miserably mainly because parents and states have denied them the moral authority to discipline and teach their children.

Kicked Out of Preschool?
By Melissa Slager
In many ways, Joanah is your typical 4-year-old. He sees Spaghetti-Os as a fashion statement, not just a dinner option.
But an active nature complicated by attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD, can make him a handful some days.

For his former preschool, there apparently were too many "some days," which included defying his teacher's instructions and hitting classmates. After just a few months, the school's director called in Joanah's mother.

"They just seemed kind of intolerant," says Lori Napier, of Lakewood, Ohio. "He wasn't a holy terror. Basically, they couldn't handle him -- or didn't want to -- and asked me to remove him."

Joanah, then 3 years old, had joined the unlikely but populous ranks of expelled preschoolers.
Yale researcher Walter S. Gilliam says preschool programs exist to ready young children for kindergarten and the elementary years that lay ahead. So expelling a kid so young, even with problem behavior, just doesn't make sense.

"I can't think of a child who's more in need of a school-readiness program," says Gilliam. "It's like taking sick people out of the hospital."

More likely than a teen
More than 5,000 children were estimated to be kicked out of state-funded preschool programs in a 2005 study of the phenomenon by Gilliam. That's less than 1 percent of the total enrollment of the programs included in the study.
At the same time, preschoolers were far more likely to be kicked out of school than their counterparts in the K–12 system. The preschool expulsion rate of 6.7 per 1,000 preschool students was more than triple that of older grades.

"It shocks a lot of people," Gilliam says.

The study didn't look into the reasons for expulsions, but anecdotal evidence from preschools points largely to aggressive behavior, including biting and hitting, and other hard-to-control behaviors, such as running away.

Reasons for removing a child from preschool run the gamut, however. Gilliam recalls a 4-year-old who was expelled for having marijuana in his backpack. The boy's mother's boyfriend had hidden his stash there when police visited their home. The boy had no idea. But school policy sent him home anyway.
Perhaps more troubling is that Gilliam's expulsion rate calculations do not include students who were transferred to a special education program or other setting. They were simply booted. And that can start a vicious cycle.

"I've seen some children who were expelled from preschool after preschool, and then they got to kindergarten and they were expelled from there, too," Gilliam says.

The rates also don't touch on those families who leave just before the point of expulsion.