From preschool to prison?
Disproportionate discipline begins for black children soon after potty training
WASHINGTON— Until she attended a 5-year-old’s birthday party, Tunette Powell was not inclined to blame her problems on the colour of her skin.
Her 4-year-old son JJ had been suspended three times from his Nebraska preschool, twice for throwing chairs and once for spitting. She didn’t think it was a good idea to suspend tiny kids, but she thought it was normal.
Then, sitting in a living room last March as JJ played with his pals, she got to talking with a group of white moms.
“They were shocked that my kid was being suspended. Even with the reasons,” said Powell, 29. “They said, ‘Well, my kid hit someone in the face and that kid had to go to the hospital, and all I got was a phone call.’ And at some point it was like, ‘What else could there be?’ ”
The month of the birthday party, the U.S. Department of Education released a set of figures that confirmed Powell’s suspicions. Black children made up 18 per cent of the country’s public preschool students but 42 per cent of the students suspended, 48 per cent of the students suspended more than once.
This week’s viral video of a South Carolina police officer violently throwing a black high school student to the ground has reignited the U.S. discussion of the “school-to-prison pipeline”: the zero-tolerance policies, discretionary “defiance” suspensions and cops-in-schools programs and that push kids, especially black kids, into the criminal justice system.
Last year’s government report led some advocates to start using an amended phrase: “preschool-to-prison pipeline.” The harsh discipline — and the disproportionate discipline — starts not long after kids are done potty training.
Powell’s other son, Joah, was suspended seven times at age 3. Or maybe a couple more. She lost count.
“We have to get to a place where we’re not telling these people at these young ages that they’re not important, that they don’t matter,” says Powell, a speaker, author and leadership trainer. Students who are suspended or expelled as young children are far more likely to face these same punishments as older children. And students suspended or expelled in elementary and high school are far more likely to eventually be incarcerated.
Steve Zwolak, executive director of University City Children’s Center near St. Louis, described suspension and expulsion as “capital punishment for preschoolers.”
“When they’re suspended or expelled, it validates the myth that they’re not OK and that they are bad, and then they raise the stakes of the mischief, and the behaviour exacer- bates itself as time goes on, and it becomes a spiral down literally for the rest of their life,” Zwolak said.
Compared to discipline fiascos in elementary and high schools, the preschool problem is not huge: 8,000 children were suspended in 2011-12 out of a million children enrolled in the U.S.
But the numbers were troubling enough that governments and school boards have scrambled to ban or sharply limit suspensions and expulsions for children in Grade 2 and below. Early-childhood educators say there are few circumstances in which a 3-year-old or 4-year-old should be banished rather than corrected and guided. Research suggests that suspensions and expulsions have more to do with teachers’ stress levels than the kids themselves: many of them are overworked and underpaid, and Zwolak said some just don’t know how to deal with the difficult behaviour of kids from troubled homes.
He added: “I think teachers are often scared of African-American boys.”