In the early '90s, when I was named one of four Deans of Students at Green Valley High, then the newest suburban high school in Clark County, Nevada, I was issued a large paddle. The tan, wooden paddle's handle was about half a foot long. It's business end was oblong with sixteen bored holes in it. The assistant principal must have seen my expression of disbelief because she fast explained that the holes, and the air that would whoosh through them, would be what would keep me from inflicting "real harm". I shoved the thing behind a bookcase when the woman left my office and it stayed there until the day, two months hence, when I requested a transfer back to the classroom. The Dean's real job at that school, besides paddling, was to suspend in a week as many bussed-in minority students as I could get away with without my efforts garnering scrutiny from minority parents and, of course, from the media. I was poor at that job, too.
I'm brought back to that time today because the New York Times has a piece on school paddling. While the incidences of it are lower than when I was supposed to be doing it, many states (see below) authorize it and do it. Sometimes children are genuinely harmed. It depends, of course, on who's paddling. You and I have run into both decent and caring school administrators and we all have known sadists, too. One of those sadists, in Texas, smacked a teen so hard the boy fell and broke his jaw. His district's now in court.
One reason that the incidences of paddling are down is that child-advocacy groups are more active now in the states allowing it. Another reason is that parent groups and individual families have increasingly brought suits against districts that still insist that whacking teenagers' bums very hard dissuades them from chewing gum, back-talk, repeated lateness to class, and fist-fights.
In the '05-'06 Paddling Season, the US Department of Education reported 223,190 public school paddlings. That was twenty-percent fewer paddlings than there were just a few years earlier. The law suits have forced school people to consider other methods of discipline.
I've met children throughout my career in teaching and in both public and independent school administration who have committed some pretty awful and cruel acts. On a number of occasions I've recommended expulsion of students whose parents refused to partner with us to help their kids improve. I've never, not one time, thought that smacking a teenager with a wooden bat, bored holes or no, would teach any lesson other than physical violence is alright. I've never known a teenager for whom physical violence, committing it or modeling it, was a route to self-improvement. And the adults who tell you they were "straightened out" by violence from school people...they're lying.
_______________
Is your state here?
# % of all students
ALA 33,716 4.5
AZ 16 fewer than 1
ARK 22,314 4.7
CO 8 fewer than 1
FL 7,185 fewer than 1
GA 18,249 1.1
IDA 111 0.4
IND 577 0.5
KAN 50 .01
KY 2,209 0.3
LA 11,080 1.7
MS 38,131 7.5 [state with highest percentage of paddled students]
MO 5,159 0.6
NM 705 0.2
NC 2,705 0.2
OH 672 .04
OK 14,828 2.3
SC 1,409 0.2
TN 14,886 1.5
TX 49,197 1.1 [state with highest number of paddled students]
USA 223,190 0.46
NOTE: --Stats are from 2005-6 and are from the InfoPlease data base.
Max Rivlin-Nadler
Linda Seccaspina
nerd cred
SagCap
jmac1949
tg within
Salon.com
Comments
Second of all I grew up in the 'strap' era.
Lets move along.Corporal punishment is over
rated with hugs
We had one teacher who was so violent with the paddle he should have been arrested. Students were scared to death of him.
Today I have hundreds of former students on my Face Book page. I'm proud to say I never paddled any of them.
She did however have the unwitting assistance of public outrage on her side because a couple of months later a teacher at one of the local schools, while having an inappropriate relationship with a student, killed a student... with a hammer.
We have all heard the phrase "And the crowd went wild"... the crowd really DID go wild... and the legislature went with them. As did the governor.
Insofar as other school districts in Texas, each has its pros and cons re disciplinary actions; my kids' school utilizes a reward system in place for punishment whereby a verbal warning is issued before a student is sent to the principal's office only after a teacher files a formal written complaint against a student.
One of his typical conversations with a parent at work, and the miscreant sitting outside his office, with the knowledge that his parents are being called, goes like this:
“Ms. Parent?”
“Yes”
“Mr. K, here. I am the principal of the elementary school which your child attends.”
“Ohhhhhhh. . . yes! We met during orientation. . . . Sorry we missed all those Parent Teacher conferences. I am sure my son’s grades will improve soon. Is everything alright with my boy?”
“No. . . . . He’s sitting outside my office right now. He was showing his friends a 22 caliber bullet on the playground.”
“Ohhhhhhhh my goodness! We were slaughtering a pig yesterday; and he was interested in the pistol; so my father let him hold a bullet. He must have forgotten he had the bullet in his pocket before he came to school.”
