End beating of children in public schools

In the report, Human Rights Watch and the ACLU cite experts on best practices in school discipline, who emphasize traditional approaches such as detention, and modern approaches such as positive behavior support systems. Positive behavior support systems, which are school-wide discipline systems that stress a clear structure of rewards and consequences for student behavior, have been effectively implemented in major US school systems. States and school boards that fail to implement best practices allow the status quo, or school beatings, to remain in place.
Human Rights Watch and the ACLU call upon the US government to prohibit corporal punishment in all public schools and urge state governments, school boards, superintendents, and administrators to eliminate physical punishment in their schools.
Selected Witness Accounts:
“He took me into the office and gave me three licks. … He made me hold onto the wall and he paddled me. … It hurt for about two hours, it felt like fire under my butt.”
– Matthew S., who was paddled in second grade for throwing food in a school cafeteria in the Mississippi Delta.
“The other kids were watching and laughing. It made me want to fight them… When you get a paddling and you see everyone laugh at you, it make you mad and you want to do something about it.”
– Peter S., a middle school student in the Mississippi Delta.
“What made me so angry: he’s three years old, he was petrified. He didn’t want to go back to school, and he didn’t want to start his new school. I was so worried that this was going to constantly be with him, equating going to school with being paddled.”
– Rose T., mother of a 3-year-old boy in Texas who was bruised from physical punishment after he refused to stop playing with his shoes in class.
“I went into the principal’s office. … He gave me a chair and said hold onto the chair. The paddle had holes in it. Then he just did three swats. … I was hit on my buttocks. … There were holes in the paddle to make it go faster. … It hurt very much. There were definitely red marks and then swelling… almost welt-like markings. It didn’t last for more than a couple days. … It left me feeling very humiliated. I think there were several levels of emotion. Physical pain, mental humiliation. … And being a female at that age, it was like there was this older man hitting me on the butt. That’s weird… even at that age I knew it was inappropriate.”
– Allison G., a recent graduate punished as a teenager in Texas for being late to class multiple times.
“I’ve heard this said at my school and at other schools: ‘This child should get less whips, it’ll leave marks.’ Students that are dark-skinned, it takes more to let their skin be bruised. Even with all black students, there is an imbalance: darker-skinned students get worse punishment.”
– Account of Abrea T., former teacher in rural Mississippi.
“I see corporal punishment as a form of slavery. Beating on the slaves was how the headman got them to do something… we’re focused so much on making kids do what we want. Think about the mental capacity that this kind of treatment leaves our children with. We are telling them we don’t respect them. They leave that principal’s office and they think, ‘they don’t consider me a human being.’ That young person loses self-respect.”
– Account from Doreen W., school board member in a Mississippi Delta town.

When I was younger, about 9 or 10, thats when they stopped paddling kids in Louisiana (my part at least). I can remember that the paddling didnt really have an effect on my behavior. Now dont get me wrong, I do believe in spanking, not beating, a child when he/she is young to teach them right from wrong, but only by a parent. This should go away when the child is old enough to understand that if he/she does something bad or something that will hurt him/her, there will be consequences. I have a 7 yr. old son and I havent spanked him since he was 3 and only when he could potentially hurt himself. But to get back to the point of school administrators (or anybody else for that matter) hitting my kid is completely out of the question, unless they want to get hit by me. There are plenty of other disciplinary actions that can be taken so that pysical force doesnt have to be used.

Many people in the south view corpral punishment as exhibiting Christian values. They use the quote "spare the rod and spoil the child" from the bible, to justify abuse. Hitting a child to improve their behavior doesn't work, it just makes them angry which makes their behavior worse.

fuck that. we need more beatings for those little bastards. they have no discipline at all.

Americans love violence. Dirty Harry stomps on a suspects bullet wound and we cheer. Joe Horn shoots two burglars in the back and we make him a hero. Don't like the gay kid in high heels, shoot him.

It seems not to matter what the infraction is, we believe we can correct it , improve it or some how make it better with violence.

Child mis behaves ............. whack him

crime ................................. shoot somebody

Foreign policy ....................Drop a bomb

We love violence. We celebrate violence. We prefer violence. We choose violence at every opportunity; first!

It starts with slapping our kids around and despite the advice of every expert, despite mountains of evidence that it not only does not work, that it simply perpetuates more violence, we continue to shoot first at every problem.

And we continue to find more efficient ways to administer violence. Four articles down, we are told about parents that have graduated to using a TASER on their kids!

We bow at the alter of violence and worship the god of vengence and retribution.

He who lives by the sword, shall die by the sword.

Today, the news reports yet another school shooting and we wonder why?

This is morally wrong. I don't understand how this sort of thing can still be going on.

In the 3rd grade, a class wannabe-bully tried to pull my chair out from underneath me, but I caught him doing it and avoiding the pain/embarrassment/whatever he was trying to cause by catching him in the act and just pulling my chair back underneath me before I sat down.

Shortly thereafter, he was called on to answer a question and had to stand up to do so. I seized the moment to exact my revenge and quietly moved his chair back while he was standing.

