Family-faculty trust as measured with the Elementary School Success Profile

The degree to which parents and teachers perceive they are working together in the best educational interests of children is a critical aspect of school culture. In previous work by Hoy, Tarter, and Woolfolk Hoy, the phenomenon was named "faculty trust" and was measured with data from teachers. The current study builds on Hoy et al.'s work by recommending that measures of faculty trust capture the important reciprocal nature of trust and cooperation between schools and families that is, theoretically, part of the original construct. Data collected from parents and teachers with the Elementary School Success Profile (ESSP) were used to test a broadened construct called family-faculty trust. Confirmatory factor analyses with Mplus indicated that items and composites on the ESSP could be used to measure a multidimensional family-faculty trust construct. Implications for how school social workers can improve this aspect of school culture when total or subscale scores are found to be low are discussed.