FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 11, 2019
Contact: Owen Kilmer, SPLC
Owen.Kilmer@splcenter.org // (334) 956-8209
John McDonald, UCLA
JMcDonald@gseis.ucla.edu // (310) 206-0513
Report: Black students, students with disabilities among
most likely to be struck in schools practicing corporal punishment
Civil rights groups offer new insight into practice banned in majority of states
MONTGOMERY, Ala. – Children attending the small percentage of the nation’s public schools that allow corporal punishment face a much greater likelihood of being struck than previously understood, with black students and students with disabilities among the most likely groups to be struck, according to a report released today by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the University of California at Los Angeles’ Civil Rights Project.
The report – The Striking Outlier: The Persistent, Painful and Problematic Practice of Corporal Punishment in Schools – provides the clearest look yet at a practice outlawed in a majority of states and, even within states that legally permit the practice in schools, ban it in a host of other public settings for children and adults. The report includes a foreword by Derrick Johnson, president and chief executive of the NAACP.
The report found that at least one in every 20 children attending schools that practice corporal punishment were struck in 2013-14 and 2015-16. Black girls were more than three times as likely to be struck as white girls (5.2 percent vs.1.7 percent) during the 2013-14 school year. Black boys were nearly twice as likely as to be struck as white boys (14 percent vs. 7.5 percent).
Such racial disparities are troubling, because other research shows that black students do not misbehave more than white students. The report also found that in more than half of the schools practicing corporal punishment, students with disabilities were struck at higher rates than those without disabilities, raisingconcerns that they may have been struck for behaviors arising from their disability.
“These findings show that corporal punishment disproportionately affects the nation’s most vulnerable students,” said Zoe Savitsky, SPLC deputy legal director. “It also destroys a child’s trust in educators, which damages learning relationships. Quite simply, corporal punishment doesn’t belong in schools, and states should bring schools in line with the many other institutions, from foster care to juvenile detention, that already ban the practice.”
The report recommends that states ban the practice in schools and that schools use evidenced-based discipline programs as alternatives to corporal punishment rather than punitive disciplinary measures, such as out-of-school suspension.
“If an adult hit someone with a weapon, it’s considered aggravated assault. An educator using violence to discipline students, however, is considered corporal punishment, and we found it’s still happening over 100,000 times every year in public schools,” said report co-author Amir Whitaker, researcher with the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA. “Like other forms of discipline and state-supported violence, it’s disproportionately used on black students. The legacy of slavery and racial terror continues through its use, and decades of research finds the practice is extremely harmful to students.”
The report’s methodology differs from previous studies, which typically examine student populations at the state or school district level where corporal punishment was practiced – even when corporal punishment was only used in a small fraction of schools in those jurisdictions. That approach skews corporal punishment rates downward. This report only examined data from schools where corporal punishment was used, relying primarily on data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection from the 2013-14 school year.
Within the schools that practice corporal punishment, the report found about 5.6 percent of students were struck during the 2013-14 school year. The rates in individual states, however, were as high as 9.3 percent (Mississippi), 7.5 percent (Arkansas) and 5.9 percent (Alabama).
What emerges is a picture of a practice that remains deeply entrenched in the South. Ten Southern states account for more than three-quarters of all corporal punishment in public schools. Just four of those states – Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Texas – account for more than 70 percent.
“There are far more effective and safer ways to manage a classroom,” said report co-author Dan Losen, director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA. “That is why most public schools in the United States ban the practice.
“This report demonstrates how in most states that still allow corporal punishment of children of color and those with disabilities are frequently struck. They bear the brunt of this outdated and ineffective practice compared to their white and nondisabled peers. Our documentation of the uneven and heavy-handed practice suggests that the use of corporal punishment is likely violating the civil rights of public school children throughout the South.”
Mississippi alone is responsible for almost one-quarter of all corporal punishment. And nearly half (43.8 percent) of all black girls receiving corporal punishment in U.S. public schools in 2013-14 were in Mississippi (4,716 black girls). No other state came close to eclipsing Mississippi’s corporal punishment rate of black girls.
Despite corporal punishment’s ubiquity in the South, a review of the law in five Southern states that allow the practice in schools (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi) found that these states not only prohibit adults from striking children in most other settings – such as child care centers, foster care settings and juvenile detention centers – but often describe corporal punishment as inappropriate, abusive and unethical in such settings, the report found.
“This data should shock our conscience,” the NAACP’s Johnson writes in the report’s foreword. He adds: “[T]he impact of corporal punishment can be devastating on a student’s ability to learn and succeed. There are much more effective ways to promote positive behavior, ways that keep students safe and in the classroom.”
