Keep Preschoolers in School

Recent Department of Education data have revealed that great racial disparity exists in preschool suspensions, with minority students disproportionately more likely to be suspended than their white peers. The statistics are staggering, and African-American preschool students are the most adversely impacted. While they constitute only 18 percent of the preschool population, they receive 42 percent of all preschool suspensions. We are worried by this trend and by the concept of out-of-school suspensions in general. Further, the reasons behind this discrepancy in suspensions need to be examined.

While we understand that schools have a responsibility to create safe environments and address behavioral problems, a policy of out-of–school suspensions is probably not an effective or appropriate means to that end. Children at three or four years old are too young to be held fully accountable for their own motives and decisions, or to feel responsible for their own education. Additionally, the behavior that prompts such suspensions may be caused by factors outside the students’ control, such as access to violent television shows in the home.  Punishing children for their behavior by removing them from school is unlikely to solve these outside problems.

When behavioral problems do arise, schools should seek more constructive, alternate methods to address the issue. An out-of-school suspension simply sends a students home, which may not always convey a message of disappointment to children: They might even see it as a break. Additionally, if the issue is one that stems from home life, having children spend more time at home will not rectify the situation, but worsen it instead. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, all students have a right to education, and sending them home cuts their time in school, undermining that goal.

We hope that schools eliminate out-of-school suspensions—but in the meantime, it is especially important that those suspensions are not meted out in a racially-biased way. There is already a significant racial achievement gap, and any system that disproportionately denies education to students of a given race needs to be changed. To that end, those schools with particularly significant disparities in their suspension rates should reexamine their methodology and eliminate any prejudicial policies. The government, furthermore, should critically examine those schools that continue to have notable differences in their systems of punishment and response. We firmly resist the notion that behavioral problems at the preschool level can be solved by kicking students out of school. The status quo does just that, and appears to hurt minority students most of all.