I spent the last year trying to find out how often students are transferred to a new school as a form of discipline, a practice that allows districts to effectively hide expulsions under a gentler name. Most people I spoke with described the process as an issue affecting adolescents. But toward the end of my reporting, I spoke with a researcher who said the practice is rampant in preschool.

J. Luke Wood, a professor at San Diego State University, and a team of his fellow researchers interviewed parents of young Black children for a project unrelated to transfers, but the issue kept coming up. Parents of preschoolers kept telling the team they had been counseled to switch their child’s school to avoid a disciplinary record, but were assured this was not an expulsion

“It seemed like they were using voluntary strategies to make families think [the schools] were doing them a favor, when really they were doing the exact opposite,” Wood said.

Experts and early childhood advocates have long argued that discipline for the littlest learners is opaque. What information is available suggests that small children are routinely punished in school: A 2005 study by Yale researchers found preschoolers are more likely to be expelled than students of any other age group. And Black preschoolers are disproportionately represented among those kicked out.

Wood now calls transfers a significant issue. “We talk a lot about suspensions, expulsions,” he said, “but the dark part of this conversation is voluntary and involuntary transfers.”

In 2021, the team published “Suspending Our Future: How inequitable disciplinary practices disenfranchise Black kids in California’s public schools,” calling for transfers to be treated like other forms of exclusionary discipline and require clear public reporting.

In California, the state department of education asks schools to log every student transfer, but the categories for transfers overlap and none of the data is published online.

Public reporting, like that recommended by Wood’s team, would help clarify disciplinary transfers for many students. But more would be needed to document what happens in largely private childcare settings to the millions of children under the age of 4.

Read the full article about preschool expulsions by Tara Garcia Mathewson at The Hechinger Report.