The effects of school climate on school disorder

Explanations of school disorder have suffered from at least two deficits: ( 1) institutional explanations of disorder (that is, school climate) have be en largely ignored, and (2) insufficient attention to appropriate measures of disorder has guided research and policy. Like people, schools have their own characteristic personalities, or climates. Using survey responses from students in middle schools in Philadelphia, the author discusses the effec ts of school climate (such as clarity and fairness of rules) and individual student characteristics (such as age, sex, race, and dimensions of bonding ) on different measures of school disorder, including victimization, avoida nce, perceptions of safety, misconduct, and offending. The schools varied s ignificantly on all measures of disorder, and school climate provided signi ficant explanatory power for each. Results varied for different measures, t hough. For example, school climate predicted less serious misconduct more s trongly than it predicted serious offending. School climate offers signific ant potential for enhancing both the understanding and the prevention of sc hool violence.