Understanding factors differentiating retained and excluded children following behavior warnings from early childhood education programs

• In Event: Soft exclusions, hard solutions: Examining the precursors to and solutions for exclusionary discipline in early childhood

Abstract

To date, research into early childhood expulsion has relied mostly on program- and teacher-reported, descriptive data. Studies elevating parents’ voices make up less than 10% of current publications (Zinsser et al., 2022). Rare too are data that allow for the comparison of experiences of children displaying challenging behaviors who were ultimately retained or excluded by childcare or preschool programs. Given disparities in who is most often expelled (i.e., boys, Black children, and children with disabilities; Zeng, 2019), it is important to understand whether and how program retention and exclusion efforts differ across child-, family-, and program-level characteristics. The present study utilizes a unique dataset collected from parents whose children all received multiple behavioral warnings in preschool to identify patterns not only in who is excluded and retained, but how parents experienced various program actions intended to support a child’s behavior.
Methods:
A sample of U.S. parents of children under age 8 were recruited through a survey panel firm. For this study, we use the term parents to refer to all biological, adoptive, or legal guardians of the target child. Eligible parents (N=218) were those whose child had received at least one behavioral warning while enrolled in an ECE program (age 0-5) and completed a survey about their exclusionary discipline experience and personal and program characteristics (see Table 1).
To answer our research question, we built three, hierarchical logistic regression models assessing for factors at the child-, family-, and program-level, parsimoniously reducing the model by removing variables not statistically significant at each stage of the hierarchy. Lastly, we ran a best-fit model including only those variables significant after all three stages of the hierarchy. All analyses were conducted in R. Additional analyses are still underway that examine the moderating roles of children’s race and disability status.
Findings:
Results found that children who were ultimately retained were 1.81x more likely to be cited for “refusing to nap” (OR= 0.55, p < .05). Being enrolled for 9-12 months before receiving a behavior warning (OR=0.13, p < .05), changing classroom routines to support behavior (OR=0.27, p < .01), implementing a behavior reward system (OR=0.44, p < .05) and a referral to special education (OR=0.24, p < .05) were all significantly more likely to occur for retained children. Excluded families were significantly more likely to feel pressure to withdraw their children (OR=4.30, p < .05) and be told the program was a ‘bad fit’ (OR=8.04, p < .01). See Table 2 for full results. We will continue exploring moderating factors, such as race and disability status, as these groups disproportionately ECE exclusion.
Implications:
Results highlight the differential ways that programs respond to children who are ultimately retained and those who are excluded following behavior warnings. Findings could provide insights for licensing bodies and technical assistance providers (e.g., Infant/Early Childhood Mental Health Consultants) as to the types of policies and procedures most associated with the successful retention of all children. Future work should include both caregiver and program reports and could also be incorporated into teacher training.

Authors

• Elyse Shenberger, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Velisha Jackson, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Sarai Coba-Rodriguez, The University of Illinois Chicago

• Kate Zinsser, University of Illinois at Chicago