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How does implicit bias affect punishment of children in school? Listen to part 2 of our 4-part series on implicit bias, featuring Yale scholar Dr. Walter Gilliam.
Children see race. We want to learn more about what that means. Hear parents, scholars, illustrators, artists, and more explore how race impacted them as a child and how it affects their lives today. In My Skin is a production of P.R.I.D.E. -- Positive Racial Identity in Early Education -- a University of Pittsburgh Office of Child Development program.
Lucius and Emma Nixon Academy is a charter school in the suburbs of Orlando, Florida, about 20 miles north of the entrance to Disney World's Magic Kingdom.
The red and brown building is shaped like a U, and in the center is a playground, with blue and yellow slides for the children at the school to play on.
On the morning of September 19, 2019, one of the school's students, Kaya Roll, came in after a difficult night of sleeping.
Kaya's grandmother would later say that a medical condition can make it difficult for her granddaughter to get a good night's rest.
The details from that morning are entirely clear, but it seems that 6-year-old Kaya, who is an African-American and stands at 3 feet 10 inches tall, may have punched and or kicked three school employees, which landed her in a school office. At 9.32 a.m., Kaya, wearing pink beaded hair ties, sat in the school office, reading a book with a school employee, when two uniformed police officers walk in.
They ask Kaya to stand up, zip tie her hands, and lead her away to a police car.
Just a warning, audio of the event captured on a police officer bodycam may be upsetting for some listeners.
"Okay, should we have to come with us now?" "Okay, Kaya, we have to go with the information." " labor there baby girl. Stand up.
Okay, come on well come over here.
limits it for you. let me get your hands okay..
honest that's not going to hurt you guys know that what is so good is.) no no
Someone at the school, it's not entirely clear who, called the police to report Kaya's actions.
And the officers were arresting Kaya. a 3 foot 10 inch 81 pound 6 year old child for misdemeanor battery.
When they arrive at the police SUV, one officer boosts Kaya up by her waist because again she's 3 feet 10 inches tall and can't quite climb into the police SUV on her own and places her in the vehicle. They close the doors and drive off with a six-year-old child under arrest in the backseat of the car.
Race doesn't limit you from anything. I feel like they learn about race from how I teach them. You don't even know who you are with somebody else and look like you.
This is In My Skin, a podcast about race and childhood. I'm Adam Flango.
I've thought about Kaya's story a lot since I first heard about it in the fall.
At its core, hers is a story about punishment, an unjust, inequitable punishment.
I think about how it connects to the people whose stories are encompassed simply in their names.
George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks. Lives taken in the ultimate form of unjust punishment, for on the surface, non-existent or trivial offenses. Beneath the surface, though, was the latent justification used, either knowingly or implicitly, for punishment. They're all black.
This is episode two in our series on implicit bias, who are going to focus on punishment in childhood and find out what leads to a six-year-old child being arrested. Because Kaya's story is disturbingly familiar. In fact, she was not even the only six-year-old child at that school that day that was arrested. A six-year-old boy was arrested as well in an unrelated incident, the details of which are not publicly available.
And when black children are not being arrested in school, they are being suspended and expelled at dramatically higher rates compared to their peers. In preschool, black children are 3.6 times more likely than white children to be suspended in preschool, and twice as likely to be expelled compared to their white and Hispanic counterparts. When children face dramatic consequences, like being taken out of school, it makes their futures that much harder. Well, we know from studies of expulsion and suspension practices in early elementary school that when children are expelled or suspended early, they have about a tenfold increased likelihood of dropping out of school or being expelled again. They're less likely to be able to graduate from high school. As a result, it tends to have a big impact on the rest of their life trajectory because it sets them up to not be able to get as good of a payback as they can get.
So, it's a rough trajectory from early elementary school. What we were finding here was that it doesn't even seem to begin in early elementary school. It begins in preschool. It begins pretty much as soon as children can come into contact with any kind of a system that's school-like. You don't have to wait until kindergarten or first grade to get expelled when we have preschool programs from which you can get expelled. That's Walter Gilliam. My name is Walter Gilliam and I am the Elizabeth Mears and House Jamison Professor of Child Psychiatry and Psychology at the Yale Child Studies Center, as well as the Director of the Edward Ziegler Center in Child Development and Social Policy. If there is such thing as a celebrity in the field of early childhood education, Gilliam would have a star on the walk of fame. His groundbreaking research into the disproportionate punishment of children has been integral to the study of bias and its effects on children in early childhood settings. When you want to talk about the research behind black children facing punishment at a higher rate than their peers, you talk to Walter Gilliam. He grew up in a poor part of eastern Kentucky and through a combination of trumpeting scholarships and financial aid, found his way to a school in Kentucky as a music teacher. Shortly after Gilliam arrived, the school experienced multiple tragedies in a short period of time.