After answering the question, he went to sit down but busted his ass on the floor in front of the whole class instead as per my plan.

Since it happened right in front of the teacher's eyes as well, unfortunately this got me sent to the office for a "paddlin" despite the fact that he had tried to do it to me first and it was witnessed by all the other kids.

I guess success has its price.

Anyway, I was always a good kid, and the experience of being sent to the principle's office and being hit with a piece of wood still remains clearly in my mind as one of the most ignorant, primitive, and unjust experiences I had to bear witness to as a young man.

The fact that the other "troublemaker" kids got paddled all the time just makes me wonder what kind of society we live in.

The kids are idiots because their parents are idiots, and the schools and teachers sure as hell aren't helping things with their tactics.

You can't legislate morality- Not with a law or a paddle. Parents and communities are letting children down all across this country. There lies the problem.

America has the attitude that the responsibility lies elsewhere when punishing their children from so many years of excessive bleeding hearts getting them into trouble when they saw a mom spanking their child in public- sometimes a little humiliation is needed!

As for a principle or school administrator doing the paddling, well, I am not in agreement there. Of course if parents felt free to discipline children as they saw fit (Not abuse mind you) then perhaps there would be no need for this sort of discussion.

Too much double talk going on- on one hand our society calls any aggressive physical contact with a child abuse- on the other, they can't seem to get a handle on today's youth... I'm thinking there is some obvious middle ground here but the spin doctors are mucking it all up.

Look at the language here...End Beating of Children... we are talking paddling here- not beating. I'll bet most of these "When I was young..." comments are not without some exaggeration and melodramatic bits tossed in- I was paddled when only 8 years old- it was humiliating sure- but I got beyond that a long time ago.

Pity those who live in Texas...

Last year I listened to a report on NPR about a horrendous type of attitude of discipline.

If you are caught in a fight BOTH parties, bully and the kid being bullied get it.

It happened to me once in grade school in Dallas.
Probably for talking too much.

I hated Dallas.

Some of my teachers were real jerks.

Don't go to Texas don't even think of it!

Maybe it is time to move to the south. Here in CA your children have the right to destroy you and anyone else and there is nothing you can do about it. They fear nothing, respect nothing and have no boundaries - that is legislated reality. I got whacked on the backside in Jr High school - ONE TIME. I made sure I paid attention and was obedient after that. Glad my folks never found out. If a teacher wanted permission to whack my kids on the but, I would give it to them.

Wow, kids are still spanked in American schools? In 2008? Wow. Oh, OK mainly in the south. Somehow I'm a little less shocked now.

I am shocked that corporal punishment in publis schools still exists i thought that was only done in like the 60's and below. I graduated from public schools, makes me happy that I live in the north. If any of the teachers in my school tried that i'm sure the students from my district would retaliate.

Paddling special needs kids? That's just criminal! Lock 'em up!

"18.4 percent of the total number of students who were physically punished were special education students"

wow...I am glad I live in California, I didn't even know that this type of crap still went on.

I'm a victim of that, i remember back in the eighties, i just like all of the other kids got diciplined for acting up. But this here is a suprise, I cannot believe kids are still being beated in schools

not down for the spanking. but a cuff across the mouth for a dirty disrespectful little unparented shit........ not feeling much sympathy. it takes a village.

smack away.

While I see that Black students might be more likely to be beaten, I would like to see:
1. Where are these schools?
2. Are white or black students more predominant in such schools?
3. Are white or black Teachers more predominant?

I could highly, highly! See far more likely a black Teacher hitting a black student over a White teacher hitting a black student, and then at the same rate I would more likely see a white teacher hitting a white student than a black student.

Anyway, the question is: Which teachers have more accusations of beating students, white or black?

Once you know that, you can address issues in a by far, easier way.

99.9 % of the time, this is never practised in the UK.
Any teacher found out or doing this, is suspended or sacked. However, school kids have a process of elimination if they`re disruptive. If they are officially diagnosed with say ADHD, they`re "managed". If a
child is bent on causing trouble, there is a process of detenion. Beyond this, the parents are made aware and are financially liable. If this comes to nothing, the child is expelled. The parents may be forced to a parenting course at an appropriate college. Children with learning difficulties, go to a special school.

Having grown up in these school systems, it isn't practiced as often as they make it out to be, and ALL schools are required by law to offer an opt-out form should they participate in corporal punishment, which can be taken to court.

My mom encouraged the school to discipline me as they saw fit and I was the biggest little shit in school, or I at least tried to be. She only stepped in once to stop me from being expelled, but every other time she stood firm behind what the school decided to do.

I truly didn't care what the school did because I fought with them almost every step of the way, and they put up a good fight.

Threatening violence and using fear for the purpose of teaching disipline is so old school...The teachers, I understand, have it difficult some times, but they should face the challenge to break the cycle of violence and develop more creative ways of dealing with disiplinary problems. Even the thought of spanking a three year old is illogical...it's pathetic and should be prosecuted...

It's difficult to believe that our schools are still so backward...