Although black children only represent about 18 percent of the students enrolled in preschool, according to a study released on Friday by the Department of Education’s Civil Rights division, more than half of students suspended on multiple occasions are black.

The study — which includes 15 years of data collected from all of the nation’s 97,000 schools — indicates that the pattern of race-based inequality that begins even earlier than previous studies have suggested.

“Fourth grade failure syndrome” — in which achievement among black male students begins to lag as teachers’ perception of them shift from impressionable boys to “the would-be criminal, the oversexed, great athlete, and [the] academically unsuccessful” — has already been well-documented by academics. This new study by the Department of Education suggests that the “school-to-prison pipeline” begins even earlier, at the preschool level.

Posted by The NON-Conformist