Eye-tracking technology shows that preschool teachers have implicit bias against black boys

For African American boys, the presumption of guilt starts before they have entered a kindergarten classroom, new research shows. In a study presented Wednesday to a meeting of education policy officials, researchers found that pre-K educators who were prompted to expect trouble in a classroom trained their gaze significantly longer on black students, especially boys, than they did on white students. When asked which of four videotaped children -- a boy and girl who were black and a pair who were white -- required their closest attention, educators black and white alike chose the study's African American boy most frequently. The study's white boy came in a distant second and two girls -- one white and one black -- drew the least scrutiny from the teachers. But when subjects in the new study were asked to rate the severity of a child's disruptive behavior and recommend consequences for it, race played a more unexpected role: African American pre-K educators, the study found, judged misbehavior attributed to a black child more harshly than did white educators.