Chilean public school administrators are not supporting whole-school approaches to school climate: a multilevel analysis

Although whole-school, multitiered approaches have been recommended as evidence-based practices for managing school violence and school climate, initial evidence in Chile has shown that an individual approach prevails. In this study, we question whether these types of strategies deployed at the school level are related to how school districts manage school climate. Using a representative sample of public municipal schools (n = 194) in all macro zones of Chile and their respective district-level administrators (n = 65), we used a two-level multilevel linear regression to analyze the contribution of school-level and district-level variables on the frequency of schools’ report of deploying multitiered whole-school approaches. Results show that a greater district-level emphasis on school climate, in terms of human resource allocation and strategic planning, was associated with higher individual crisis attention and lower whole-school approaches. These findings suggest that school districts influence schools to manage school violence and school climate through individual student interventions. We discuss the need to overcome both at the district and school level an individual theory of change model, which is short term and shown to be ineffective, and embrace whole-school evidence-based approaches.