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Tuesday, December 15, 2015

The States Where Schools Are Still Allowed to Practice Corporal Punishment and Physical Discipline - The Atlantic

The States Where Schools Are Still Allowed to Practice Corporal Punishment and Physical Discipline - The Atlantic:
Where Teachers Are Still Allowed to Spank Students
Corporal punishment is legal in 19 states.





“But I wasn’t chewing any gum,” the 10-year-old begged, insisting he was innocent.
“You’re a liar!” the adult reportedly responded. “Now you’re really going to get it because you keep lying to me.”
In a scene more reminiscent of a Victorian orphanage or an 1800s one-room schoolhouse, the wooden paddle allegedly hit the child’s backside about a dozen times, each smack accompanied by wailing cries. The door to the hallway was only partially closed, allowing Liz Dwyer, a student at the time who says she witnessed the incident at Muessel Elementary School in South Bend, Indiana, to clearly hear the screams of the third-grader in the music room. Dwyer says she’s still haunted by the memory of corporal punishment over 30 years later. “I knew he didn’t have any gum,” she said, “but I was too afraid to speak up.”

Dwyer, the culture and education editor at the digital advocacy magazineTakePart, distinctly recalls “the swoosh of the paddle, the sound it made as it connected with [his] body… the sobs for mercy.” And she remembers the arbitrary and discriminatory nature of the punishment. “The reasons a kid could be yanked out of class… were inconsistent and petty,” she said. “If our [music] teacher thought a boy—and it seemed to always be a boy—was singing [a song] too loudly… if he seemed bored while he clanged the shiny metal triangle, or if he appeared a tad too enthusiastic while slapping a tambourine, the paddle would come out.”



These days, in the realm of harsh school discipline, suspensions, expulsions, and school arrests most immediately come to mind. Many believe paddling is an archaic punishment from a long-gone era. Federal education data confirms that incidents of corporal punishment reported by schools have declined significantly in recent years. But the practice is still widely in use—and for tens of thousands of public-school students, discipline that “deliberately inflicts pain upon a child” is not uncommon. As a result, education groups, activists, and parents—including those victimized by the practice—are demanding that corporal punishment be outlawed in schools to protect children’s physical and emotional health.




In the 19 states—mainly in the South, Southwest, and Midwest—where corporal punishment is legal, teachers and school officials have wide discretion in how and when to apply such discipline. That’s because of a 1977 Supreme Court case,Ingraham v. Wright, which found that spanking in schools does not violate students’ rights, specifically the Eighth Amendment’s “cruel and unusual punishment” clause and the Fourteenth Amendment’s right to due process. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, Berryhill Public Schools Superintendent Mike Campbell told the Tulsa World he finds paddling useful “for some children” and points to himself as an example. “I know I was paddled as a child, and I grew up to be a productive citizen,” Campbell said. Still, while there’s no formal policy banning corporal punishment in his district, Campbell and school leaders decided to phase it out a few years ago to reduce the likelihood of lawsuits and costly The States Where Schools Are Still Allowed to Practice Corporal Punishment and Physical Discipline - The Atlantic: