Understanding the factors that influence student learning outcomes is critically important to school administrators tasked with designing and staffing schools. Considerable research has assessed differences in student achievement by focusing on teacher quality, class size, teacher turnover, and student teacher ratio. While discerning the impact that teachers have on students is of obvious importance, there is also interest in understanding how the built environment influences student achievement. Here, we assess how the environmental characteristics of schools influence student achievement.We use a panel dataset from a suburban Denver school district of approximately 41,000 students to understand how school characteristics impact student achievement. Specifically, we evaluate the relationship between school environmental characteristics and standardized test scores. The school environmental characteristics include thermal comfort, acoustics, visual quality, indoor air quality, and Energy Star rating, which are specific to each of the 54 schools in the district. By observing students that transition between schools as they move from elementary to middle schools and from middle to high schools, we evaluate how the differing school environmental characteristics impacts achievement.When controlling for other school characteristics and student demographics, we find a school’s Energy Star score, acoustics, and indoor air quality have a positive relationship with student test scores, while thermal comfort consistently has a negative relationship with test scores. The positive impact of the Energy Star score is particularly robust to differences in how the achievement model is specified. Given this, we evaluate the specific components of the Energy Star score. Overall, the results highlight the importance of evaluating both the environmental impacts and the impacts on student achievement associated with the construction of energy efficient schools.