Spare The Rod, Spoil The Child, New Mantra in GOP Assault on Schools
A school district in the “show me” state will bring back the outdated and counterproductive paddle to show students that they better behave.
Missouri is the latest red state to take a swat at education, and this time, it’s literal, while it also is the latest state to revise procedures in schools after public pressure from parents.
Parents who hit their children can be charged with domestic violence; physically abusing animals is a violation of animal rights laws. And corporal punishment is considered a human rights violation by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Schools are one of the last public institutions where corporal punishment is still legal. It has been banned in prisons and military training facilities. In most states, it is banned in child care centers, residential treatment facilities, and juvenile detention facilities.
These facts didn’t sway officials with the Cassville R-IV School District, a small, low income district located in southwest Missouri near the Arkansas border, which decided to allow parents to choose if district personnel can physically discipline their students. The district has the Supreme Court on its side, with the Ingraham v. Wright ruling in 1977 that the use of corporal punishment in schools did not qualify as “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Schools Superintendent Merlyn Johnson, who has been heading the district since 2011, previously taught GED classes to prisoners at the Arkansas maximum security prison in Newport, Ark. He went on to lead two districts before coming to Cassville.
“My goal is to represent what the voters want for their school,” Johnson said, “what they want for their kids, and honor their wishes — as long as it’s best for the kids.”
Johnson said he didn’t want his epitaph to read that he was the superintendent who brought back the paddle. The district had banned any form of corporal punishment in 2001 but Johnson said it is back by popular demand, after a survey of staff, students and parents in May showed support for bringing back the paddle.
Paddling and spanking are legal in public schools in 21 states, including Missouri which leaves the decision up to the local districts. The other states are a virtual mirror of the nation’s predominantly Republican, red states, including Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming.
A study by the National Center for Biotechnology Information showed that while corporal punishment is permitted in 21 states, it is much more pervasive across schools in some states, particularly Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi, where half of all students attend schools that use corporal punishment. Mississippi has the highest proportion of children experiencing school corporal punishment, where 1 in every 14 children is subject to corporal punishment in a single school year.
Missouri is bucking the national trend of states banning corporal punishment, including New Jersey, 1867; Wisconsin, 1988; Utah, 1992; Massachusetts, 1971; Alaska, 1989; Illinois, 1993; Hawaii, 1973; Connecticut, 1989; Maryland, 1993; Maine, 1975; Iowa, 1989; Nevada, 1993; District of Columbia, 1977; Michigan, 1989; Washington, 1993; Rhode Island, 1977; Minnesota, 1989; West Virginia, 1994; New Hampshire, 1983; North Dakota, 1989; Delaware, 2003; New York, 1985; Oregon, 1989; Pennsylvania, 2005; Vermont, 1985; Virginia, 1989; Ohio, 2009; California, 1986; South Dakota, 1990; Nebraska, 1988; and Montana, 1991.
As of 2018, New Jersey and Iowa were the only states that barred corporal punishment in private and public schools.
The U.S. Department of Education reported that there were 69,000 instances of spanking nationwide in the 2017–2018 school year and that half were in Mississippi or Texas.
The Missouri district will use paddling “when other means of discipline have failed” although “striking a student on the head or face” will not be allowed and the district said it is certain that there will be no “chance of bodily harm.”
The Missouri district’s decision comes in direct contrast to a directive issued in 2006 by the United Nations Commission on the Rights of the Child calling on governments to ban spanking and paddling. The 1977 U.S. Supreme Court decision left the decisions up to states.
The demographics are similar to school districts in many red states.
For the 2022 school year, the pre-K to 12 Cassville district includes four public schools serving 1,856 students. The district’s average testing ranking is in the bottom half of public schools in Missouri. That includes an average math proficiency score of 33 percent, compared with the Missouri public school average of 42 percent; and reading proficiency score of 46 percent, versus the 49 percent statewide average.
