Preschool suspensions are made worse by racial disparities [View all]

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Yet another set of appalling statistics. The good news is that it is being discussed and recognized as inappropriate, and some schools systems are making it difficult if not impossible to suspend preschool students.

The department’s new Civil Rights Data Collection for the 2013-2014 school year is a major empirical dive, covering 50 million students in nearly all U.S. public schools and a broad range of information. Here are key points on preschool suspension disparities:

Black preschool children are 3.6 times as likely to receive one or more out-of-school suspensions as white preschool children.
Black children represent 19 percent of preschool enrollment, but 47 percent of preschool children receiving one or more out-of-school suspensions; in comparison, white children represent 41 percent of preschool enrollment, but 28 percent of preschool children receiving one or more out-of-school suspensions.

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Studies demonstrate that this kind of bias treatment feeds an implicitly racist system facing black people all along the preschool-to-prison pipeline. A joint policy document by Education and the Department of Health and Human Services says “young students who are expelled or suspended are as much as 10 times more likely to drop out of high school, experience academic failure and grade retention, hold negative school attitudes, and face incarceration than those who are not.”

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To deal with misbehavior, educators need more constructive methods that are “consistent with the educational mission and purpose of schools” and in some cases mental health tools, said Liz King the director of education policy at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. Suspending preschoolers, she said, means they are “more likely to learn the lesson that the school doesn’t want them there or that they don’t belong, than that their behavior was inappropriate.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/06/13/preschool-suspensions-are-made-worse-by-racial-disparities/?hpid=hp_hp-cards_hp-card-fedgov%3Ahomepage%2Fcard