School Climate, Parent Involvement, and Exclusionary Discipline: A Cross-Lagged Panel Study of Kentucky Schools
Using a four-wave panel of Kentucky schools, this study found that while improvements in school climate predict subsequent reductions in out-of-school suspensions, parent involvement in site-based governance shows no significant within-school relationship with either climate or disciplinary outcomes, highlighting the importance of distinguishing between-school stability from within-school dynamics in educational research.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
Every year, hundreds of thousands of students in the United States are sent home from school as punishment, missing out on instruction and often falling further behind. This practice, known as exclusionary discipline, is not distributed equally; it falls much more heavily on Black students and those with disabilities. Because removing a child from the classroom is linked to lower grades, higher dropout rates, and even future trouble with the law, educators and policymakers are desperate to find ways to stop it. Two ideas are frequently proposed as solutions: improving the overall feeling of a school, often called school climate, and getting parents more involved in school life. The logic is simple: if a school feels safer and more welcoming, students will behave better, and if parents are engaged, they will help keep their children on track. But while these ideas sound good in theory, it has been difficult to prove that changing one actually causes the other to change over time, or whether schools that are just naturally better at everything simply happen to have good climates, involved parents, and fewer suspensions all at once.
A team of researchers set out to untangle these relationships by looking at schools in Kentucky over four consecutive years, from 2021 to 2025. They gathered data from 719 schools, tracking three things: how positive the school environment felt, how many parents voted in local school governance elections, and how many students were suspended. To make sense of the data, they used a statistical approach that acts like a filter. Imagine trying to hear a single conversation in a noisy room; this method separates the steady, unchanging background noise of a school—its permanent character and community—from the actual changes happening inside it from year to year. This allowed the researchers to ask a very specific question: when a specific school improves its climate or sees more parents show up to vote, does that specific change lead to fewer suspensions later on?
The results offered a clear, if modest, answer for school climate. The study found that when a school's environment became more positive relative to its own usual standard, it was followed by a small but real drop in out-of-school suspensions. This suggests that improving the daily atmosphere of a school can indeed help reduce the need to send students home. The researchers also looked at the reverse: did a drop in suspensions lead to a better climate? The data did not support this; the flow of influence seemed to go one way, from a better environment to better behavior, rather than the other way around.
However, the story was different when it came to parents. The researchers focused on a specific type of involvement: parents voting in elections for school-based decision-making councils. They found that when a school saw an increase in parent voting, it did not lead to a better climate or fewer suspensions in the following years. In fact, there was no detectable link between these governance votes and the behavioral environment of the school over time. The study did find that schools with higher rates of parent voting tended to have better climates and fewer suspensions overall, but this was a stable difference between schools, not a result of change within them. It appears that schools where parents are more active in governance are simply different places to begin with, rather than places that improve because parents start voting more.
The researchers also tried to see if these patterns held true for specific groups of students, particularly Black students, who are suspended at much higher rates than their White peers. Unfortunately, the data available for these specific groups was too small and often hidden to protect student privacy to draw a reliable conclusion. While the overall trend of a better climate leading to fewer suspensions held up for the whole school, the researchers could not confirm if this benefit worked the same way for every single group. The study concludes that while improving a school's climate is a promising path toward reducing suspensions, simply increasing the number of parents voting in school elections is not a lever that will move the needle on student behavior or school safety. The disciplinary environment of a school appears to respond to the quality of its daily life, but not to the narrow, administrative forms of parent participation often tracked in official records.
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