Two students and one alumni died by suicide. Another in a moped accident near the school.
For those two years, I really wasn't doing much music teaching at all. I was just mostly a brief counselor who didn't know what he was doing. And so it caused me to rethink what I wanted to do with my life. And I decided that instead of loving music and liking working with children, maybe it was maybe it was more the other way around. This led him back to school to study suicide and adolescence. And along the way, he realized the impact of intervening in a child's life. The more I started working in these programs, serving young children and working with these professionals in these programs that serve young children, the more I became convinced that if I really cared about children committing suicide in their adolescent years, then I should care all the more about them when they're young, when their teachers hadn't given up on them yet, and their parents still think that they might grow up to be president. And if we can't help our young children at that age, what chance do we have later when the symptomatology is even greater and when the problems are even bigger, and when the unmet needs have eroded away that social support that's around them. So Gilliam began his research doing assessments of various pre-K programs from schools to Head Start classrooms. And what he found was alarming. In general, children were being expelled in these programs at much higher rates than they were anywhere else in education from elementary to high school. It was a problem for children across the board, but Gilliam dug deeper to understand who was most at risk for expulsion. And so we became interested in who's most likely to be expelled. What types of programs are most likely to expel a child. And we noticed in our original study that our black children were being expelled at a rate more than twice that of white children, boys at about four times the rate of girls. Bigger children, more likely to be expelled. And when you put it all together, you know, bigger children, more likely to be expelled. Black children, more likely to be expelled. Boys, more likely to be expelled. The three B's of preschool expulsion risk, big black and boy. And then it became just pretty clear to us that we couldn't really continue ignoring that anymore. That preschool expulsion was certainly an issue that we wanted to take on, but there was a layer into this of
gender disproportionality and racial disproportionality. They just absolutely couldn't be ignored because it was just so huge. Gilliam and his team had identified the children most likely to be expelled. Big black boys. The tragic irony of young black children, boys in particular, being expelled at such a high rate is that they were being expelled from programs designed specifically to help them. And instead of intervening in the lives who could potentially be most impacted, they were kicking them to the curb. But I suppose the thing that concerned me the most as somebody who studies preschool programs and child care programs for a living is that for the most part, we have three studies that's been conducted that are longitudinal that people like me use to make the case for why investing in early care and education is important. There's the Perry preschool study in Ypsilanti, Michigan began in 1964, study of 123 children in Ypsilanti, Michigan that were randomly assigned to even go to a high quality preschool program or not. And they followed them over time and they're still following them. And now they're closing in on social security age and researchers are still following them. And they found that the children who are randomly assigned to go to the preschool program, they were less likely to fail a grade, less likely to need special education, more likely to graduate high school, more likely to go to college, they earn more money, more likely to own a home, less likely to go to jail. And when they did cost benefit analysis on that, they found that by the time the children were 27 years old, every dollar that was spent on the program is yielding back $7.14 in societal savings. By the time the children were 45, now it's $17 in societal savings. And there's a couple of other studies like this too, the Ebbe Sedarian study and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, similar kinds of findings. And also the Chicago Child Parent Centers study with again, similar kinds of findings. These are the three studies that people like me cite over and over again when making the case for why we should invest in early care and education. But the thing that we often don't say enough is this, the number one most cited study in the field of early care and education, the Perry preschool study was a study of 123 children in Ypsilanti, Michigan. And every one of those children in the study were black. Every child in the study was black. And the Ebbe Sedarian study was a study and 98% of the children in that study were black. And the Chicago Child Parent Centers, 93% black. What we were doing is we took data that belonged to our black children, black families, black communities, and used it to create a program for the benefit of all of our American children. And that's a good thing. But then when no one's paying attention, we disproportionately kick out the back door, the very children who gave us the data in the first place. And that's the part that bothered me the most. Well, it was at that time that I decided that as much as I need to cite these three studies to make the case for why our investments in early care and education matter, I'm no longer going to do it. I'm no longer going to cite these three studies unless I'm able and willing to spend at least an equal amount of my time protecting the rights of the children who gave us the data in the first place. Because it's not my data to use as their data. And how dare we take their data, create a program and disenfranchise them from the very program that their data purchased.
When this research came out in the mid 2000s, it was met with shock by many members of the early childhood community. But it wasn't the concept of not allowing a child to continue learning anymore that shocked them. I was giving a talk on this to a group of early childhood educators.
