The project "School as the developmental environment and students' coping" originated from the fact that since the 1990s there is the continual dropout from the high school in Estonia, especially among boys, and already at the level of compulsory education. Our initial hypothesis was that the competitive school atmosphere parallel to the harsh economic competition in the society has evoked the youth into a situation where a considerable amount of students feel having lost control over their studies and, as a result, they try to avoid attending the school. The central category of the project is coping, based on the transactional model of coping by Lazarus and Folkman (1984). In 2004 we submitted self-report questionnaires to the 7th, 9th and 12th grade students (N = 3838), their teachers (N = 620), school managers (N = 120) and parents (N = 2048) - altogether from 65 schools. The sample includes ca 10 % of all Estonian schools providing primary and general secondary education and covers proportionally schools with the Estonian, Russian, or Estonian-Russian instructional language. The comparison of the Estonian teachers` and students` coping patterns in the academic domain will be presented in the paper. In the questionnaire we used the coping categories created by E. A. Skinner and J. G. Wellborn (1997) which is based on the motivational perspective, originating from three basic innate psychological needs: relatedness, competence and autonomy. We used the same, minimally modified questionnaire for students as well as for their teachers. The reliability of the questionnaire, indicated by Cronbach-alpha, was highly significant in the case of both groups. The most interesting results were the following. The typical coping strategies of students in case of academic difficulties are often unconstructive or not developed at all, whereas the strategies used by boys are significantly less constructive. The older the students are the more constructive the strategies become, but to a much lower degree from what might be expected (there were statistically significant differences between the 14-years- old and older students). In general, the students` coping strategies are most unconstructive in the area of relatedness and most constructive in the area of competence, while constructiveness of autonomy is between the two mentioned. All differences were statistically significant. The coping strategies of teachers starting from the most constructive to the least constructive were the following: (I) competence, (II) relatedness and (III) autonomy. Again, all the differences were statistically significant. In general and not surprisingly, the coping strategies of teachers' are much more constructive than those of students. These results will be interpreted in the light of other data of the current study and other studies - the basic values of school (the absolute value of the Estonian school across all respondent groups is scholastic performance, while more "soft" values such as good interpersonal relations, caring and joy of school is at the end of the value hierarchy), the willingness of teachers and school managers to get rid of troublesome students (ca 2/3 of teachers and school managers consider it right to form special classes for students with learning or behavioural problems and more than 1/3 agrees that such students should change the school), the distanced relationships and sometimes even hostility between students and teachers, also the position of Estonian teachers in the field of social relations. The pedagogical and educational policy inferences will be discussed. References Lazarus, R. S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. New York: Springer. Skinner, E. A. and Wellborn, J. G. (1997). Children's Coping in the Academic Domain. In S. A. Wolchik and I. N. Sandler (Eds.), Handbook of Children's coping (pp. 387- 422). New York and London: Plenum Press.