Thirty-one states have banned corporal punishment in schools, according to the report. In the remaining 19 states, there are nearly 8,000 schools within districts that practice it. Of those schools, however, almost 45 percent do not use corporal punishment. This means that children attending different schools in the same district can have vastly different experiences when it comes to discipline. One school may use evidence-based practices that provide positive, corrective consequences for students. But, at a nearby school, children engaging in the same misbehavior may be struck despite research showing the practice to be ineffective and unsound for education.
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The Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Alabama with offices in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi, is a nonprofit civil rights organization dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry, and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of society. For more information, visit www.splcenter.org.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Appalling
My first teaching job, just out of college, many years ago, was in a small town in rural Indiana where the students were mostly latch-key kids whose parents were uneducated, extremely low-paid workers in the one factory on which the town’s entire economy was based. The school had five remedial English preps, and being the new person, I got ALL OF THEM. Resting in every chalk tray in the school, in those days before whiteboards, was a large wooden paddle (est: 21 inches long) with holes in the business end and a leather strap on the other end to loop around one’s wrist. The school principal was FURIOUS when I refused to paddle students, and he informed me near the end of the year that FOR THIS REASON, he planned not to rehire me for the following year. So, at the end of the year, I submitted a letter of resignation. Technically, I wasn’t fired for refusing to batter children, but I came close.
Now, of course, except in a few backward schools, mostly in the South, the institutionalized assault on vulnerable children comes by means of standardized testing.
one way or the other…
Nice story Bob. The memory of how we used to look at things is vital for our picture of what things should look like. I started teaching in a public school in1987. When my acquaintances in the community would learn that I was a teacher, the primary response was to launch into a long dissertation on the breakdown of discipline due to the setting down of the “board of education”. None of these people had an education, and none of them ever set foot in a school. All of them trumpeted the declaration that “if I ever got a whippin in school they was anudin waiting on me when I got home.”
Any type of corporal punishment sends the wrong message to children. Education should not be about fear and intimidation. It is shocking that some states still use this barbaric practice on children including disabled children. There are other more effective and humane ways to deal with student conduct and classroom management.
This is an important study. It makes excellent use of the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) The CRDC does not have exactly the same categories for every data-collection year. The CRDC reports on corporal punishment go back to 1976.
I am sorry that this report did not take advantage of the fact that the CRDC includes reports from charter schools that receive federal funding. Perhaps the number of students in subgroups would be too small.
The 2017-2018 CRDC has these categories for reporting, unchanged from since 2013-14
Students who received corporal punishment:
1. Number of preschool students (ages 3-5 years) who received corporal punishment (disaggregated by race, sex, disability-IDEA, EL);
2. Number of K-12 students without disabilities who received corporal punishment (disaggregated by race, sex, EL); and
3. Number of K-12 students with disabilities who received corporal punishment (disaggregated by race, sex, disability-504 only, EL).
4. Number of instances of corporal punishment that preschool students received (disaggregated by all preschool students, preschool students with disabilities-IDEA).
5. Number of instances of corporal punishment that K-12 students received (disaggregated by students without disabilities, students with disabilities).
This study did not look at other categories for reporting on discipline including the use of: suspensions, school transfers, referrals to law enforcement, on-campus arrests, mechanical restraints, physical restraint, and seclusion. That data is available and much of it is disaggregated.
You can find a color-coded map of the districts that reported they used corporal punishment in 2013-2014 in the link below. I imagine the data is underreported because the reporting forms are long and entirely voluntary.
I recommend page 35 of the report for some familiar reasons that corporal punishment persists, and notably in the South.
This doubles as a map of areas of the country that are/are not civilized. Extreme caution is advised for those venturing into darkest Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
It’s little wonder that Sarah Hucksterbee Slanders, aka Miss Communications, is being encouraged to run for governor of Arkansas rather than go through treatment for her acute Liabetes.
This graphic is just astonishing. Places in the US where schools still beat children. Aie yie yie!!!
Corporal punishment is not lawful according to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Its Article 19 states: States Parties shall take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect children from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse, while in the care of parent(s), legal guardian(s) or any other person who has the care of the child.
The Committee on the Rights of the Child and other UN human rights treaty bodies, such as the Committee against Torture, systematically address states’ legal obligations to prohibit all corporal punishment of children. At the regional level, the European Court of Human Rights has condemned corporal punishment and handled its first case on physical punishment in the home in 1982. In 2009, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights confirmed the human rights obligations of member states of the Organization of American States to prohibit and eliminate all corporal punishment of children.
–Harvard Center for Health and Human Rights
I am curious: What about the social-economic level of the students’ families?
Meaning, do black children and children with disabilities that live in middle class or upper-middle-class families, where the parents have some college or are college educated, face corporal punishment at the same level as children living in poverty do?
Exactly the thought that entered my mind. It is easy to define Black and White due to data that are collected that way. Thus researchers often focus on that to ke p themselves from looking deeper. I always wonder about socioeconomic factors when describing what happens and to who .
I found a study that might provide the REAL answer explaining why more than 80-percent of public school teachers are white.
