Implicit bias is the term used by sociologists and psychologists to explain the function of stereotyping. It is the relatively unconscious aspects of racism and prejudice in our social behaviors. Researchers at Yale have released findings showing that even well-meaning educators in preschool show the kind of implicit bias and prejudices against black boys that we see throughout our society.
Preschool expulsions and suspensions cause young children to lose their early educational placement or time in care, directly undermining their access to educational opportunities. This “push out” phenomenon has become increasingly concerning to the field especially given the disproportionate rates of early childhood expulsions for boys, Blacks, and particularly Black boys. Black preschoolers are 3.6 times as likely to receive one or more suspensions relative to White preschoolers.1 This is particularly concerning as Black children make up only 19% of preschool enrollment, but comprise 47% of preschoolers suspended one or more times. Similarly, boys are three times as likely as girls to be suspended one or more times.
The researchers set up a conference hall populated by early care and education professionals. The participants were either currently teaching or student teaching in early childhood or preschool classrooms.
The majority of participants were female (93.9%), and identified as White (66.7%) or Black (22%), 77% of whom are non-Hispanic/non-Latino origin. Most (68.2%) were classroom teachers, whereas the rest were student teachers, center directors, and other classroom staff. On average, participants were in the field of early education for 11.0 years (SD = 9.1). Participants worked in a variety of settings, including faith-affiliated centers (22.7%), school-based prekindergarten (17.4%), non-profit centers (11.4%), Head Start (8.3%), for-profit centers (7.6%), and other settings (31.8%). Also, in this sample, Black teachers worked in zip codes with a median income much lower than the rest of the sample, as well as worked in neighborhoods with much higher proportions of Black households and households below the federal poverty level.
What the researchers did was show the participants footage of two black kids and two white kids—one black and one white boy, one black and one white girl. They told the teachers that they were “interested in learning about how teachers detect challenging behavior in the classroom.” The trick was that there was no challenging behavior in the videos. The results showed that the educators looked for problems to arise out of the black children, and more specifically the black boy considerably more than the white children or girls. But there were more findings about how severely the standards were being set for these students and both black educators and white educators are guilty of practicing an equal bias upon black children.
White teachers consistently held black students to a lower standard, rating their behavior as less severe than the same behavior of white students.
[Lead researcher Walter] Gilliam says this tracks with previous research around how people may shift standards and expectations of others based on stereotypes and implicit bias. In other words, if white teachers believe that black boys are more likely to behave badly, they may be less surprised by that behavior and rate it less severely.
Black teachers, on the other hand, did the opposite, holding black students to a higher standard and rating their behavior as consistently more severe than that of white students.
Even more distressing was that some of the educators were given a back story to students. Backstories included hardships at home, single parenting, mental health issues amongst the parents. The findings that resulted from this information was that teachers were more empathetic and less severe if they were of the same race as the child, but if the teacher and child were of different races, the severity with which the teacher saw the child’s behavior “skyrocketed.” The educators seemed to feel that there was nothing that could be done for these children, that they could not affect any meaningful change in that child’s life.