Preschoolers suspended from school?

NIEER posted an article last week referring to the rate at which preschoolers get suspended from school for misbehavior.  Aren't the preschool years when children learn to recognize, understand, and properly express their emotions? Isn't preschool a time when children are learning self regulation?  Is it developmentally appropriate to suspend them from school and will they put the suspension as the consequence together with what they did?

"Suspending young students is a controversial practice because 3- and 4-year-olds are unlikely to learn from that sort of discipline, said Laura Bornfreund, deputy director of early education at the think tank New America.  For these children, "there's no connection between what kind of misbehavior a preschooler did in class to being suspended," so kids are unlikely to learn from their mistakes, she explained" (Emma, Simon, Severns, 2014).  You can read more about this article at http://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/civil-rights-education-race-equity-104879.html 

While the article really seemed to focus more on the discrimination of which races of young children are suspended more often, my heart sank as I realized how many preschoolers really are suspended each year.  The number in this article was an alarming 8,000 3 & 4-year-olds each year with 2,500 suspended more than once.

I watched a YouTube Video about the rate of preschooler expulsion from school.  It showed a rate of 2 out of every 1,000 K-12 graders are expelled compared to 27 out of 1,000 preschoolers.  Really?  We are suspending and expelling preschoolers at a rate of 1300% higher than school age kids?  Isn't preschool the age of teaching them social skills?  And yet we want to focus on academic core curriculum! You can watch the video for more information, I recommend the first 2:44 minutes of the video. Are Children Safe in Preschool? The Harsh Reality Requires New Skills .  While I may not agree with everything in this video, the reality that preschoolers are being suspended and expelled from school is something to be considered.  Are we doing our job as educators and parents to teach these children to regulate their emotions?

This led me to a search to see if others are recognizing this as a problem.  On The 2, February 2014, The Baltimore Sun newspaper published an article titled State task force will look at pre-K suspensions: Bill calls for a group to study punishment's effectiveness amid recent surge in city. They suddenly recognized that preschoolers were being suspended in the state at a high rate and worried that it was because programs and educators did not have or follow a discipline guideline to teach young children appropriate behaviors.  http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2014-02-01/news/bs-md-pre-k-bill-20140131_1_pre-k-suspensions-task-force-state-school-board

What's even more crazy, preschoolers getting suspended for reasons other than behavior problems. Look at this article in the Washington Post .  A three year olds gets suspended from a Montessori school for a month because she was having potty accidents.  Really?
These by far are not exceptions to preschool suspensions or expulsions. How about this article in the New York Times, or Chicago Tribune or USA Today.  This is not new research, not new thoughts.  Look at this article from May 2005 called Maybe Preschool is the Problem.  The truth comes out... we have taken away the block center and the dramatic play dress up clothes and replaced them with flashcards and alphabet and letter drills and busy desk work and expected children to be better prepared for school.  The push is now for children to no longer focus on social skills but to focus on academics and we think this will help them be prepared for school?  Maybe the new structure is the culprit to the behavior problems, especially when we are looking at children in poverty, homes with mental illnesses, inconsistent parenting, and many other problems.  Aren't these the children we are trying to help?  How are we helping them when we suspend or expel them?  Have we doomed them to fail for life?  If we don't help them, who will?
Maybe we blame it on the teachers who aren't equipped to handle the children as stated in this study and article.

Do we understand the purpose of preschool?  If children are being suspended, we are not understanding our role as educators, as parents, and as a community of what quality early childhood education really means.  Do we really just want to believe that it is academically focused?  What are the long term affects of this?  children getting suspended in preschool could have