Kicked Out of Preschool

07/17/2008

From Mike Brown’s book, Ideas Magnets: An innovative leader “makes sure his or her personal core purpose is solid. This grounding on what’s important extends to their teams and organizations.”
Mike Brown

When the national media does a story on early childhood education, it often takes a provocative story and blows it out of proportion. Last week MSN Encarta did cover a provocative story, expulsions from preschools, but the author of the story, Melissa Slager, covered the topic in a most thoughtful and even-handed manner.

She cited a study by Yale researcher Walter S. Gilliam where he estimated that more than 5,000 children were kicked out of state-funded preschool programs in 2006. By comparison, preschoolers were far more likely to be kicked out of school than their counterparts in the K-12 system. The preschool expulsion rate of 6.7 per 1,000 preschool students was more than triple that of older grades.

In reviewing these results Gilliam says preschool programs exist to ready young children for kindergarten and the elementary years that lay ahead. Expelling a kid so young, even with problem behavior, just doesn't make sense. "I can't think of a child who's more in need of a school-readiness program," says Gilliam. "It's like taking sick people out of the hospital."

Slager goes on to talk about parents and experts who see a preschool system that has lost sight of what's appropriate to expect of a 3- or 4-year-old.

"I think some people have expectations that children that age are able to sit for 20 minutes and listen to a lesson," says Lisa McCabe, associate director and cooperative extension associate of the Cornell Early Childhood Program at Cornell University.

"You stick them in that environment and they start acting out and hitting, and then they're labeled a problem child, when they're not — you're just expecting things that are inappropriate."

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