New U.S. Department of Education Report Just Released: New Office for Civil Rights Report Reveals that African American and Male Preschool Students are Disproportionately Suspended from Preschool
Dear Colleagues,
Late last
month (March 21, 2014), the
U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights released its first
comprehensive look at civil rights data from every public school in the country
in nearly 15 years. Called The Civil Rights Data Collection
(CRDC), data from the 2011-2012 school year were reported, and the most
newsworthy information showed that:
More than
8,000 public preschoolers were suspended at least once, with black children
and boys receiving a disproportionate number of these suspensions. Indeed,
while Black youngsters made up about 20% of all preschool pupils, close to 50%
of these children were (disproportionately) suspended more than once. While
boys of all races represented 54% of the preschoolers included in the report,
more than 80% of them were (disproportionately) suspended more than once.
CLICK HERE FOR THE REPORT
In a
press conference announcing the Report, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
called the data "mind-boggling." And, indeed, the data are
mind-boggling. . . but nothing new.
In fact,
we have known for at least a decade-for example, through the Harvard Civil
Rights Project and researchers like Walter S. Gilliam at Yale University-that
preschool students are the most suspended age group of students in
public education.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
The real
questions are, "Why is it happening?" and "What do we do about
it?"
Relative
to the first question, there are many possible contributing factors.
Poverty, potential teacher bias, high student-teacher classroom ratios at the
preschool level, dysfunctional families and poor parental supervision, preschool
students being raised by the TV and impacted by media violence were cited in an
Education Week article about this Report.
And while
we need to be sensitive to these issues, we need to understand that these
reasons are correlational or contributory factors and rarely causal
in nature.
Critically, the primary causal reason for preschool "discipline"
problems is that the many preschool students have not learned and mastered the
developmentally-appropriate social, emotional, and behavioral (both individual
and interpersonal) skills that they need to be successful.
Indeed,
preschoolers often imitate the behaviors that they have observed, or randomly
try out different behaviors-sometimes not knowing if they are "good
choices" or "bad choices." Sometimes, preschoolers use the
same behaviors at school that help them to "survive" at home. And
sometimes, the behaviors that are inappropriate at school have been supported,
reinforced, or not corrected at home.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
All of
this leads to the following important points or recommendations:
**
Preschools need to have a formal, developmentally-appropriate social skills
training program that is taught by teachers who are both qualified and
trained to teach these programs.
**
Preschool staff need to understand that preschoolers need clear and
explicitly-stated expectations, constant verbal guidance and feedback,
behavioral prompts to organize their awareness and thinking, and adult
supervision and presence. Preschoolers, cognitively and developmentally, do not
have the ability to anticipate or predict events (unless they have learned them
from previous experiences), nor can they "walk in another student's
shoes"-understanding "how another child feels." Remember,
according to Piaget, preschoolers are pretty egocentric at this age level.
**
Preschools need to have a written behavioral standards and accountability
document that differentiates behaviors that are "Annoying" versus
"Disruptive" versus "Antisocial/Major Disruption" versus
"Dangerous/Extreme." If teachers consistently use these standards to
categorize and respond to different intensity levels of students' inappropriate
behavior, this should largely resolve the "teacher bias" issue.
** When
preschoolers make "bad choices," the critical behavioral principals
are:
"If you consequate, you must educate" and
"Consequences do not change behavior, they only
motivate students to want to change behavior."
That is,
after a consequence is over, students must be taught and practice (ideally,
with the same adults and in the same setting where the original
"offense" occurred) the appropriate, replacement behaviors as
part of a "teachable moment." This is what holds students
accountable (to appropriate behaviors), and increases the probability that
these behaviors will occur the next time.
** A
school suspension is not a consequence. . . it is an administrative
response or decision prompted by a student's inappropriate behavior. For
preschoolers, suspension rarely acts as a consequence that motivates them to
"want to do better the next time."
** If a
student continues to demonstrate inappropriate behavior-despite a well-taught
social skills program and a consistently-implemented accountability system, a
data-based problem solving process (largely led by preschool behavioral experts
like school psychologists, behavioral consultants, speech pathologists, etc.)
needs to proceed (with parent permission) to determine why the
behavioral pattern persists. This assessment may/should be completed as
part of the local public school district's Child Find Process.
*
Finally, if a student needs to be expelled or "released" from a
preschool, the preschool should file an immediate Child Find petition with the
local public school district.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
We have
known for years that students from poverty often come into preschool and
kindergarten with approximately 20,000 expressive or receptive vocabulary words
less than students coming from middle class or above homes. Clearly, the needed
intervention here is to intensively work with and teach these students the
vocabulary that will close this gap.
Similarly, when preschoolers come to school exhibiting "behavioral
gaps" that result in behavior or "discipline" problems, we need
to focus on the strongest high-hit intervention: teach the expected
behaviors.
While, in
the long term, it is important to also reach out to prevent these skill deficits
from occurring, the Civil Rights Data Collection report demonstrates that suspension is
not the answer. If suspension were the answer, every suspended student
would return from a suspension demonstrating consistently appropriate behavior
and decreased (or absent) levels of the original inappropriate behavior.
Clearly, that is not happening (look at the
"twice-suspended data in the Report). And so, we need more common
sense, research-based approaches to address this issue.
Hopefully, some of the ideas and points in
the discussion above will help all of us on our way.
Howie
