Understanding School Discipline Climate: A Multilevel Latent Class Analysis Approach

School discipline reform has gained considerable attention at the local, state and national levels in recent years, and in 2011 the U.S. Department of Education and Justice called for a focus on rigorous research that can guide school discipline policy decisions. School discipline climate, or the degree to which schools demonstrate student support and disciplinary structure, has been found to predict several outcomes associated with school discipline, including the racial suspension gap, student disengagement, and school safety. Based in authoritative parenting theory, researchers have theorized that entire schools can be characterized as having a school discipline climate typology, which reflect authoritative (high support, high structure), authoritarian (low support, high structure), permissive (high support, low structure), and uninvolved (low support, low structure) styles, and that these school discipline climate typologies are strongly related to the socialization of students to school norms and their success in school. In an effort to better understand this construct at the student and school-levels, the current study used multilevel latent class analysis (MLCA) to identify latent classes of student perceptions of school discipline climate, model school-level variation in these student experiences, and examine the relation between school discipline climate and important student and school demographic characteristics. Using a nationally representative sample of approximately 12,610 students nested within 580 public high schools in the U.S. from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002, results show that student perceptions of school discipline climate fall into four classes: authoritative, permissive, authoritarian, and uninvolved, which are consistent with authoritative parenting theory and the school discipline climate literature. In addition, schools tend to have one school discipline climate type that is experienced by more students than the others (a predominant school discipline experience), although considerable variability in individual student experiences exists. Student gender, ethnicity/race, and SES all impact a student’s likelihood of membership in these classes. Current findings address gaps in the previous literature on school discipline climate and have important implications for future research and school policy decisions