I think 2005, 2006, not too long after the results came out. And I was talking about it and this one preschool teacher raised her hand and she said, "You know, I don't like it when you call it preschool expulsion." And I thought to myself, "Well, I don't like it when you do it." But I didn't say that, but instead I asked, "What do you like to call it?" And she said, "When we call it, not get ready for school basis." I thought, "Well, that's an interesting term for it. Does anyone else in the audience have a term that they prefer to call it than somebody else?" So we call it, we call it, "We're not the right place for your child." And then there was another person who said that at their program, they call it, "Giving the child the gift of time." And these are all just nice terms that we can apply to it to make ourselves feel better, I guess. But in the end, it's telling a child that we can't serve as you. It's telling a child, "We're giving up on you already at three." Regardless of the language used, Gilliam had established which populations were most vulnerable. And we know who has the power to expel students. It's the teachers in AIDS in schools and early childhood facilities. 73% of pre-K and kindergarten teachers are white, and more than 97% are women. But the question is why. That after the break. "In My Skin" is a production of the PRIDE program, which stands for Positive Racial Identity Development and Early Education. PRIDE is part of the University of Pittsburgh Office of Child Development. Thank you to the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and Hillman Family Foundations for making this episode possible. [Music]
Gilliam's research led him to try to understand what led to these disproportionalities and how he could intervene. Did teachers note that they were doing this? Or did it have something to do with implicit bias? So he and his colleagues set up an experiment. At a conference for educators, they set up a station and asked more than 100 teachers to watch a video of children playing at a table. There is one black girl, one black boy, one white girl, and one white boy. They were given the following instructions. Now you are ready to view a series of video clips lasting six minutes. We are interested in learning about how teachers detect challenging behavior in the classroom. Sometimes this involves seeing behavior before it becomes problematic. The video segments you are about to view are of preschoolers engaging in various activities. Some clips may or may not contain challenging behaviors. Your job is to press the enter key on the external keypad every time you see a behavior that could become a potential challenge. Please press the keypad as often as needed.
The thing is, they weren't actually detecting challenging behavior in the classroom.
In fact, the video didn't actually show any challenging behavior. Using eye tracking technology, they were looking at who the teachers looked at when they were looking for challenging behavior. It's a novel way to quantify their implicit biases. The result? The teachers spent more time focusing on the black children and in particular the black boy. And when teachers were asked explicitly at the end which child deserved the most attention, 42 percent said the black boy. It seemed clear to Gilliam and his colleagues that implicit bias played a role here.
But it's not something that is easily combated because it often exists in the shadows and people don't discuss it or talk about it. So what would happen if you shine a light on it? Well, that was an initial thought that we had was that perhaps it is like mold.
And perhaps mold grows best in dark places. And if you can shine a light on the bias, then it makes it harder for the bias to thrive. Or at least it makes it harder for the bias to thrive unchecked. And that perhaps the way to deal with biases is to shine as much light as possible. And make ourselves aware of the biases that we have. And so we embarked on some research trying to see what would happen if you try to elucidate that to teachers. Or you try to give teachers more information about their children that they serve. And is it possible that the more a teacher knows about the child that they serve, the more that the teacher knows about the child's family, the harder it is for them to harbor biases about that child. That maybe bias is also a way that we categorize and dehumanize people. These are the good people, these are the bad people, these are the smart people, these are the not so smart people, these are the hard workers, these are the not so hard workers. Ways to categorize people into categories. And that the way to re-humanize a person instead of dehumanizing them is perhaps to tell their story, to shine light on their lives. And the more that teachers know about the lives of the children in their care, perhaps the less likely it would be for them to be able to continue making decisions just based on the biases that might be in their head. To test this idea, Gilliam and his fellow researchers did that. They shed light. They gave the same description of a four-year-old child's behavior to each participant, but with two differences. First, they changed the name in order to signify both gender and race, using LaToya and Deshawn as stand-ins for black girl and boy, and Emily and Jake for white girl and boy. Then all of the participants read a paragraph summarizing the child's behavior, but half of the participants read an additional paragraph. Here's what it said. Here's what it said. We picked a name, though the names were random in the actual experiment. Deshawn lives with his mother, his eight and six-year-old sisters, and his 10-month-old baby brother. His home life is turbulent between having a father who has never been a constant figure in his life and a mother who struggles with depression but doesn't have the resources available to seek help. During the rare times when his parents are together, loud and sometimes violent disputes occur between them. In order to make ends meet, Deshawn's mother has taken on three different jobs and is in a constant state of exhaustion. Deshawn and his siblings are left in the care of available relatives and neighbors while their mother is at work. The hope was that this additional information might help combat implicit bias. Maybe it would make the teacher more understanding and less likely to deem a child's behavior problematic. And if that's the case, then there seems to be a ready-made solution. Have teachers gain a better understanding of each child's home life, then poof, implicit bias is gone.
