Eye-tracking technology shows that preschool teachers have implicit bias against black boys
LOS ANGELES TIMES / TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE
A kindergarten class at Dorris Place Elementary School in Los Angeles in May 2015. A study presented today to a meeting of education policy officials, researchers found that pre-K educators who were prompted to expect trouble in a classroom trained their gaze significantly longer on black students, especially boys.
For African-American boys, the presumption of guilt starts before they have entered a kindergarten classroom, new research shows.
In a study presented today to a meeting of education policy officials, researchers found that pre-K educators who were prompted to expect trouble in a classroom trained their gaze significantly longer on black students, especially boys, than they did on white students.
When asked which of four videotaped children — a boy and girl who were black and a pair who were white — required their closest attention, educators black and white alike chose the study’s African-American boy most frequently. The study’s white boy came in a distant second and two girls — one white and one black — drew the least scrutiny from the teachers.
But when subjects in the new study were asked to rate the severity of a child’s disruptive behavior and recommend consequences for it, race played a more unexpected role: African-American pre-K educators, the study found, judged misbehavior attributed to a black child more harshly than did white educators. And they were more inclined to recommend the child’s suspension or expulsion from the classroom.
The new research, conducted by psychologist Walter S. Gilliam and colleagues at Yale University’s Child Study Center, set out to explore the biases, many of them operating beneath a teacher’s awareness, that may drive a troubling pattern in elementary and secondary schools across the nation: that African-American students are suspended or expelled at more than twice the rate of children of any other ethnicity.
At the pre-K level, Gilliam found an even starker pattern in 2005. In state-funded pre-K classrooms, 3- and 4-year-olds were being kicked out of school three times as often as older students. And black children — boys mostly — were about twice as likely as Latino and white children to be expelled.
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This nursery-school “push-out phenomenon” does more than inconvenience parents and give naughty children a time-out away from classmates: Many researchers suspect it sets up a child early for school failure by eroding his engagement with teachers and classmates and sending the message that the student cannot be redeemed.
At an annual conference of early care and education professionals, the authors of the new study recruited 132 pre-K educators (67 percent white, 22 percent black and 68 percent of them classroom teachers). First, researchers told the subjects they were trying to understand how teachers detect the first signs of troublesome behavior. Then, they used eye-tracking technology to measure the amount of time that subjects focused their attention on each of four children playing and working together on a videotape — a white boy, a black boy, a white girl and a black girl.
As a group, the teachers spent more time watching the videotaped activity of the black male student than any of the others. And black teachers were even more vigilant about their young black charges than were white teachers: Compared to white study participants, black subjects spent more time gazing at black boys and less time gazing at other children.
In the study’s second part, educators read vignettes detailing a child’s pattern of extremely disruptive behavior. The researchers manipulated teachers’ beliefs about the child’s gender and race using different names, such as DeShawn or Latoya to suggest a black boy or girl, and Jake and Emily to suggest a white boy or girl. On a five-point scale, the educators then rated the severity of the misbehavior and the likelihood that they would recommend suspension or expulsion.
Here, Gilliam and his colleague found a surprising trend: Black educators were sterner in their judgment of such disruptive behavior on the part of a black child than if it was attributed to a white child. The study’s white educators rated the severity of the child’s disruptive behavior very low when they believed the student was black, and judged it more severely when they believed the child was white.
This pattern, said Gilliam, suggests two very different assumptions about race and child behavior on the part of white and black educators. While black educators upheld stern — perhaps unrealistically stern — expectations of black preschoolers’ behavior, he said, the white educators seemed to have far lower expectations.
In assessing black children’s misbehavior, white educators almost seemed to accept “that this was normal behavior, and this was not normal behavior,” said Gilliam. These “shifting standards,” said Gilliam, are a pernicious cause of what researchers call “implicit bias.”
Further racial differences emerged when the subjects were asked to read a statement about the misbehaving child’s home and family situation — a grim recitation of absent father, overworked mother, few resources and a chaotic household.
When white teachers read the background statement and believed it described a white child’s situation, their judgment of the child’s prospects of overcoming disadvantage was kinder and more positive than were their judgments when they thought the child in question was black.
When black teachers read the background statement and believed it described a black child’s situation, they judged the child’s prospects more kindly than when they thought the child in question was white.
Across the divide of “us” and “them,” said Gilliam, lies a racial empathy gap that needs to be overcome.
“We need to help them feel like these children and families are their children and families,” said Gilliam. Children, and especially African-American children, can be helped by policies and practices aimed in many directions, he added.
Programs that seek to raise teachers’ awareness of their implicit biases and counter them are important, said Gilliam. But practices that increase their empathy for all students will help too, as would any measures that reduce overall stress and chaos in preschool classrooms.
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©2016 Los Angeles Times
32 responses to “Eye-tracking technology shows that preschool teachers have implicit bias against black boys”
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“who were prompted to expect trouble in a classroom trained their gaze significantly longer on black students”
Teachers, like the rest of us, are the result of their own experiences.
“Studies cannot make teachers, or us, discount what we SEE and KNOW from our EXPERIENCE.
This tells me that implicit bias is a natural reaction to what is experienced over and over, and is color neutral! Change the behaviors of the subjects and over time, the bias will change. As the study suggests, you cant “fake” bias’s; your body language tells the truth.
You are right , what we see and not our “racist” upbringing forms our attitude. “Eye-tracking technology shows that preschool teachers have implicit bias against black boys”: FOR GOOD REASON!
Bias to not only black kids on the mainland but also towards Samoan and Polynesian kids in Hawaii. You only have to look at their track records for justification. Just reality.
And Black people in Hawaii. And don’t forget Haoles who are discriminated against more and more. You know — Go back to the Mainland. Actually, the term Haole applies to all non-locals but people use it only to refer to White people.
