In parts of the 19 states where the practice is still legal, corporal punishment in schools is used as much as 50 percent more frequently on children who are African American or who have disabilities, a new analysis of 160,000 cases during 2013-2014 has found. Corporal punishment — typically striking a child with a wooden paddle — continues to be a widespread practice in disciplining children from pre-K through high school, according to a new study by Elizabeth Gershoff of The University of Texas at Austin and Sarah Font of Penn State University. The paper is published this week as a Social Policy Report by the Society for Research in Child Development.
“Some Americans may think corporal punishment is as obsolete as the one-room schoolhouse,” says Gershoff, an associate professor of human development and family sciences. “Yet public school personnel in 19 states — and private school personnel in 48 states — can legally hit children in the name of discipline.”
The new report analyzes data gathered by the Office of Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education from all 36,942 public schools in the 19 states where school corporal punishment is legal. The study assessed which school districts are using corporal punishment, and which children are punished using corporal punishment within these public schools.
[For more of this story go to http://news.utexas.edu/2016/10...unishment-in-schools]
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