Every day in the United States, around 250 preschool children are expelled from their classrooms. That number is striking in itself, but the disproportionality is even more concerning: Black children are far more likely to be removed. Researchers and advocates have described this as the “preschool-to-prison pipeline.” Once children are excluded at such a young age, their educational and social trajectories are often set on a much more precarious path.
Parents in the Frame
A new study in Prevention Science by Zulauf-McCurdy, Brooks, and Meltzoff (2025) examines an overlooked factor: how teachers’ perceptions of parents shape their judgements about children. In a randomised experiment, preschool teachers read identical descriptions of a child’s disruptive behaviour. Later, they were told either that the parents were cooperative or that they were dismissive. Race and gender were also varied using names with strong cultural associations.
The results are telling. When parents were described as cooperative, teachers rated the same disruptive behaviour as less severe. When parents were perceived as uncooperative, teachers felt more hopeless about whether the child’s behaviour could change. In short, what teachers thought about the parents influenced how they saw the child.
Why This Matters
This may sound intuitive: teachers naturally feel more capable of coping when they sense parental support. Yet the implications are troubling. Expulsion decisions should be based on the child’s behaviour, not on adult relationships coloured by frustration, mistrust or bias. If children’s access to early education is determined by how well their parents are perceived to cooperate, then the very pupils most in need of support risk being penalised.
The study carefully notes its limitations. Short online vignettes are not the same as the chaos of a real preschool classroom. The sample—95 teachers, mostly female and predominantly White—is too small to capture the full complexity of how race and gender interact with parental cooperation. As the authors admit, these effects may fade quickly outside the laboratory.
Where to Go Next
Still, the findings suggest an important lever for change. Beyond classroom management training or implicit bias workshops, strengthening parent–teacher relationships may itself reduce the risk of expulsion. Helping teachers see parents as partners, even when cooperation is not straightforward, could lower the sense of hopelessness that feeds exclusionary decisions.
At the same time, we must be cautious. A parent who cannot attend a meeting due to shift work or struggles with language barriers is not “uncooperative”—they are operating within structural constraints. Unless we address those realities, interventions risk becoming yet another demand placed on families, rather than a shared responsibility.
The key message is simple but urgent: preschool expulsion is rarely just about children’s behaviour. It is about adult perceptions, strained relationships, and the biases that flow into decision-making. Suppose we are serious about dismantling the preschool-to-prison pipeline. In that case, we need to support teachers and parents together, because children should not bear the consequences of adults’ disagreements.
Abstract of the study:
Preschool children in the United States are expelled at a rate of about 250 per day with a disproportionate number being Black children. There is a need to better understand how to prevent preschool expulsion. Using a random-assignment experiment, preschool teachers (N = 95; 92% female; 61% White) were assigned to one of eight conditions: child race (Black vs. White) child gender (boy vs. girl) parental cooperativity (cooperative vs. uncooperative). Teachers read two controlled vignettes: one about a child and one about that child’s parents. The child vignette described the child’s challenging classroom behavior (identical behavior for all children); the parent vignette described a subsequent meeting with the child’s parents (half of the parents were described as uncooperative with the teacher and half as cooperative). After each vignette, teachers were asked to complete sections of the Preschool Expulsion Risk Measure (PERM) to assess two known risk factors for preschool expulsion: (a) teachers’ perception of the disruptiveness of the child’s classroom behavior and (b) teachers’ feelings of hopelessness about changing the child’s behavior. Even though the child’s challenging behavior was controlled (by experimental design), teachers’ construal of the child’s behavior and teachers’ feelings of hopelessness towards the child were significantly influenced by the descriptions of parental cooperation. Variations in results by child race and child gender are also reported. Findings indicate that teachers’ perceptions of parents may be a particularly important factor to prevent children from preschool expulsion.
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