Even Black Preschool Teachers Are Biased

The trend is a familiar one, documented across grade levels: Black students are disciplined more harshly than their white classmates. They’re about four times as likely to be suspended and almost twice as likely to be expelled. The pattern also extends to the youngest black learners. Federal education data released in June revealed black preschoolers were 3.6 times more likely to receive one or more out-of-school suspensions. Yet even with this recurring outcome, one aspect remained largely unknown: What was the major contributing factor in the highly disproportionate suspension and expulsion rates for black pre-k children? A new study from the Yale Child Study Center, a leader in early-childhood research, set out to address this perennial question and answer why black children make up an overwhelming share of the youngsters pushed out of preschool. Multiple studies show that implicit bias—harboring unconscious stereotypes that shape educators’ behaviors and decisions—influences teacher expectations and gifted-and-talented placements for older schoolchildren. The link was missing, however, in early-childhood settings.