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Bias Isn't Just A Police Problem, It's A Preschool Problem | Let's Talk | NPR

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(Al Sieb / Los Angeles Times)

For African American boys, the presumption of guilt starts before they have entered a kindergarten classroom, new research shows.

In a study presented Wednesday to a meeting of education policy officials, researchers found that pre-K educators who were prompted to expect trouble in a classroom trained their gaze significantly longer on black students, especially boys, than they did on white students.

When asked which of four videotaped children - a boy and girl who were black and a pair who were white - required their closest attention, educators black and white alike chose the study's African American boy most frequently. The study's white boy came in a distant second and two girls - one white and one black - drew the least scrutiny from the teachers.

But when subjects in the new study were asked to rate the severity of a child's disruptive behavior and recommend consequences for it, race played a more unexpected role: African American pre-K educators, the study found, judged misbehavior attributed to a black child more harshly than did white educators. And they were more inclined to recommend the child's suspension or expulsion from the classroom.
See the most-read stories in Science this hour "
The new research, conducted by psychologist Walter S. Gilliam and colleagues at Yale University's Child Study Center, set out to explore the biases, many of them operating beneath a teacher's awareness, that may drive a troubling pattern in elementary and secondary schools across the nation: that African American students are suspended or expelled at more than twice the rate of children of any other ethnicity.

At the pre-K level, Gilliam found an even starker pattern in 2005. In state-funded pre-K classrooms, 3- and 4-year-olds were being kicked out of school three times as often as older students. And black children - boys mostly - were about twice as likely as Latino and white children to be expelled.

This nursery-school "push-out phenomenon" does more than inconvenience parents and give naughty children a time-out away from classmates: Many researchers suspect it sets up a child early for school failure by eroding his engagement with teachers and classmates and sending the message that the student cannot be redeemed.

At an annual conference of early care and education professionals, the authors of the new study recruited 132 pre-K educators (67% white, 22% black and 68% of them classroom teachers). First, researchers told the subjects they were trying to understand how teachers detect the first signs of troublesome behavior. Then, they used eye-tracking technology to measure the amount of time that subjects focused their attention on each of four children playing and working together on a videotape - a white boy, a black boy, a white girl and a black girl.

As a group, the teachers spent more time watching the videotaped activity of the black male student than any of the others. And black teachers were even more vigilant about their young black charges than were white teachers: Compared to white study participants, black subjects spent more time gazing at black boys and less time gazing at other children.

In the study's second part, educators read vignettes detailing a child's pattern of extremely disruptive behavior. The researchers manipulated teachers' beliefs about the child's gender and race using different names, such as DeShawn or Latoya to suggest a black boy or girl, and Jake and Emily to suggest a white boy or girl. On a five-point scale, the educators then rated the severity of the misbehavior and the likelihood that they would recommend suspension or expulsion.

Here, Gilliam and his colleague found a surprising trend: Black educators were sterner in their judgment of such disruptive behavior on the part of a black child than if it was attributed to a white child. The study's white educators rated the severity of the child's disruptive behavior very low when they believed the student was black, and judged it more severely when they believed the child was white.

This pattern, said Gilliam, suggests two very different assumptions about race and child behavior on the part of white and black educators. While black educators upheld stern - perhaps unrealistically stern - expectations of black preschoolers' behavior, he said, the white educators seemed to have far lower expectations.

In assessing black children's misbehavior, white educators almost seemed to accept "that this was normal behavior, and this was not normal behavior," said Gilliam. These "shifting standards," said Gilliam, are a pernicious cause of what researchers call "implicit bias."

Further racial differences emerged when the subjects were asked to read a statement about the misbehaving child's home and family situation - a grim recitation of absent father, overworked mother, few resources and a chaotic household.

When white teachers read the background statement and believed it described a white child's situation, their judgment of the child's prospects of overcoming disadvantage was kinder and more positive than were their judgments when they thought the child in question was black.

When black teachers read the background statement and believed it described a black child's situation, they judged the child's prospects more kindly than when they thought the child in question was white.

Across the divide of "us" and "them," said Gilliam, lies a racial empathy gap that needs to be overcome.

"We need to help them feel like these children and families are their children and families," said Gilliam. Children, and especially African American children, can be helped by policies and practices aimed in many directions, he added.

Programs that seek to raise teachers' awareness of their implicit biases and counter them are important, said Gilliam. But practices that increase their empathy for all students will help too, as would any measures that reduce overall stress and chaos in preschool classrooms.
melissa.healy@latimes.com Follow me on Twitter @LATMelissaHealy and "like" Los Angeles Times Science & Health on Facebook. To read the article in Spanish, click here MORE IN SCIENCE: Baby boy with DNA from 3 people offers hope for moms who would pass on deadly genetic diseases Narcissists may start out popular, but people see through them in the long run Teen birth rate in the U.S. hits record low for 7th consecutive year

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Eye-tracking technology shows that preschool teachers have implicit bias against black boys

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For African American boys, the presumption of guilt starts before they have entered a kindergarten classroom, new research shows. In a study presented Wednesday to a meeting of education policy officials, researchers found that pre-K educators who were prompted to expect trouble in a classroom trained their gaze significantly longer on black students, especially boys, than they did on white students.

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The National Center on Universal Design for Learning at CAST.

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Code of Ethical Conduct and Statement of Commitment

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The NAEYC Code of Ethical Conduct offers guidelines for responsible behavior and sets forth a common basis for resolving the principal ethical dilemmas encountered in early childhood care and education.

