Teach Effectively!

Writing from Everman (TX, US) Rick Lyman reported about the use of corporal punishment in schools. Mr. Lyman, who is a reporter for the New York Times (NY, US), described places where the practice of paddling students continues.

In a handful of districts, like the one here in Everman, there have been recent moves to reinstate it, some successful, more not. In Delaware, a bill to rescind that state?s ban on paddling never got through the legislature. But in Pike County, Ohio, corporal punishment was reinstated last year. And in southeast Mississippi, the Laurel school board voted in August to reinstate a corporal punishment policy, passing one that bars men from paddling women, but does not require parental consent, as many other policies do.

The most recent federal statistics show that during the 2002-3 school year, more than 300,000 American schoolchildren were disciplined with corporal punishment, usually one or more blows with a thick wooden paddle. Sometimes holes were cut in the paddle to make the beating more painful. Of those students, 70 percent were in five Southern states: Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama and Arkansas.

Mr. Lyman describes different viewpoints on the use of corporal punishment, including the opinions by evangelicals advocating it and the evidence offered by others (e.g., the American Academy of Pediatrics) against it. Based almost certainly on anecdotal evidence, some believe “it works,” meaning students no longer misbehave, I guess.

Whether corporal punishment deters misbehavior would an easy question to examine. In studying it, I’d also like to examine the other punitive methods of behavior management. And, quite importantly, I’d like to know what sorts of positive behavior management strategies are employed. In 1993-94, Jim Kauffman and a group of colleagues drafted a document addressing violence among children and how educators might address it; one of the recommendations was to eschew violence as a means of discipline. I’m still in agreement with that view.

Link to Mr. Lyman’s story (free subscription required). Link to the AAP policy statement on “Corporal Punishment in the schools.” Link to the violence statement by Porfessor Kauffman and others.