General Findings

Linda Pee was stunned and outraged by what she saw.

Her daughter, Audrey, had purple bruises from the paddling she had received at her school in Webster County, Mississippi. The sixth grader’s offense: She had been late for gym class.

The coach lined Audrey up with nine other tardy students and paddled them in front of their classmates. The blows were delivered with a paddle that appeared to be “a flattened baseball bat … a piece of wood about 15 inches long, three inches wide, and an inch thick,” the girl’s mother would later tell a congressional subcommittee in written testimony at a 2010 hearing on corporal punishment. 1

Audrey received a single blow.

“[Y]ou could see the mark of the paddle across her buttocks,” her mother testified at the hearing by the U.S. House Subcommittee on Healthy Families and Communities. Pee had previously signed a document allowing her daughter to be paddled, but didn’t expect what she saw: “[I]t never occurred to me she could be injured from it. I thought she would be safe in school.”2

She made it clear to the school that she would no longer allow her daughter to be paddled. And it wasn’t an issue for the next few years. In March 2007, with only a few months to go before graduation, Audrey was paddled. The young woman’s offense: She had worn sweat pants that exposed her ankles — a violation of the school dress code.

This time she received two blows.

“She was paddled in first period and she had bruises all over her by third period,” her mother testified.3

The school later said it couldn’t find the form she’d signed opting Audrey out of corporal punishment. As Linda reflected on the situation during her oral testimony before the panel, she summed up the experience: “I don’t think [anyone] should be hitting [anyone] else’s children. It’s not the type of decision teachers or principals should make — it’s too complicated and too much can go wrong.”4

In 19 states,5 however, educators in public schools are allowed to do what employees in many prisons, juvenile detention facilities, daycare and early learning centers can’t do by law — strike another person as punishment.

As more than half of the states have banned corporal punishment in schools since the 1970s, the number of students corporally punished out of all public school students in the country has declined from 4 percent in the 1970s to less than 1 percent in recent years.6 And more than 100 professional organizations representing pediatricians, child psychologists and educators have called for its abolition.7 In 2016, the U.S. Department of Education sent a letter urging state leaders to end corporal punishment in schools because of the practice’s link to harmful short-term and long-term impacts on students.8

But in those 19 states, corporal punishment remains a viable option for disciplining students. And each school year, a staggering number of students feel the sting of being hit at school more than 600 students a day.9

A new look at an old punishment

Where previous research has examined how school districts allow corporal punishment, this report examines it at the school level — eliminating schools that do not practice corporal punishment in districts and states that practice it. The report focuses solely on the public schools that use corporal punishment by examining data from the Civil Rights Data Collection at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which is reported to the federal government by schools and districts every two years. When examining a state’s or district’s use of corporal punishment, this report includes only schools within that state or district that practice it.

Most of the analyses in this report focus on data from the 2013-14 school year, but it also includes some 2015-16 data, to confirm the trends in corporal punishment. In the 2015-16 data collection, a new survey item regarding corporal punishment was introduced (discussed in the Methodology section), which can cause confusion in reporting and, occasionally, unreliable data.

In the 2013-14 school year, 4,294 schools reported students receiving corporal punishment, which amounted to a little more than half (56 percent) of the schools in the districts that practice corporal punishment. (More information about the analysis is found in the methodology section.)

What emerges is a greater — and more detailed — understanding of corporal punishment in schools that paints a bleaker picture. This report finds that, among students attending schools that practice corporal punishment, the rate of students struck in school at least once is 5.6 percent in the 2013–14 school year. This is compared to a rate of 3.3 percent among the states that allow corporal punishment, when schools that did not administer corporal punishment are included.

The report’s findings also provide a more detailed look at the disproportionate impact of corporal punishment on black students and students with disabilities. What’s more, its findings show that the likelihood of a student being struck in school appears to depend mostly on where the child lives.

A look at the states

Mississippi had the highest corporal punishment rate of all states examined — with over 9 percent of the students enrolled in public schools that allowed the practice struck during the 2013-14 and 2015-16 school years. In the 2013-14 school year, this amounted to 25,339 students out of around 270,000 students.

