NEWS & POLITICS
NOBODY BEATS ARKANSAS (AT BEATING KIDS IN SCHOOL) THE SCIENTIFICALLY AWFUL PRACTICE OF CORPORAL PUNISHMENT TRAUMATIZES A NEW GENERATION. BY AUSTIN BAILEY
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rkansas educator Tate Aldrich cringes when he hears people throw around the statistic that 19 U.S. states still allow corporal punishment in schools. While technically accurate, the number is wildly misleading, he said. Most of those states stopped spanking schoolchildren long ago and simply never got around to codifying the shift. Even where it’s still legal and still done, the use of violence as punishment in schools declined steadily in most places over recent decades. That’s not the case in Arkansas, where we continue to beat our students at chart-topping rates. In the 2018-19 school year, the Arkansas Department of Education reported 13,692 uses of corporal punishment in Arkansas public schools. “Arkansas is one of the minority of states that allows any kind of corporal punishment,” Laura Kellams, director of Northwest Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, told state senators last year. But lawmakers pushed back on a bill shielding children with disabilities from suffering violence at the hands of their educators, suggesting that children with disabilities should be treated the same as other students as much as possible and therefore should remain subject to the same physical threats. What if parents want teachers to hit their kids, Sen. Charles Beckham
THE HITS KEEP COMING: Arkansas schools ignore the science on spanking.
(R-McNeil) asked, before suggesting an opt-in amendment for the pro-spanking set. The bill died in a House committee. Scanning the data on who gets paddled and how often quickly becomes disheartening, and damning, too. Arkansas children have it rough. While 96% of school districts nationwide prohibit corporal punishment, in Arkansas, 67% of districts have policies specifically endorsing it, Aldrich said. An award-winning classroom teacher turned Ph.D. candidate at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, Aldrich pored through policy handbooks of the more than 250 public school districts in the state to get a handle on where Arkansas teachers and administrators are still pulling out the paddle. While the Little Rock School District prohibits corporal punishment and Fayetteville schools haven’t spanked a child in decades, corporal punishment is common in small and rural districts throughout the state. Arkansas could hardly be in worse company here. “We’re in a small minority,” Aldrich said. “Texas, Arkansas, Alabama and Mississippi report more than 70% of all corporal punishment administered in America’s public schools.” Widespread distaste for Arkansas’s heavy hand with corporal punishment became evident
in 2018. The national spotlight fell briefly on Greenbrier after three high school students joined in a nationwide walkout one month after 17 students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School died in a mass shooting. The Greenbrier students’ punishment for joining in the gun violence protest was a paddling. In an age of research and in-depth studies, when educators look to scientifically proven best practices in hopes of gleaning the highest possible test scores and graduation rates, corporal punishment makes zero sense. Piles of studies reveal that hitting kids in school is linked to worsening academic performance, higher absenteeism and dropout rates and mental health problems. There’s no apparent upside, no evidence of any positive outcomes. Hitting as a disciplinary tool is the only issue on which schools turn a blind eye to science and research, Aldrich said. “There’s a national push for sensitive, traumainformed instruction, for relationship building, for data-driven best practices. All of that contradicts the belief in corporal punishment. There’s absolutely no education research that shows any benefit to corporal punishment,” he said. “That we are allowing grown adults to hit children is baffling to me,” said Tessa Davis, a ARKANSASTIMES.COM
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