shared beliefs and norms behind how a school operates. Climate is the mood those beliefs produce day-to-day. Gruenert and Whitaker describe culture as the group's personality and climate as its attitude. Climate tends to shift more readily. Culture is slower to move.

Why does school culture matter more than strategy?

In this article's framework, culture is what determines whether a strategy actually gets used. A school can adopt strong instructional practices and see little change if staff doesn't trust the people asking for the change. Implementation also depends on training, resources, time, staffing, leadership, and how faithfully the practice is carried out, so culture is one factor among several rather than the whole explanation.

Who is responsible for school culture?

Everyone contributes. Administrators have substantial influence, and this article argues the principal sets much of the tone, but culture is also shaped by staff, students, families, district policy, and working conditions. Leadership research treats culture work as a core part of the principalship without making the principal its sole cause.

How long does it take to change a school's culture?

Longer than most improvement plans allow for. Gruenert and Whitaker devote a full chapter of School Culture Rewired to the question and treat it as a sustained, multi-year effort. A short-term lift in climate is often mistaken for cultural change and then reverses.

How do you measure something as vague as culture?

Not precisely, and not with informal counts alone. Staff contacts per day, how staff speak to each other during a walk-through, and whether people volunteer for things they weren't assigned can all tell you something useful, but they don't add up to a measure of culture. A school wanting a defensible read should use a validated school climate or culture instrument, such as the school culture survey Gruenert and Whitaker describe.

Culture shapes implementation - This article's argument is that a strategy works only when the people asked to run it trust the people asking, which puts culture work alongside instructional initiatives rather than after them.
Culture and climate are not the same thing - Gruenert and Whitaker define culture as a school's personality and climate as its mood. Climate is the more responsive of the two, and treating a short-term lift in mood as lasting change is a common error.
Leadership sets much of the tone - In the author's framework, staff take their read on culture from how the administrator treats them. Culture is also shaped by staff, students, families, and district conditions.
Informal signals are a starting point - Staff contacts, walk-through observations, and survey responses are suggestive rather than conclusive. A validated climate or culture instrument gives a defensible read.
Relationships are the organizing idea - Each of the nine dimensions here is a relationship: administrator to staff, staff to staff, staff to community, staff to families, and staff to students.

School culture is an important part of educational leadership practice. If you're weighing a move into school leadership, the sponsored programs on this page include M.Ed. and Ed.S. tracks in educational leadership, several with online coursework built around a full teaching schedule. Administrator credentialing rules differ by state and may involve an approved preparation program, specific degree or coursework requirements, teaching or leadership experience, an internship or fieldwork placement, and state-required assessments, so check what your own state's educator-licensing agency asks for before choosing a program.