Nobody's mentioned yet the unconscious biases that exist when it comes to suspension/expulsion. There's a growing awareness that race, gender, perceived culture/class, and other factors impact how much empathy school officials have when interpreting negative behavior. For instance, people have trouble gauging the age of folks of a different race, and white people tend to overestimate the age of black children. So even when a white administrator knows objectively that the black boy sitting in her office is the same age as the white boys in his class, she may unconsciously hold him to a developmentally inappropriate standard of behavior. (And how many of you've had a little girl who preens when she's caught acting out, clearly waiting for us to melt in the face of her cuteness? That's behavior that's gotten positive reinforcement.)
All that to say, this could be
in part a ham-handed attempt to reduce the disparity in how children are excluded from preschool programs.
http://fortune.com/2016/09/28/how-ra...up-in-schools/