Kicked Out Across the Pond

Looks like American preschoolers aren’t the only ones getting expelled from school at alarmingly high rates. In 2005, researchers at Yale found that American preschoolers were getting expelled from school at a rate three times higher than their peers in K-12. Recent data from the British parliament shows that more than 4,000 “under fives” were suspended from British preschool classes in the past year.

Earlier this month, the British shadow Education Secretary who requested the data, Michael Gove (pictured at right) of the Conservative party, said that British teachers need greater authority to physically restrain unruly students before they cause greater disruption or harm others. (Lately, British educators seem particularly touchy about physical contact with students; last week the British music educators union issued its own super-cautious advice on the topic.)

It doesn’t take much to see that Gove suggestion is only a band-aid reform that fails to address the systemic factors that may have encouraged the child to misbehave in the first place. Earlier this year, William Gilliam, author of the original Yale study, offered his own preventative and structural recommendations to help reduce preschool expulsions. Among them:

Early Intervention: Teachers should work with childhood mental health professionals to assess their students’ behavioral needs and develop individual programs that will help children with behavioral challenges transition into a normal classroom environment.

Structural: Preschool providers should aim to reduce class size, provide adequate rest time for teachers, and provide professional support, all factors which are correlated with reduced preschool expulsion rates.

As we wrote before, policymakers need to pay attention to how preschool providers are addressing high expulsion rates, with special attention to providers outside state pre-k programs. Gilliam’s 2005 research found that faith-based and for-profit providers had the highest rates of expulsion, while public pre-ks were less likely to expel students. This may reflect variation in resources as well as different perceptions about expulsion of young students. Either way, children who are expelled from preschool are usually the ones who need preschool most, and teachers should make every effort to keep them there.