Study: Teachers' 'implicit bias' starts in preschool

Are teachers implicitly biased against African-American students — and African-American boys in particular — as early as preschool?

A new study from the Yale Child Study Center wades into this fraught question, looking at preschool teachers' sometimes unconscious attitudes about student behaviors.

The findings suggest that teachers who care for very young children may judge those kids’ behaviors differently based on race: both black and white teachers judge students of the other race more harshly once they know a thing or two about the student’s family lives, for instance. But one thing seems clear: both black and white teachers are watching black students more closely for potential misbehavior.

“Implicit bias is like the wind — you can’t see it, but you can sure see its effects,” said Yale’s Walter Gilliam, an associate professor of child psychiatry and psychology and the lead researcher on the study.

Gilliam said the findings show that implicit biases “do not begin with black men and police. They begin with young black boys and their preschool teachers — if not earlier.”

For the study, Gilliam’s team set up two experiments with teachers. In one, teachers were asked to watch videos of preschoolers after being told they’d be witnessing “challenging” student behaviors — edu-jargon for misbehavior. Then researchers tracked, among other measures, where teachers’ eyes went.

“We told the teachers that we were interested in learning how quickly and accurately they could detect challenging behaviors in preschoolers,” Gilliam told reporters earlier this week. “What we did not tell the teachers was that the preschoolers in the videos were all actors assisting us in the study, and that no challenging behaviors were depicted in the videos.”

Teachers watched a total of 12 clips, each 30 seconds long, featuring a black boy, a black girl, a white boy and a white girl. When primed to detect bad behavior, Gilliam said, teachers gazed longer at the black children, especially boys.

In a second experiment, teachers read descriptions of fictional misbehaving preschoolers, to which researchers had attached fictitious names based on 2011 U.S. Census data of the most popular boys’ and girls' names for both black children (DeShawn and Latoya) and white children (Jake and Emily).

When asked to rate the severity of each child’s misbehavior, teachers actually rated children with white-sounding names more severely.

But the findings, released late Tuesday, suggest that expectations cut both ways. For instance, most teachers didn’t suggest suspension or expulsion at higher rates for the misbehaving black students — the only teachers who suggested firmer discipline were themselves black. These teachers believed more strongly than their white co-workers that black students should be suspended for more days for misbehavior.

Previous research going back a decade or more — some of it by Gilliam and other Yale researchers — has found that preschool discipline can be harsh. A study from 2005 found that preschool boys were expelled 4.5 times more often than girls. Black students in state-funded prekindergarten programs were about twice as likely to be expelled as white or Latino classmates.

In the new study, researchers also randomly asked half of the teachers to read a brief paragraph detailing each fictional child’s home environment, including descriptions such as “a largely absent father, a mother who works three low-paying jobs and struggles with depression and doesn’t have the resources to seek help,” Gilliam said. The paragraphs included accounts of “loud and sometimes violent disputes” among family members.

Those brief descriptions actually had the opposite effect on teachers based on their own race, Gilliam said. When family background information was withheld, white teachers rated white students’ behavior as “more severe” than black students’. But when presented with the background information, white teachers rated black and white students’ behavior as equally severe. In other words, knowing more about a student’s home life tended to equalize attitudes about how he or she should behave.

But black teachers, given no background information, did just the opposite: they rated black students’ behavior as more severe. When given the background information, black teachers’ expectations flipped: they rated white students’ behavior as more severe.

That was one of the most striking findings, Gilliam said.

“When teachers understood the background information of the family as having stressors, that tended to create empathy in the child from the teacher — but only if the teacher and the child were of the same race,” he said. “And if the teacher and the child were of different races, it didn’t just fail to create empathy — it seemed to do completely the opposite. It made teachers even more severe in their rating.”

This suggests that perhaps teachers were “overwhelmed by these findings, and overwhelmed by the fact that the child had these challenging behaviors and had this challenging home life too. And that, of course, raises the question of whether or not we’re able to supply empathy to children who come from cultures that are very dissimilar to ours, or from cultures that we may perceive to be dissimilar from ours.”

Howard Stevenson, a professor of urban education and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, called the study “groundbreaking.”

Stevenson, who for decades has studied race and educational achievement, said Gilliam illuminated why harsh school discipline so often bedevils black students, particularly black boys. “On so many levels, it’s still hard for people in our country to accept that there are racial disproportionalities,” he said. “If this can happen at the level of preschool, perhaps it could happen at other levels as well.”

Stevenson, the author of a 2014 book on racial literacy in schools, said the findings point out the importance of training teachers in implicit bias. “Once people are able to navigate the stress of racial politics, not only in their own lives but in their relationships with students, they can get better at being empathic towards all students, and particularly students of color — and particularly black boys.”

Dorie Nolt, spokeswoman for U.S. Education Secretary John King, said the study "sheds a light on an important issue that Secretary King talks about frequently: the current lack of diversity among the teaching profession."

She noted that the Obama administration last May issued findings on the state of racial diversity in the teacher workforce and is working with states, districts, teacher preparation programs and teachers' unions "to address this issue head-on by highlighting communities that have success in attracting diverse educators and by creating grant programs that can help support districts as they work to hire more educators of color."

Linda K. Smith, who oversees early childhood programs, including Head Start, at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said Gilliam’s study presents results “that we probably didn’t want to hear, but needed to know.”

The findings, Smith said, “present us with a real challenge that all of us know is not new, but one that we haven’t really been addressing with the same rigor” as issues like poverty and income.

“What is disturbing to us is that we now know that our early-childhood settings are not immune to the same racial disparities that plague the K-12 setting.”

Follow Greg Toppo on Twitter: @gtoppo