“Yes, that’s what your child said. We’re suspending him for three days. You can come pick him up right now.”
“Well, ahhhhhhh, I don’t get off work until 4:30. And I don’t understand why you are suspending him. It’s not like he brought a gun to school. It was just an innocent mistake, I am sure.”
“Ms. Parent, perhaps you aren’t familiar with our school manual. I’ll send you a copy to the e-mail address you provided us two years ago when we last saw you or your husband. I encourage you both to read it.”
“Yes, we’ll certainly do that. . . . Although that sonofabitch slept with his secretary; and I kicked him out of the house.”
“Since you can’t come to us during school hours, you can pick up your son at the Sherriff’s office, District III. Their phone number is (602) 555-1911. Sergeant Noshit will be on duty. He’ll tell you how to get there whenever you’re ready to see your boy.”
“Ohhhhhhh my god! You can’t be serious!!!! I’ll be right there, give me an hour. . . . I am going to beat the ever living crap out of my son. . . . What am I going to do while he is at home for three days!!!!!!!?????????? Shit!!!!! I can’t miss work!!!!!! I can’t believe this is happening to ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
“Ms. Parent, don’t forget that both you AND your husband must meet with me BEFORE your son can return to class after his suspension. We’ll keep him here for the next 45 minutes before we call the patrol car to come pick him up. I look forward to seeing you soon.”
Mr. K is an ex-Marine – two tours in Vietnam as a noncom. He has a command presence. He can speak in an authoritarian manner.
As a result, Mr. K is effective when engaging parents in the lives of their children at his school. On many occasions, conversations such as the one I reported in the foregoing comment, lead to better home lives for the students involved and often result in a close relationship between Mr. K and the parents who were initially conscripted into his ‘boot camp’.
By the way, the foregoing story is true, as reported to me by Mr. K.
Mr. K's belief is that his school exists to serve its ‘customers’ – the parents. The academic progress of his students is his ‘product’.
Mr. K tolerates no disruption to the educational process in any of his classrooms. As such, he is supportive of his teachers when normal classroom management techniques do not work with students.
In this larger totality, corporeal punishment becomes unnecessary. Under this policy regimen, Mr. K cleverly turns over the worst discipline cases to parents for the administration of whatever punishment they deem necessary and effective.
Working parents seem highly motivated NOT to be forced to care for their children in lieu of attending to their jobs. Consequently, one trip through Mr. K's 'boot camp' is often all it takes to make a permanent, positive, change in the behaviors of both parents and their children.
The result is that Mr. K’s school performs at a higher level then most of the other schools in his district. Mr. K is one of my proofs that a little common sense goes a long way in public education in America today.
As a teacher yourself, all of this is likely no surprise.
Thanks for your post, especially for the compassion it advocates for students. Many forget that such compassion, along with increased support for teachers, are two components most easily implemented to enhance the academic result in any public primary school.
Chris
♥R
Congratulations on your EP!
rated
Good for you for hiding the paddle and congratulations on the Editor's Pick.
Best,
Buddy
The truth is, if the parents do the right sort of thing when these kids are in primary school and still under the full time care of their parents, they can teach them to respect the education they are getting.
The belief that schools are even responsible to teach your kids respect and ethics and the social interactions they need in order to attend school in the first place is about as lame as those who think whacking a teenager is going to make thiem change their minds about rebellion.
I know I got whacked in junior high, and from that day forwards, it was war.
Parents need to stop buying into the rhetoric that all the evils of our youth are connected to bad schools.
Public rhetoric and political hacks use the schools and the kids as tools for their crusades for vouchers schools and attacks on unions.
Of course you are goung to get kids who have no respect for the teachers or the insitutions. There are definitely schools that should be revamped.
But more likey administrators and some teachers need to be at the receiving end of those whacks themselves, just might give them an appreciation for using reason over fear.
But as a whole our failure is parenting and supporting of the teachers, by those parents who defend their childs actions, by relfex and social pressure to keep up the appearnces of being decent parents in the "keep up with the jones IQ" department.
Maybe if more folks actually backed the professionals and their assessments of those kids, as pre-teens the issues of discipline in schools would change.
And the need for whackings in junior high and highschool would be a moot point.
Not all kids are well mannered, not all kids are future doctors and engineers, and not all kids want to be rich or famous, some just want to have lives, be happy and raise families.
Maybe we should go back to educating and not trying to predetermine their futures and the political positioning of those kids?
If school was about discovery and thoughful free thinking, and the opening of thier minds, not the current score based brain mills we have forced them to be. Just maybe going to school would be an experience that we as parents appreciated again, and we might instill that in our kids too?