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3 Reasons to Say Disability instead of Special Needs

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3 Reasons to Say Disability instead of Special Needs

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My Facebook exploded the other day.

I had posted a question about "special needs" and "disability", wondering if anyone would participate in a pro/con series I was thinking of running on this blog about the words. What emerged instead was a huge discussion between my disabled activist friends (and to be clear, they are adults with different disabilities; all with at least one disability) and my friends from the parent community of kids with disabilities.

In many ways, it was a reflection of where I stand at my life, at an intersection between communities. I'm in the parent community of kids with disabilities as my daughter has Down syndrome. I'm in the disabled community by dint of being deaf, with TBI and C-PTSD. Oh, and I'm an activist probably because I was born in the year of the Water Ox - it's in my nature.

But that's all kind of beside the point.

The point is, I asked a simple question and it exploded, which tells me very clearly that these words still bear discussion. Or rather, the swap from saying "special needs" to "disability" needs to happen, and parents of kids with disabilities need to understand why.

Reasons to Say "Disability" Instead of "Special Needs"

1. People with disabilities want you to

In and of itself, this is really the only answer anyone should need: people with disabilities want you to.

Parents of kids with Down syndrome have been on a campaign to stop the use of the word, "retard," first and foremost because people with Down syndrome have asked us to stop saying it. Regardless of how it makes sense or not to people, we ask that people "spread the word to end the word" - quit saying the "r-word."

Adults with disabilities ask that you say "disability" and not "special needs" when you are talking about disability. As Louisa Shiffer said,

Disabled people should control the conversation about their disabilities, and the language used about them, not their parents.

Your child with autism, Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, deafness, brain injury, dyslexia, spina bifida, blindness, muscular dystrophy - all of it - every one of them counts as a disability, and adults from every one of those communities identifies as being disabled.

That doesn't mean every adult from those communities, just like not every adult with Down syndrome is asking you to quit saying the r-word; but enough of them, the majority of them, identify as having a disability, not a special need.

I myself hiccupped there. I thought that you could have a special need and not a disability, that is, that one could have an IEP for something not necessarily disability-related.
Wrong!
It's all disability related if they receive an IEP. Anyone with an IEP has a disability; anyone receiving services or accommodation under section 504 or the IDEA has a disability.

Calling it "special needs" then makes as much sense as saying "handicapped" - it's an antiquated, inapplicable term. Rather than saying "special needs," it should simply be "services for students with disabilities."

Point blank. Call it what it is.

Say the word: disability.

In the words of Lawrence Carter-Long:

A need isn't special if other people get to take the same thing for granted.

3. All the Other Words Make Us Gag

"Handi-capable", "People of all abilities", "Different abilities", "Differently abled" can be lumped together with "special needs." They all sound patronizing, condescending.

And they are all inaccurate, unless you are talking about every single person in the entire world. In which case you are losing at trying to label the population you wanted to identify in the first place.

"Handi-capable", "People of all abilities", "Different abilities", "Differently abled" and "special needs" were made up outside of the disabled community, by people without disabilities. Their continued use, and the defense of their use by people without disabilities reeks of able-splaining; that is, people without disabilities explaining disability to people with disabilities.

Kind of like man-splaining (men explaining womanhood to women), or white-splaining (white people explaining the black experience to black people). None of these "splaining" bits work well because no given population - especially a population which regularly faces and battles with oppression and discrimination - want to have their experience described to them, or be told how they should want to define themselves.

My brain and ears work in different ways than most people's, they qualify me as having a disability. Now, that means that I will react, process, hear, absorb and perceive in accordance with my disabilities but it does not mean that I have a different ability. It will mean that I require accommodation, but not a "special need" because all people, with and without disabilities, require accommodation. The difference in the case of disability is that most of us know exactly what we need to be able to work and learn effectively. Most of the mainstream (non-disabled) population does not, and they play a guessing game throughout life in trying to figure it out.

Back to my Facebook page.

I realized in reading the discussion that ballooned around the words "disability" and "special needs" that this really wasn't a pro/con subject. You don't, after all, set up a pro/con conversation for the word "retard" or the word "negro." You know you don't say those words anymore; their period of use is over. We've moved on.

In this case, we've moved on to "disability" - a word that seems so imperfect when you look at 'Dis' in Latin; which a Latin prefix meaning "apart," "asunder," "away," "utterly," or having a negative, or reversing force.

But, if you look a little further down on that very same page in the dictionary there is another root of the word 'Dis', as pointed out by Heather Watkins and Lawrence Carter-Long:

Latin (akin to bis, Greek dís twice); before f, dif-; before some consonants, di-; often replacing obsolete des- < Old French

The PIE root is a secondary form of *dwis- and thus is related to Latin bis "twice" (originally *dvis) and to duo, on notion of "two ways, in twain." ...hence *another* way of doing and being..

'Dis' = Another Way of Doing and Being

"Disabled" meaning an ability to do or be something in another way.

"Disability" meaning an ability to do or be in another way.

Then the word "disability" makes complete sense. Those of us living with a disability are absolutely living a dual existence: we move through the mainstream world which is largely inaccessible and not disabled, and we have our own experience with the fact of our bodies.

We see, hear, speak, think, learn, process, read, write, move, and/or feel in ways that are less common than most. We have a lot to offer, by dint of our experience with disability and where our interests lie. Our needs are not special, so please: say the word, as we are asking you to.
Disability.

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3 Reasons to Say "Disability" Instead of "Special Needs"

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My Facebook exploded the other day. I had posted a question about "special needs" and "disability", wondering if anyone would participate in a pro/con series I was thinking of running on this blog about the words.