A Shocking Number of States Still Allow Public School Teachers to Spank Students

Last week, Kansas state Rep. Gail Finney
(D-Wichita) made headlines with
a bill explicitly allowing parents and caregivers, teachers,
and school personnel whom parents have given the greenlight to
spank or strike children to the point of “redness or bruising.” The
matter was met with swift derision from both
local and
national media.
John Stewart even got in on the game. 

Finney says folks are taking her bill—designed to protect
parents wrongly accused of abuse, particularly in custodial
cases—out of context. “The part that just really amazes me is the
number of people who have never really taken the time to even
actually read the bill,”
she told local TV news station KSN. 

The part that amazes me is how few critics acknowleged that
Kansas already allows both parents and public school
teachers to strike students. In fact, it’s one of 19
states that still permit corporal punishment (including
spanking and paddling) in public schools. 

PolicyMic has a nice
map of where school spankings are and aren’t illegal. The
majority of states that still allow it are concentrated in the
Southeast. And within these states, the meting out of physical
discipline is far from egalitarian. Rural students and boys are
more likely to get spanked than non-rural and female students,
according to PolicyMic analysis of data from the Civil Rights
Data Collection. Disabled and minority students are also
disproportionately likely to be struck by teachers.

In North Carolina, for instance, Native Americans make up only 2
percent of the public school population. Yet they received 35
percent of school corporal punishment in 2009, according to
PolicyMic. In a little of my own data digging, I noticed that
around the same number of black and white male students received
corporal punishment in South Carolina in 2009—despite there being
about 66,000 more white male students enrolled. In Louisiana, 2.4
percent of black male students received corporal punishment,
compared to 1.4 percent of white male students. 

PolicyMic’s Alex Collazo suggests it’s these types of
disparities that keep corporal punishment alive and well in
American schools (despite the fact that 80 percent of U.S.
parents and 72 percent of all Americans are against it):

“More privileged students with more privileged parents … are
rarely effected and thus unlikely to give the issue much thought.
Those most passionate about changing these policies may lack the
political power to influence the legislative or media agenda …
The next time corporal punishment in schools enters the news cycle,
think of the issue not as a controversy, debate or discussion,
but a continuing and pernicious failure of American-style
democracy.” 

For a deeper look at corporal punishment in U.S. schools,
check out the short 2013
documentary The Board of Education.