Some US schools resist ending corporal punishment
Associated Press
Two licks with a wooden paddle in the principal’s office was the price 11-year-old Kaley Zacher, of Dexter, Ga., paid for ignoring warnings about falling behind in her school work.
Rules are rules, said her mother, Kimberly Zacher, so why shouldn’t the punishment be the same as at home when her daughter falls out of line?
“What we instill in our children is if you break the rules, there’s a punishment that you have to suffer the consequences for,” she said. “You don’t want to give two sets of rules.”
Although corporal punishment in American schools has declined in recent decades, paddling is still on the books in 19 states despite calls from the U.S. Education Department to curb punitive discipline, which has been shown to affect minority and disabled students disproportionately.
“We know that the use of corporal punishment tends to be intertwined with other factors, such as a child’s race or disability status,” Deputy Assistant Secretary Tanya Clay House said Tuesday.
Black children were more than twice as likely to be corporally punished than white children, and nearly eight times more likely to be corporally punished than Hispanic children, the Children’s Defense Fund said in a 2014 report that analyzed 2009-10 Education Department data.
But in corners of the country where it remains deeply woven in culture and tradition, some school administrators say corporal punishment has broad support from parents, that it preserves learning time that would be lost to a suspension, and that they see little need to give up a practice that dates back generations.
“Corporal punishment is an immediate consequence to an action, and there’s no down time. ... It’s really pretty effective,” said Camille Wright, a superintendent in Enterprise, Ala., part of the mostly southern swath of states where paddling is allowed.
The U.S. Education Department, whose statistics show that more than 100,000 students are subjected to corporal punishment annually, has been urging schools through its “ReThink Discipline” initiative to create safe and supportive climates that emphasize positive behavior.
Several medical and human-rights groups have called for an end to a practice criticized as ineffective and potentially harmful.
Kaley Zacher said the paddling she received from her vice principal last year after missing several assignments and receiving numerous warnings left her shaken.
But did she get better about her work?
Yes, her mom said. “She talked about it for a couple of weeks, and she said she didn’t want that to happen again.”