Most Popular Majors by Race and Ethnicity
Look close at the four lists and the answer is there. Only in the WHITE column do we see Elementary Education as a popular major. English is also an important major for many teachers who plan to teach in middle schools or high schools. English does not appear on the list for the most popular majors for Blacks.
https://www.clevelandfed.org/newsroom-and-events/publications/economic-trends/2015-economic-trends/et-20150331-racial-and-ethnic-differences-in-college-major-choice.aspx
Proof that the major reason there are not that many Blacks who become K-12 teachers is do to CHOICE and not racism at the K-12 public school level.
I find it interesting that most Asians and Whites do not seem interested in Criminal Justice but Hispanics and Blacks are.
Scroll down to the chart: Percentage of Bachelor’s Degree Recipients Majoring in STEM subjects, and what ethnic group has the smallest ratio?
Scroll to the end and discover the ethnic group that has the highest ratio of graduates who majored in Public Administration and Social Service Professions.
I’m reasonably certain that lower income people are more likely to have it used against them. I looked closer at studies that show how it leads to escalating violence later in life. For the past eight to ten years since it was down to about 19 states that still allow it (New Mexico was last to ban it in 2011 Colorado might be next now that Democrats have control of both legislature and Governors office.) the murder rates have been between 22% and 31% higher than in states that don’t allow it.
These states are also more likely to have, other types of violence including cops killing civilians or civilians killing cops and there was a 2002 study saying that they had more school deaths as a result of shootings than those without it. However from 2002-17 all ten of the shootings killing five or more people were in states banning it, which is very odd. In 2018-9 it swung sharply back in the direction of the 2002 study, with Parkland and the Texas shootings in states allowing it as well as most of the other ones.
I was raised in the culture of “spare the rod and spile the chile ” here in Tennessee. My parents, however, were not really of the community, and did not weird the rod as some did.
What I do recall was the first elementary teacher who rarely spanked. He was also the first elementary teacher I ever had who was male and carried the best educational background. He avoided a lot of trouble by having us organized and keeping us working..
Then in 7th grade, I had my first African American teacher. Mrs Smith was a wonderful teacher of grammar and part of speech. I still give her credit for my interest in th function of words in sentences, and I recall with fondness how rewarded I felt to put words in categories based on their form or function.
Mrs. smith made it her business to give special attention to the young black kids in the class, and it was, of course, the young boys that felt the sting of her “love” to their nether regions. She was bound and determined to turn this one boy into a good citizen. He was being raised by a woman of the community who raised almost everybody who needed it. Others she raised were still going rough school twenty years later when I started to teach. Mrs. Smith would get him up to accept his punishment and make him lie across a chair where she would whale away at him. He would whine and cry enough to earn an Oscar nomination and then turn his face to the class like a Shakespearian actor addressing the audience, winking and making funny faces to let us know he was unhurt. As good a teacher as she was for me, I do not think she ever understood how ineffective her punishment was for him.
More than any other experience, that memory informed me as I resolved to organize the misbehavior out of my students. Like Mrs Smith, I have been only somewhat effective.
Corporeal punishment also teaches to respond to problems with violence leading to much more child abuse, bullying, hazing domestic violence, and other forms of violence, even murder. For the past eight to ten years the states still allowing it had between 22% and 31% higher murder rates than those not allowing it. The murder rates have dropped steadily since the early nineties, which correlates with a period of about five years after the majority of the country banned corporal punishment in schools.
About a dozen states banned corporal punishment in schools between 1986 and 1990. The closest point, starting in 1991, when I found data, where the murder rates were only 2.26% higher in states allowing it than those not allowing it was in 1992 shortly after most of these states banned it. Combined with other research that shows this has long term damage teaching violence this leads me to strongly suspect the biggest reason for reduction in murder rates is eliminating it in schools and education to reduce it in the homes, while reducing child abuse.
Other studies show it impairs learning abilities, contributes to more depression, lower income and many other emotional problems. Professor James Garbarino said “I have made statements in public opposing using physical violence against children (I prefer to say that rather than use the term ‘corporal punishment’).”
He’s a child psychologist specializing in youth violence who interviewed a lot of kids in prison for murder or other seriously violent crimes, and also said “Most of these killers are best understood as untreated, traumatized children who inhabit and control the minds, hearts, and bodies of adult men.”
https://zacherydtaylor.blogspot.com/2018/12/research-on-preventing-violence-absent.html
We need far more discussion of this in the mass media, which could help reduce all kinds of violence, thanks for pointing this out. However I still disagree with your views that private institutions, controlled by a fraction of 1% that controls over 90%, should be allowed to decide for themselves what gets published and what doesn’t. If six oligarchs control this much media there needs to be a way for good academics to get their views across to the public.
Centralized authoritarian, for profit, control of the media is how they push charter schools through despite the research you point out, and how they withhold education that can save many lives.