Change the rhetoric and the closed minded nature so many administators and fear mongers have set up our schools to be.
I grew up the hard way, so maybe my vision is skewed?
Kids did get the strap when I was in elementary school, so I was careful about that and it never happened to me. The principal loathed the whole process so much that he would literally cry himself when he had to (only after a snotty call from the school board) do it.
I think that if any teacher had hit me or my siblings, my mother would have torn the building down with her bare hands. The one real donnybrook she had with a teacher was when my Grade Six teacher took away a book I was reading in class, because it was "too advanced" and I "couldn't possibly understand it".
Mom pointed out that I had already read 3/4 of the thing, so if I wasn't understanding it I would have quit long since.
That teacher didn't come back in the fall.
I'm certainly 100 percent in agreement with you here, Jonathan. Good post!
If the principal's boss paddled him for the above mentioned crimes the principal would not hate him. If the principal's boss paddled him for being late the principal would hate him -- a violent assault over efficiency, mere office management.
Let principals contemplate these contradictions (and why some kids hate them forever).
There is a hole in the law against violent assault. There is provably no justification for the hole -- provably by the common policy in the worst hitting states (where 90% of the beating of girls and 75% of the beating of boys is for tardies) : it is often optional for the student -- take detention or suspension or a beating. If the school lets the student decide how can the school tell the courts that it is so necessary the court should allow a hole in the law against violent assault with a weapon?
Unfathomable social instinct can be at work on students here: if everyone else chose a beating over an hour's detention so would I. Instinctively must accept the same danger as the rest of the hunting pack? ??? Sometimes like in the famous YouTube video the student will miss a days work as with the boy or as with the class president girl miss the prom if they do not take a tardy bend over for a behind beating by the (male) principal. Sometimes a student fears even a tardy suspension may affect college admission. None constitutionally justifies a hole in the prohibition against violent assault -- especially on children.
I'm not sure what that assistant principal meant when the said the holes in the paddle--which most people recognize as something that increases force of impact--made it safer. That with less wind resistance the blow would be less likely to get "off target"? If so, what does that say about the velocity with which the paddle is typically slammed against children's bodies? And why don't any schools care enough about avoiding "real harm" to put some kind of padding on the student to protect their tailbone and upper legs?
Even if you accept the notion that corporal punishment is sometimes necessary, you'd think there would at least be some discussion as to whether paddling is the ideal form for it to take. After all, there are many ways to inflict pain on a child, such as mild electric shocks, many of which would arguably be more precise, safe, judicious and equitable than crudely whacking their buttocks with a wooden board--not to mention more in line with sexual harassment policies. Yet advocates of corporal punishment seem to be attached to this particular method of pain infliction and closed-minded to alternatives, for no better reason than because that's the way it's always been done and most likely that's how it was done them. I suspect that without that element of familiarity, the nature of the act would be too stark for most people's comfort. (What's more, with paddling you know the degree of pain you cause is a function of your physical strength, so there's more of an alpha-dominant vibe, whereas if electric shocks were the standard mode of punishment, it would be just as painful from the petite school librarian as from the burly gym coach. Where's the sport in that?!)
The NY Times article reports that an African-American school in New Orleans has rallied in defense of the practice of paddling. The sad irony there is that the spanking paddle itself was originally invented not for use on schoolchildren but rather as a tool for beating slaves. The idea was to have something that would inflict terrible pain without causing the kind of permanent tissue damage that could lower a slave's market value. While the corporal punishment of slaves has most often been portrayed as using a whip, it was also fairly common practice by the mid 1800's, at least in certain states, to use a paddle instead. (This will not be news to anyone who has studied American slavery in depth or seen the 1975 movie "Mandingo.") Although nobody would suggest that students today are paddled with the same degree of severity that slaves were, it is important to recognize that extreme severity is what this instrument was designed for. It is virtually unheard of, moreover, for school personnel to receive any professional training in how to paddle students, to be required beforehand to demonstrate competence at doing it safely and judiciously, to have their paddles inspected and held to any standards of size, weight, composition, or craftsmanship, and least of all to have the velocity of their swing measured. Thus, we can reasonably expect that paddlers will often times hit harder than they intend to, or in some cases, hit parts of the body they don't intend to.
Anyway, thanks again for posting this.
UnlimitedJustice.com is a National Campaign to End School Paddling of Children.
The very same act, hitting any person or animal with a wooden board to inflict pain, done in public rather than within the walls of a tax payer funded school building by those state actors paid tax dollars to be entrusted with the care and safety of schoolchildren is felony criminal assault, no matter who does the paddling.