Lesson 2Research and Data Landscape

This transcript was made from the recording by software. It may have small errors.

So before we jump into the context of early care and education or early learning settings, we wanted to provide a little bit of context and talk about a little bit of research that kind of sets the groundwork in kind of how these biases have manifested and kind of how they globally affect our perceptions of black children and in some cases black boys in particular. So there has been a large body of research that has found that characteristics associated with childhood are applied less when thinking about black boys relative to white boys.

And this is broader, right? So there have been studies that have found that people rate black children as about four and a half years older than they actually are. White peers and keep in mind that many of these studies simply involve showing pictures of white children and pictures of black children and having the respondent rate kind of on a Likert scale where they land and so this is what we generally find in the research that kind of where folks perceive black children as being older as being more aggressive more guilty less innocent and this doesn't just applied to boys.

So there was a study recently released out of Georgetown, actually, looking at some of these same issues with black girls. And what they found was that adults perceived black girls as needing less nurturing and protection. And they were rated as knowing more about adult topics, including sex, between the ages of five and 14. So these are little girls as young as five, but they're all little girls So what we kind of see in this pattern, right, is an implicit dehumanization of black children, where black children are seen as older, more aggressive, and more adult-like.

And along the same lines as a dehumanization study, we kind of think about empathy and what that looks like. And so there was a pretty incredible study that was done a few years ago looking at the development of empathy how that breaks down by race throughout childhood so the researchers asked children who are five-year-olds children who are seven-year-olds and i believe children who are nine or ten years old they asked them a series of questions how bad does it hurt when you bite your tongue how bad does it hurt when you bump your head or how bad does it hurt when you get your finger in the door and they asked them to rate that from like one to ten or some kind of likert scale and then they asked them how bad does it hurt this child and they showed a picture of a white child how bad does it hurt this child showed a picture of a black child what they found was that at five years of age there was really no difference between the pain that they rated feeling with those actions and black children or white children but by the time children were seven they were reliably or significantly rating black children as feeling less pain so we We know that all early care and education providers, systems leaders, mental health consultations are older than the age of seven.

And so if we know that these kind of something as fundamental as empathy and how we are applying that kind of in a biased way for different kids of different races, we know that starts early and that's ingrained throughout our lives and it's reinforced through everything we see and through, it's in the drinking water. And so taking this all together, right, like this dehumanization paired with less empathy.

And what does the dehumanization do? It's not just, you know, they're more adult-like and so our expectations change. Our decisions with respect to discipline change and differ. So it's all kind of wrapped up into one big issue.

This transcript was made from the recording by software. It may have small errors.

You know, we kind of wrapped up with this empathy piece is, sorry, the last slide, the previous slide was showing that there has been research specifically looking at empathy and, you know, by race of child and by race of teacher, and that shows that really teachers are less likely to respond with empathy with a child of a race different to his or her own. It's exhibiting challenging behavior or home experiences.

This all manifests in the classroom right this is where we're talking about broadly how black children are perceived so how what does this look like in the classroom so there is it's definitely manifest in the classroom and in a minute we'll get to you know hopefully hear a little bit from you about how you've seen it manifest but the first study we wanted to talk about the first point is really that black children receive harsher punishment for the same or similar behavior as white children one recent study that came out from some researchers at Stanford kind of set up an experiment to test if this was the case and how it worked.

And so what they did was they gave teachers written down records or behavioral-- kind of like behavioral incident reports or behavioral records of young children. And they labeled one with a stereotypical white name, like Jake. And they labeled the other with a stereotypical black name, like Deshaun. To read the reports. The reports were identical, so they did not differ. And they asked them a number of questions with respect to what kind of discipline they would recommend for each individual child.

And what they found was that for the children with the stereotypical black name, they were more likely to be rated as troublemakers. They were more likely to be rated as like this is a pattern that happens with this child. It's not like a one-time slip-up where they might have messed up. Of the doubt and they were more likely to recommend exclusionary discipline for the black child the other thing we know of how this manifests in the classroom is we know that black children are punished for more subjective behaviors versus objective behaviors so we see in the literature is that there are disparities right in discipline disparities in a lot of places and some research has found that a lot of those disparities are explained when the behavioral infraction or the behavior at hand is a subjective one so for example defiance or disrespect compared to something like you know smoking or vandalism or something a little bit more objective there's actually very little disparity when you get to more objective behaviors like smoking at least in older children and so we know that this is when bias comes in right when when there is discretion and subjectivity that's kind of when the door kind of opens for that type of behavior, bias to manifest into decisions.

