Expulsion Report Underscores Need to Guarantee Access to Pre-K

A new study by the Yale Child Study Center found that 3- and 4-year-olds are three times more likely to be expelled from a state-funded prekindergarten program as children in kindergarten through 12th grade. The report, Prekindergarteners Left Behind: Expulsion Rates in State Prekindergarten Systems, available on the website of the Foundation for Child Development is based on data gathered in the National Prekindergarten Study. It presents information by program setting -- public school, Head Start and private provider -- gender and race/ethnicity from 40 states that fund pre-k programs.

While the study is valuable in that it identifies major shortcomings in state pre-k programs that require corrective action, according to Dr. Steve Barnett from the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, it probably overestimates expulsion rates because of how the term was defined in the survey. The Yale report defines expulsion as the "complete and permanent removal of a student from the entire educational system," but surveyed teachers not about children who had been "expelled," but about "permanent termination of the child’s participation in the setting." Termination of participation in a particular classroom or program is distinct from complete and permanent termination from the entire educational system. A teacher may not know what happens to a child once he or she is removed from the classroom, especially if the child attends a state-funded pre-k program in a community setting or in a large school district.

A more accurate methodology to assess pre-k expulsion would be to survey school districts or the other centralized agency designated by law to deliver the program at the local level. These agencies, charged with responsibility for enrollments, could more accurately track a child’s placement in the educational system.

The Yale report also compares the expulsion rate of preschoolers to that of K-12 students when in all but two states – Kentucky and New Jersey - preschoolers do not have a comparable right to attend school. The state constitution and statutes of every state grant elementary and secondary students a right to a public education, and thus bestow property interests that give rise to corresponding due process protections. See, e.g., Goss v. Lopez, 419 U.S. 565, 95 S.Ct. 729 (1975), in which the United States Supreme Court found that a student’s property interest in public education required minimal due process protections when schools imposed a short-term suspension. To date, only Kentucky’s preschool program for low-income children and New Jersey’s Abbott preschool program require every school district to enroll every child who seeks to enroll and grants a child the right to attend.

With the exception of Florida, which is launching its new, constitutionally mandated pre-k program this Fall, children in every other state do not have a right to enroll in the state’s preschool program. A child’s ability to attend the program will depend on program availability, which, in turn, depends on program funding and the supply of participating providers. In the absence of a right to attend prekindergarten in these states, there are unlikely to be safeguards to protect children from arbitrary and wrongful termination of educational services. In this sense, the comparison of pre-K expulsion to K-12 expulsion is misplaced. Moreover, the comparison may be misleading, since most state prekindergarten programs target high-risk populations where behavioral problems are likely to be more prevalent.

Despite these problems with research methodology, the Yale report identifies that children are being removed from pre-k programs and thus provides an opportunity to identify several key policy changes needed in our nation’s pre-k programs.

• Ensuring universal access to voluntary programs and procedural safeguards to protect against arbitrary removal from the program
• Increasing teacher quality to ensure staff have the proper training and skills to handle difficult behavioral problems in classrooms
• Increasing teacher and program access to classroom-based behavioral consultants, such as school social workers and school psychologists, who can provide help in behavior management, in all programs, including private community settings.