One day, about eight years ago, when Tessa Davis' son was in kindergarten, she got a call from his school outside Little Rock, Ark. She said the school told her he had grabbed a girl's jacket in the cafeteria and twisted it – they thought he was trying to choke her.
Given his past misbehavior, Davis said, the school gave her two options: He could either be suspended for three days or a school administrator could paddle him. NPR is only identifying her son by his first initial, C, because this story details his behavioral struggles and how he's been disciplined in school.
Davis said she couldn't afford to miss three days of work to stay home with C.
"I was kind of at, just like my breaking point," Davis recalled. "I told my husband that he could decide what we would do. And he was like, 'Well, I was paddled, so give him the paddling.' So that's what we chose. And I just remember feeling like instant regret."
After the paddling, she said C was scared to go back to school.
"I just think he always struggled going to school then after that, for sure," his mom said. "I mean he struggled before, but afterwards I felt like, especially in that building, he was always more tense, more aware and afraid. … One time he told me that he didn't want to go to school there anymore because he was afraid that he was gonna get hurt."
The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry defines corporal punishment as "anything done to cause pain or discomfort" in response to a child's behavior. In schools, that often means a paddling.
There is broad consensus among psychologists that corporal punishment can be harmful to children, but the U.S. has no federal laws banning it in public schools. Instead, it's up to states and local districts to decide if it can be used, and many states and local districts still require parents to consent.
And while corporal punishment is much less common today than in the past – when it was used for everyday discipline as well as to punish students for speaking languages other than English and, in federal Indian boarding schools, to force Native children to assimilate – it still happens.
The most recent data from the U.S. Department of Education's Civil Rights Data Collection, or CRDC, shows almost 32,000 reported instances of corporal punishment being used on K-12 students in the 2021-'22 school year. That's about 1 reported incident per 2,000 students.
The public schools in C's home state, Arkansas, have some of the highest rates of corporal punishment in the country, second only to Mississippi.
An NPR analysis found that 15 states allow schools to employ corporal punishment, though the practice may be banned at the local level. Thirty states plus Washington, D.C., have passed laws that explicitly ban corporal punishment in all public schools. And the remaining states don't explicitly ban the practice – some have other laws that have been interpreted as bans, and others have no laws at all.
Almost all of the country's reported instances of public school corporal punishment happened in eight states – primarily in the South – according to federal data.
Morgan Craven advocates for ending corporal punishment nationally in public schools. She is a policy expert with the Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA), a group that promotes equal educational opportunities, primarily in the South.
She said that in some communities in the South, spanking or other types of corporal punishment can be rooted in faith-based beliefs or other types of community norms.
