NEWS & POLITICS

NOBODY BEATS ARKANSAS (AT BEATING KIDS IN SCHOOL)

THE SCIENTIFICALLY AWFUL PRACTICE OF CORPORAL PUNISHMENT TRAUMATIZES A NEW GENERATION.

BY AUSTIN BAILEY

THE HITS KEEP COMING: Arkansas schools ignore the science on spanking.

Arkansas 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 (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

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BRIAN CHILSON STOP THE VIOLENCE: After serving as the designated paddler at a campus where he taught, educator Jeffery Burton joined the push to end corporal punishment in Arkansas schools.

mom and occupational therapist in North Little Rock who serves with Aldrich on the board of the nascent group Arkansans Against School Paddling. Davis and her husband allowed a teacher to paddle their kindergartener son years ago, and the immediate regret launched Davis on a crusade to stop what she sees as a cycle of trauma inordinately visited on children of color and children with disabilities, both categories that fit her son.

Jeffery Burton, a school administrator and board member for Arkansans Against School Paddling, said a stint as what he called “the executioner” at a school where he worked opened his eyes to the racial disparities in how corporal punishment is doled out. As the one designated to do the paddling at a small, rural school, Burton said he quickly noticed that while Black students made up only a small part of the student body, they were

being sent in for what seemed like more than their fair share of the swats. “I don’t think the disparities are intentional, but they are alarming,” he said.

Burton’s experience is borne out in the data. While a 2018 study printed in the Journal of Education Research shows Black and white children misbehave at the same rate, Black students absorb more than their share of blows at the hands of educators. Black boys are twice as likely to receive corporal punishment as white boys, and Black girls are three times as likely to be hit as white girls.

Aldrich puts it bluntly. “It’s a racially discriminatory practice,” he said, an intregral component of the school-to-prison pipeline. In areas in the South that have legacies of racial violence, you can see the through-line to corporal punishment in schools. “It’s a residual part of racial violence in America’s past.”

Students with disabilities are also singled out disproportionately for physical punishment. In Arkansas, Act 557 of 2019 moved the needle in the right direction, prohibiting the use of corporal punishment against children who are “intellectually disabled, non-ambulatory, nonverbal, or autistic” but failing to protect students with other disabilities that could affect their performance or behavior in the classroom. That’s where progress stalled out.

So why do we continue to hit kids in school? Tradition is the most likely answer. We do it because we were hit in school and feel like we turned out OK.

“It’s hard to admit that perhaps the schooling

I experienced wasn’t the best schooling, so we end up prioritizing tradition over prioritizing our children,” Aldrich said.

The issue of corporal punishment in schools is a minefield in the culture war, but Aldrich said it shouldn’t be. One of his goals is to help to pioneer ways to talk about this issue that aren’t personal or triggering, but that focus on facts. What people choose to do at home or in church is not at issue here, he said. “We’re not talking about family or heritage or religion. We’re talking about school, and right now Arkansas is ranked near the bottom. We just want to help give kids in Arkansas a worldclass education, and there’s no place in worldclass education for corporal punishment.”

BLACK BOYS ARE TWICE AS LIKELY TO RECEIVE CORPORAL PUNISHMENT AS WHITE BOYS, AND BLACK GIRLS ARE THREE TIMES AS LIKELY TO BE HIT AS WHITE GIRLS.

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2022 READERS CHOICE PICKS REVEAL A HEALTHY RESTAURANT SCENE IN UNHEALTHY TIMES

At least the pandemic pounds Arkansas collectively packed on are well earned. This year’s Readers Choice picks reveal that while plans and routines went sideways during the COVID-19 era, we didn’t miss many meals.

You’ll find plenty of tried-and-trues among our annual survey of readers’ favorites, restaurants whose time-tested formulas keep diners returning year after year. As Vino’s owner Henry Lee knows very well, when you have something that works, you don’t need to mess with it. Rhett Brinkley and Lindsey Millar tell the story of that Little Rock institution through an oral history.

Newer restaurants and food trucks get plenty of love in this list, too.

YGFBFKitchen Restaurant & Catering in Conway launched on wheels four years ago and has already expanded twice, settling into a brick-and-mortar and attracting fans from far and wide. Owner MaryAnn Strange established her chef bonafides by cooking meals so good her girlfriend passed the dishes off as their own, Stephanie Smittle reports.

Searcy has been showing out lately, too, beckoning us, Lindsey Millar writes, with Knightfire BBQ and Wild Sweet William’s Bakery scones that dance like sugarplums in our dreams.