Significantly fewer students are receiving corporal punishment in Alabama, according to a new dataset released by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights and analyzed by the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama. Still, Alabama paddles more students than almost any other state. Alabama is one of only 11 states where corporal punishment was used more than 100 times statewide in 2018. 1
According to the data, 9,168 students in Alabama K-12 public schools received corporal punishment in the 2017-2018 school year. That ranks Alabama No. 3 behind Mississippi and Texas in the number of students who were subject to corporal punishment. Across the U.S. almost 70,000 students were reported to have received corporal punishment in 2018, compared to almost 100,000 in 2016. Alabama’s number of reported paddlings dropped by more than 7,000, from 16,542 in 2016. That was the largest numerical decline among the states. Ten fewer Alabama school systems reported paddling students.
Why Is This Important?
PARCA provides analysis so public agencies can understand their policies in a wider context and identify best practices in order to improve performance for public schools, much of that analysis centers on student outcomes like graduation and on standardized tests. But beyond academic preparation, success in school is influenced by student behavior and a school’s response to misbehavior.
Last year, PARCA examined the use of out-of-school suspensions in school discipline. Educational research shows that out-of-school suspensions lead to missed instructional time and disengagement. Out-of-school suspensions have been linked to lower levels of achievement and higher dropout rates.2
Proponents view corporal punishment as a more efficient alternative. It has been found to effectively motivate students to comply with school rules in the short term. However, research shows that corporal punishment does not appear to change behavior in the long run, can adversely affect achievement, and may legitimize physical violence as retribution in school and society. 3
Questions of equity also arise. The data show Black students face a higher rate of punishment than white students in both suspensions and corporal punishment. A higher percentage of disabled students are paddled compared to non-disabled students. In recent years, most states, including Mississippi and Arkansas, have banned corporal punishment on disabled students.
National Trend Away From Corporal Punishment
The fall in the use of corporal punishment in Alabama and across the country is the continuation of a long-term trend and coincides with increasing calls for ending physical punishments in schools.4
Between 1971 and 2011, 30 states outlawed corporal punishment in public schools. New Jersey banned the practice in 1867.5
In 2016, then-U.S. Education Secretary John B. King Jr. wrote to governors and state education chief executives urging them to end corporal punishment in public schools, citing research that finds physical punishment ineffective and counter-productive.
The American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) have long recommended against the use of corporal punishment in schools. In 2018, the AAP issued a strongly-worded recommendation against any adults, including parents, using physical force to attempt to modify children’s behavior.
“Aversive disciplinary strategies, including all forms of corporal punishment and yelling at or shaming children, are minimally effective in the short-term and not effective in the long-term,” the Academy wrote. “With new evidence, researchers link corporal punishment to an increased risk of negative behavioral, cognitive, psychosocial, and emotional outcomes for children.”
Still Supported, Practiced, Particularly in the Rural South
However, corporal punishment continues to have supporters in local communities and in state legislatures. It is most common in rural, non-metropolitan school districts. Proponents argue that it is a decisive intervention that avoids separating students from school and classes, as does out-of-school suspension. Attempts to ban the practice in additional states have fallen short. Proposals for a statewide ban were considered but failed to pass in Colorado, Kentucky, and North Carolina in recent years.
Corporal punishment in public schools is still legal in 19 states, though in 8 of those states (North Carolina, South Carolina, Colorado, Arizona, Wyoming, Indiana, Utah, and Kansas), it is rarely, if ever used. In 2018, the 11 states where more than 100 students were corporally punished were concentrated in the Southeast, overlapping with the membership of the Southeastern Conference.
In terms of the percentage of students receiving corporal punishment, 1% of all Alabama students were paddled in 2018, ranking Alabama No. 3 behind Mississippi and Arkansas. But some schools don’t use corporal punishment. Looking only at the universe of schools where corporal punishment is practiced, 4% of Alabama students attending corporal punishment schools were paddled, which ranks behind Mississippi, Arkansas, and Missouri. Only a small number of schools use corporal punishment in Missouri, but the corporal punishment rate is high in those schools.
A Higher Percentage of Blacks and Disabled Students Receive Corporal Punishment
More whites than Blacks receive corporal punishment, and more non-disabled students are paddled than disabled. However, as a percentage of their enrollment in schools where corporal punishment is practiced, a higher percentage of Black students were subjected to corporal punishment in 2018 than white students.
The same is true for disabled students. A higher percentage of disabled students than non-disabled students were subject to corporal punishment, according to the 2018 data. In recent years, states have begun to ban corporal punishment of students with disabilities, including Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee.
The data on corporal punishment comes from the biennial reports submitted by schools to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. The reports gather a wide range of data from enrollment characteristics, to funding, to course offering and participation, to the application of various forms of discipline.
In Alabama, 223,000 students, or 30% of the state’s public school population, are enrolled in schools where corporal punishment is practiced. Alabama had a total of 1,384 schools submitting reports; 470 of them reported that corporal punishment was used in 2018.
The following dashboards can be used to explore the use of corporal punishment in Alabama in the 2018 data, explore maps, rankings by system and school, and make a closer examination of statistics for individual schools.
Non-Punitive Alternatives
A number of schools and systems in Alabama and around the country are increasingly turning to non-punitive measures that are more directly targeting underlying causes of student misbehavior and have been found to decrease disciplinary referrals. Examples include:
- Caring School Communities model 6
- Character education (see character.org)
- Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) 7
- Pre-K early childhood education
Among these approaches, PBIS has the strongest body of evidence, though in recent years the Caring Schools Community model, programs integrating academic and social-emotional learning, and student character education are showing promising results. PARCA is currently evaluating programs in Alabama associated with these models. PARCA’s pre-k research also suggests that students participating in Alabama’s First Class Pre-K are less likely to be cited for disciplinary infractions than students who did not participate.