Dr. Sabol, Dr. Onnie Rogers (Associate Professor; University of Chicago), and Dr. Sandra Waxman (Professor, Northwestern University) are building a measurement toolkit to address race-based disparities in preschool discipline practices.
Across the United States, pre-k suspensions and expulsions are nearly three times those in K-12 settings. More startling are the large racial disparities in early disciplinary actions. Black preschool children are three times more likely to be suspended or expelled from preschool than are White children (Office of Civil Rights, 2014). Such racial disparities in preschool disciplinary action perpetuate a pernicious problem: not all children are afforded an equal opportunity to benefit from early learning environments.
Researchers focusing on educational settings — especially early childhood settings — lack valid, reliable tools to measure the dynamic, everyday disciplinary experiences that occur within the sociohistorical realities of racism in which schools, teachers, and students are embedded. Researchers focusing on children’s acquisition of racial identities and race bias are also hampered by measurement issues: most measures are validated at 5 years or older. It is therefore essential to develop new tools to identify how preschool-aged children see themselves and are seen by others, and how their emerging racial identities are influenced by their interactions in the preschools they attend.
In our study, On the Road to Discovery: Building a Measurement Toolkit to Address Race-Based Disparities in Preschool Discipline Practices, or the “On the Road Project,” we are working to establish clear metrics of daily interactions and psychosocial processes to study emerging interventions, develop curricula, and design professional development programs that target reductions in racial disparities.
Through support of the SESP Venture Funds, we are building a tablet-based toolkit to assess how children see themselves and are seen by others, their own awareness and perceptions of teacher biases and disciplinary practices, and how this intersects with teachers’ own biases and behaviors in the classroom (using the newly developed EyeTeach tool). Our goal is to design a reliable, valid, and efficient set of measures to better discover the mechanisms underlying the preschool race/ethnic disparities that can be used as the foundation for teacher professional development.