A conceptual model to understand and address racial disparities in exclusionary discipline through teacher-child relationships

Abstract

Young children in the United States, particularly Black boys, are being suspended and expelled from early childhood education programs and primary schools at alarming rates. Teachers describe children's “disruptive” or “challenging” behavior as the most common reason for suspending or expelling a child. For this reason, common efforts to reduce exclusionary discipline target teacher behavior to change child behavior (e.g., improve use of evidence-based practices) or child behavior directly (e.g., learn self-regulation skills). In this paper, we argue that improving the quality of the teacher-child relationship is an alternative mechanism for addressing exclusionary discipline and mitigating racial disparities in the early childhood years. We propose and provide support for a transactional, relational model to account for exclusionary discipline. The proposed conceptual model intentionally names how teachers’ racial bias and children's stereotype threat, resulting from racialized classroom experiences, exacerbate coercive teacher-child interaction cycles for Black children. We apply this model to review and evaluate select teacher-child relationship interventions to identify opportunities and challenges these interventions present to reduce exclusionary discipline and mitigate racial discipline disparities. We end the paper with recommendations for future research to advance relationship-based solutions to the exclusion crisis in early childhood education.