By Andrew Pillow

People have been discussing police bias a lot lately. As it turns out, it may actually be a problem in preschools also.

According to a Yale study, teachers often watch young black boys and expect poor behavior.

The lead researcher, Walter Gilliam, didn’t let the teachers he was studying know that the real goal of his research was to measure implicit bias. Teachers were asked to rate the severity of behaviors in video segments of various students.

According to NPR, the results yielded the expected outcomes:

“What we found was exactly what we expected based on the rates at which children are expelled from preschool programs,” Gilliam says. “Teachers looked more at the black children than the white children, and they looked specifically more at the African-American boy.”

Indeed, according to recent data from the U.S. Department of Education, black children are 3.6 times more likely to be suspended from preschool than white children. Put another way, black children account for roughly 19 percent of all preschoolers, but nearly half of preschoolers who get suspended.

One reason that number is so high, Gilliam suggests, is that teachers spend more time focused on their black students, expecting bad behavior. “If you look for something in one place, that’s the only place you can typically find it.”

In another portion of the study, teachers were given background information about the child to see whether that changed how they rated the child. It did.

Read more about the study and its findings here.