Mississippi not only tops the list for the percentage of students struck in schools, but also the overall number of students struck in school in 2013-14 nationwide. Texas, a far more populous state, struck 19,157 students in school that same year—6,000 fewer students than Mississippi, despite having almost 420,000 students enrolled in schools that allow corporal punishment.

Arkansas had the second-highest corporal punishment rate at 7.5 percent (14,849 students were struck in school out of 196,941 students enrolled in practicing schools). Missouri struck students in school at a rate of 6.1 percent (3,273 students out of 53,644), and Alabama at a rate of 5.9 percent (18,696 students out of 315,721).

A look at school districts

These state-level rates and numbers capture the differences in risk of being struck in school between one state and the next. However, among the districts where some schools still practice corporal punishment, there is greater variation in a student’s risk of being struck in school. Because these rates are annual numbers, and therefore a snapshot in time, the data presented here do not fully capture a student’s risk of receiving corporal punishment: they may not have received it in the 2013–14 school year, but if they are enrolled in a school or district that permits the practice, they risk being struck in school each year of their education.

With a corporal punishment rate of 56.8 percent, the Carroll County School District in Mississippi had the highest overall rate for any school district in 2013-14. The district had 532 students. Mississippi’s Yazoo City Municipal School District struck students at a rate of 41.1 percent, which represents a staggering 1,030 students struck in school out of more than 2,500 students enrolled. (While both districts made improvements in their corporal punishment rates in the 2015-16 school year, they remained above average statewide.)

This report analyzed the 25 school districts with the highest corporal punishment rates in 2013-14. Each of these districts struck more than one out of every five students. In other words, the risk for students of receiving corporal punishment in those schools was above 20 percent. At the East Jasper Consolidated School District in Heidelberg, Mississippi, for example, the district had a 31.4 percent corporal punishment rate among its 958 students – over 300 students were struck in school in just one school year. It was enough for the district to have the fifth-highest corporal punishment rate in the nation, among districts enrolling at least 500 students.

Overall, in ranking all of the districts nationwide by students’ risk of receiving corporal punishment, six out of the top 10 school districts were in Mississippi, and four were in Arkansas. This report also found over 75 school districts with at least 500 students enrolled had a risk for corporal punishment that exceeded 15 percent.

Above-average corporal punishment rates are often more pronounced at the school level. In over 200 schools enrolling at least 100 students each, at least one out of every five students was paddled in 2013-14.

Within districts that allow corporal punishment, some schools frequently strike children, while others don’t allow the practice at all. For example, there are over 7,717 schools (of all enrollment sizes) in the districts that still practice corporal punishment, yet 44 percent of those schools — 3,423 — did not strike any students.

This means a child could be enrolled in a school district that allows corporal punishment but never attend a school that uses it — it all depends on where the child receives their education. This fact is especially troubling because, as the research summarized in this report’s recommendations shows, corporal punishment in schools is traumatic and not educationally necessary. Other effective forms of behavior management are used in schools every day to help manage children’s behavior.

Wynell Gilbert noted as much when she testified at the same 2010 congressional hearing as Linda Pee. Gilbert, who was a science teacher at Erwin High School in Center Point, Alabama, at the time, emphasized the power of educators getting to know their students, understanding what motivates them, and using positive reinforcement to promote good behavior.

“I know firsthand the difference a teacher can make in the classroom without having to resort to the use of corporal punishment,” Gilbert said in her written testimony. “Even though corporal punishment is allowed in many Southern states, has it truly made a difference in student behavior? Based on my experiences as a teacher in a high school that was once known for its discipline problems, using corporal punishment is comparable to sweeping dirt under the rug: The problem still exists; it’s just being covered up.”10

And too often, the human factor involved in meting out corporal punishment in schools raises a more basic concern for parents, which Pee highlighted during her Congressional testimony. “You can’t know what mood the teacher’s in [when paddling a student], whether he’s mad and swings too hard,” she said in her written testimony. “And you can’t know how it’ll affect a child, whether a child will be bruised or injured or worse. This just shouldn’t happen in schools — not to anyone’s child.”11