Everybody hates Chris……
In reporting that “For African-American boys, the presumption of guilt starts before they have entered a kindergarten classroom”, Los Angeles Times writer Melissa Healy is totally full of [scatological term redacted]!
As a public school teacher for the last quarter century I can assure you teachers must of necessity be data- and experience-driven if they have any chance of being effective. Effective teachers must identify disruptive students as soon as possible and do all in their power to get them to stay on task or chaos may soon take over in which no one will learn anything.
No genuine racist would be stupid or masochistic enough to waste his or her time in a doomed effort to teach inner city children who are predominantly Americans of African Ancestry.
The study is reported as having concluded “African-American pre-K educators…judged misbehavior attributed to a black child more harshly than did white educators.” Whatever the difference between black or white educators, nowhere in this news report is ANY mention made of the more than 80 percent of black boys now born out of wedlock, who having no father so often get their real education on the street, especially in their pre-teen years.
That more than any other factor – – certainly more than any alleged black OR white teacher ‘racism’ – – accounts for differences in classroom conduct and the consequences meted out for disruptive behavior. If there is any blame to be laid here it is on irresponsible fathers who, regardless of race, refuse to encumber themselves with marriage, self control, and fidelity to one woman and instead hang on their myriad of b a s t a r d sons a life long albatross of hopelessness, suffering, academic failure, low skills ~ ~ and increasingly often early death at the hands of another fatherless, love starved black boy vainly seeking HIS manhood with a gun in hand.
But did the kids know they were being selected? If not this study ain’t worth nuttin’. LOL
It it looks and smells like roast duck, it probably is.
..and when the “black boys” grow up and no teacher keeps an extra eye on them they have the highest crime rate and incarceration rate of all groups.
Well, at least no one got shot….this time, anyway.
Sounds about right….
This implicit bias even against preschool students affects life for blacks everywhere (and in Hawaii probably Polynesians)- applying for jobs, shopping in a store, driving and facing police scrutiny tilting the playing field against them. My cousin who is a teacher and part polynesian says this is beyond implicit in Hawaii– she sees other teachers missing bad behavior by non-polynesians because so much attention is placed on polynesian children and this stays with them all through school.
I have to say that when I was a classroom teacher at a school near public housing that had a very high number of Polynesian kids that those kids, though economically and educationally somewhat disadvantaged were the sweetest, most helpful, friendliest and eager to please students I think I ever had. The thing that surprised a lot of people was that I was caucasian and these kids really accepted me. I guess it has a lot to do with respect, belief of success, and expectations.
Why would you say that those housing kids had an educational disadvantage? Those skills of respect were taught by parent (s).
No disrespect intended. At grade 9, many of the kids in that school (housing and non-housing but usually correlated with SES/family income) arrived with some major reading and writing deficits. I understand from a friend currently teaching at that school that the situation has improved quite a bit.
As far as “respect” I was referring to my respect for them which was certainly reciprocated.
Stop it. Would you just stop with the inciting of racial issues. Seriously?! The eyes……geeze.
I agree! Just opening another can of worms. Who thinks of this stuff anyway!
Yeah, let’s stop thinking!
No, don’t over think! Some people keep moving on their project until they get the desired results thus overlooking the actual results.
Which “segment” of students cause the most problems???
Answer: Black Males.
All we are told is total # of pre k teachers and then the report jumps to %’s forcing us to rely on what the study claims is significant. Does it really show the black teachers have a greater level of implicit racism. Oh my.
“While black educators upheld stern — perhaps unrealistically stern — expectations of black preschoolers’ behavior, he said, the white educators seemed to have far lower expectations.”
I suspect that if white educators upheld “unrealistically stern expectations of black preschoolers” the conclusion would be that white educators treat black preschoolers more harshly. I also suspect that if educators spent more time watching white preschoolers they’d be seen as caring more about them. I further suspect that this study was performed and interpreted with biases already held by the researches.
Agree
This study ASSUMES that all the children were acting exactly alike. If the children weren’t all behaving exactly the same, it becomes a variable as to what is drawing the teachers’ attention.
Thanks SA for a totally worthless piece of tripe.
…and if a child is half black and half white, then what happens?
Then they only get half the amount of stink eye.
They become President or perhaps a well paid quarterback from the SF 49ER’s……….
Expectations affects how teachers treat children, which in turn affects how children view themselved. So how would one use the study to give all children equal opportunity for success? Train the teachers so they recognize their biases, and train them to treat the child based only on the child’s actual behavior.
According to the Yale website, the subject teachers were 93.9% female, with 66.7% white and 22% black. In that group is 23% hispanic or latino. 68.2% were actually classroom teachers, while others were directors, staff or student teachers. The subjects were told to detect challenging behavior in videos of children. Eye tracking determined how long they looked at diffeent children in an effort to detect challenging behavior.
How would their familiarity or lack of such with children of other races or incomes affect which student they were gazing at the longest to try to detect challenging behavior? How does their gazing at a child affect their actual behavior with that child?
Chill, gang. This is only information. According to this study, implicit bias exists in the subjects (teachers). Like SteveToo and Noheawilli, we could question the design of the study, or like GoldenDisk, we could make an effort to review the actual study to determine if the results are valid. If the results are valid, then we can begin to talk about what implicit bias might imply, i.e., in operational terms. At stake is the quality of life of our keiki throughout the country. As Cellodad so eloquently reminds us, these are very young children. The one word that comes to mind is “innocent.” One theory to pursue is: Does implicit bias translate to actual unfair treatment or is it a bias that’s overridden by observable facts? Put another way, Can a teacher remain objective despite subjective feelings?
Boys that age going call you one tilly if you speak in proper English. He gotta talk pidgin or whatever slang of that area.