The third piece we know, the third important component, is that Black children are scrutinized more by teachers for their behaviors than other children. So I think many of you have heard from Dr. Walter Gilliam and his, in particular, the study that he released a few years ago looking at implicit bias. And in brief, what he found, he did an experiment where he used eye tracking technology with teachers.

And he put a video on, and the video was of a black girl, a black boy, a white girl, and a white boy playing at a small table. And he asked the teachers to hit the space bar or a button on the computer whenever they anticipated that a challenging behavior was about to occur. They kind of told the teachers that they wanted to see how good they were at kind of predicting it or anticipating when a challenging behavior was going to occur.

And then they tracked their eyes and they tracked where they were looking on the video. And what they found, what he found, was that they were most often looking at the black boy. And so there have been other studies that have, you know, similarly gotten to the same idea, but the idea being that we're watching black boys more. We're expecting more challenging behavior out of them. And so if a black child is standing next to a white child and they're both doing the exact same thing, but we're only looking at the black child, we're likely going to identify those behaviors more in the black child, even if they're not different.

So that's another big concept to understand. In Dr. Gilliam's previous work, he's also found that there are three big, three primary risk factors for being suspended or expelled. And he calls them the three b's being a boy being black and being big bigger in stature just taller or larger and as you can see none of those risk factors have anything to do with behavior none of those factors have anything to do with defiance or disrespect or challenging behavior or meltdowns or anything at all yet they predict suspensions and expulsions and exclusionary and other types of discipline so here the overall picture is right we're scrutinizing black children more we're making decisions discipline decision and harsher discipline decisions especially when there's more subjectivity involved in the decision and then when we are making the decisions they're getting harsher types of discipline than their peers and here's the key that we don't talk about all the time but you know sometimes it we feel like it goes without saying but we feel like we need to say it and be explicit about it.

There's absolutely zero research data, anything that shows that black children behave any worse or with any more intensity than white children. There is just no data to support that whatsoever. Even, you know, sometimes we kind of slip into this, oh, well, you know, black children are more likely to be overrepresented in lower income communities. And so maybe that is what's explaining this. Even when we account for income, even when we account for other factors, race is still a predominant factor.

Predicting discipline so when you're comparing a low-income white child and a low-income black child the low-income black child is still more likely to get harsher discipline and you're comparing a high-income white child with a high-income black child the black child still subjected to a lot of these biases and differential decisions based on that next slide please So these biases, you know, they don't just affect discipline decisions, and we'll get into that in a bit, but they also affect our worldviews and how we form relationships with children, right?

They affect how we see their families and how, and Lisa will get into this a lot more in a second, but it influences the extent of the connection that we can make with a child. And I think mental health consultants more than any other profession in the world know how important the relationship is between the teacher and the child and the adult and the child, the parents and the child.

And so if these biases are really interfering in our ability to kind of systemically and comprehensively form these warm relationships that really are the foundation on which everything else is built, we have a really big problem. The other thing that we do want to call out here is that we don't often talk about dual language learners and English learners in this context all the time, or at least we talk about them less.

But, you know, I think there's an important kind of conversation to be had there too of how kind of dual language learners and how things like, for example, teachers' expectations because there's a language barrier, teachers' and administrators' opinions and thoughts, you know, of the child's home culture, how the child feels at home or does not feel at home, how the language of instruction, how, you know, influences whether or not they feel valued and welcome and part of a community.

And an asset as opposed to, you know, trying to hide who they are. So, you know, I think there's an important conversation to be had there about dual language learners as well. But we did want to, you know, do a quick, you know, for this one, it won't be a poll, but just type in the chat box and we can reflect on these a little bit later of how you may have seen some of these biases and some of the research that we talked about play out in the classroom.