If it sounds too good to be true, it's because it is. Well, the finding that we had that was a bit of a surprise to us was less about the race of the teacher and less about the race of the child and more about the match of the race of the teacher and child. If we were to give this kind of information, explaining the stressors that this family is dealing with, is it possible that the behavior problems wouldn't seem quite so bad after all? Because now we've humanized this childhood bit and we've explained where some of these behavior problems might be coming from. And what we found was that it worked, as we expected, but only kind of. It only worked that way if the teacher and the child were of the same race. If the teacher was a white child, what the teacher was a white teacher, rating who she thought was white children. Or if the teacher was a black teacher, rating who she thought were black children, then it worked that way. But if the teacher was a white teacher rating who she thought was black children or a black teacher rating white children, the more information we gave that teacher about the child's background, the more severe the behavior problems seemed. It literally went in the opposite direction. And so we had to change the way in which we were thinking about this. At first I thought if we could just give teachers more information, help them understand the lives of the children that they're serving, perhaps it would help them feel more empathic to children. And I think instead it's not that it does that, what it does is that if the teacher feels some kind of connection to the child along racial lines or perhaps even other lines, and look at that child and think that child could be my child, that could be my nephew, my niece, the more information we give them, the more empathic the teachers seem to respond to that child. But if the teacher and the child are fairly different, then the more information we give them, the more hopeless the teacher's reported feeling about the child's ability to be able to improve. That perhaps more information about our children's lives doesn't really necessarily make teachers more empathic, it just makes them more of whatever they already were. And if they have a connection already, the more information I give them, the more close they feel in that connection. And if they have perhaps already otherized this child, then the more information that I give them, the more otherized they become.
Rather than finding an answer, Gilliam and his colleagues found new layers to the complexity of the problem they are trying to solve. There are some solutions currently in place to help end the disproportionality in punishment in these young ages. Things like mental health consultation and trauma-informed care in schools aims to intervene with both children and the adults in the school before behavior becomes too problematic, and hopefully this intervention drastically reduces or eliminates suspensions and expulsions for young children. This is essentially a rising tide lifts all boats situation. If suspensions and expulsions are bad for all children, and they disproportionately affect black children, then eliminating them would have a significantly greater impact on black children. It's a promising idea to be sure. But what it doesn't actually address is the implicit bias underlying the issue. Identifying the problem is hard enough and convincing people that it is a problem is even harder, but despite the efforts of Gilliam and others, we still don't have a clear grasp on how to intervene to stop the effects implicit bias has on punishment. Hearing about these disproportionalities can be dispiriting.
Stories like Kaya's, from the beginning of the episode, underline how far we have to come. When I asked Gilliam about his prospects for the future, I expected him to not be particularly rosy. He certainly made enormous progress in the field. Since illuminating the problem of preschool expulsion, a number of states have simply eliminated the practice entirely. But there still seems to be so much work to address the root of the problem in implicit bias.
But he doesn't see it that way.
I think the thing that gives me the most hope is the fact that people are now talking about it. We're having conversations about it. Those conversations may not have all the right answers, but at least they are conversations. People are talking about how we treat children in preschool classrooms, what the experience is for individual children. That quality isn't some amorphous thing about how we treat the majority of the children, the majority of the time. But quality is really about how each and every child in that classroom experiences that program. These are the kinds of conversations that people are having now that just simply weren't happening before. And the same thing about bias. And there'll be times, I suppose, in our national story, where it feels like things are going in a good direction and there will feel like maybe at times that things are going backwards and not so good of a direction. But as long as there's actual conversations happening about it, then the hope for a possibility that we can be able to come to some kind of common solutions are there. The biggest challenge that I think we have when it comes to issues having to do with bias and equity is when those are silent issues and when no one is talking about them anymore. And so I think the thing that gives me the most hope right now is the fact that there is a conversation happening on this that I just don't think of going to be silenced anytime soon. And that's a good thing.
In the third part of our four-part series on implicit bias, we're going to look at how implicit bias impacts language. In My Skin is a production of the University of Pittsburgh Pride Program, part of the Office of Child Development at Pitt School of Education. This episode was written and produced by me, Adam Flango, with help from Pride Director Dr. Aisha White, Pride Director of Engagement Medina Jackson, and Pride Administrative Assistant Katie Carney. Music for this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions. You can find every episode of In My Skin, along with links to the research cited in today's episode at racepride.pitt.edu.