Minority enrollment is 13 percent of the student body with the majority Hispanic, which is less than the Missouri public school average of 30 percent, which is mostly African American.
The district revenues and spending also are below the state average. It gets $9,898 per student while the state median is $12,182. The district spends $9,520 per student, significantly less than the state median of $11,663.
The school district is based in Cassville and serves the communities of Cassville, Arrow Point, Butterfield, Eagle Rock, Emerald Beach, and Golden. An island in the Shell Knob also falls in the district boundaries.
Cassville is a small town, with a population of 3,190 as of the 2020 census. It also is relatively poor with the 2020 median income for a household at $27,351, and the median income for a family was $34,074. The per capita income for the city was $16,660 and about 12.3 percent of families and 15.4 percent of the population were below the poverty line.
A report by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), “Corporal Punishment in U.S. Public Schools: Prevalence, Disparities in Use, and Status in State and Federal Policy,” found that African Americans, boys and people with disabilities were the most likely victims of corporal punishment.
The Cassville district said it is certain that there will be no “chance of bodily harm” through corporal punishment but bodily harm is a subjective term. For instance, the Texas Education Code specifies permissible corporal punishment as, “…the deliberate infliction of physical pain by hitting, paddling, spanking, slapping, or any other physical force used as a means of discipline.” The Texas code allows school personnel to hit children with objects (“paddling”) and to use “any other physical force” to control children, as long as it is in the name of discipline.
The NIH report also found that students in elementary schools are the most likely targets of corporal punishment for a range of behaviors, from more serious issues like fighting or getting drunk on a field trip to relatively minor infractions like bus misbehavior, disrespect of staff, cell phone use, inappropriate language, being late to class, sleeping in class and failing to turn in homework.
The report noted that children have suffered from a range of serious injuries as a result of school corporal punishment, including bruises, hematomas, nerve and muscle damage, cuts, and broken bones. The Society for Adolescent Medicine in 2003 estimated that between 10,000 and 20,000 students require medical attention as a result of school corporal punishment each year.
According to the report, research has found corporal punishment is not effective at teaching children how to behave.
“The more children receive corporal punishment, the more likely they are to be aggressive and to misbehave over time,” the report said. “States that have banned corporal punishment from their schools have not seen a subsequent increase in juvenile crime over time.”
Missouri was a slave state and part of the confederacy and Cassville served as the Confederate capital of Missouri for one week from Oct. 31 to Nov. 7, 1861, when the confederate forces were pushed south by the invading Yankee army. A note of irony is that Cassville is the hometown of Clete Boyer, the best third basemen in N.Y. Yankees history. Missouri also is the place of birth of Chuck Berry, Sheryl Crow, Walt Disney, Edwin Hubble, Brad Pitt, Harry S. Truman and Mark Twain.
A state with a majority Southern Baptists, Missouri gained national attention in 2014 with civil unrest after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed African American, by a Ferguson police officer. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People later issued a warning to African-American travelers to Missouri, where “African Americans, Hispanics and other people of color are disproportionately affected by stops, searches and arrests” and where in 2017, “black motorists were 85 percent more likely to be pulled over in traffic stops.”
A return to corporal punishment is the latest development in a continuing, right wing assault on education throughout the country.
In Florida, schools were ordered not to teach about transgendered children or other aspects of sexuality while teaching about the ongoing destructive effects of racism and slavery also is no longer allowed.
In a Texas school district, police were called to a school library to “investigate” a graphic novel about a bullied gay teen. In Oklahoma, responding to a school censorship law, a teacher covered up her classroom library with a sign saying, “Books the state doesn’t want you to read.” She then resigned.
In another Texas district, a middle school deemed portions of a book by the man for whom the school was named — a grandson of former slaves who learned to read at age 98 — to be “inappropriate.”
In a Michigan town, librarians were targeted with abuse after it was reported that the library contained books on LGBTQ themes; the town then decided to defund its only library.