15 states have laws that allow corporal punishment in schools. Here's where, and why

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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."

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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.

"There is this belief that corporal punishment … is not harmful at all, but is actually part of the expectation that some communities have for raising children," Craven said.

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Because of the cultural connections in these areas, she said, "talking about ending corporal punishment in schools feels like some indictment of the way that they were raised or what was passed down in their own families."

But not everyone accepts those norms. "There are also many communities in the South," she said, "who are pushing back against physical violence as a way to discipline children and really want to challenge those understandings."

"The spankings never made the behavior stop"

Tessa Davis said she and her husband both grew up in households that used corporal punishment, so choosing it for their own family felt natural.

"That's how I was raised, so that's what I was trying and it definitely was not working. … The spankings never made the behavior stop, ever," she said. "In fact, it made it worse."

Davis and her husband adopted C when he was a toddler, and she said he always had a lot of trouble separating from her.

"Crying, screaming, yelling, melting down, following me out the door, running out the doors, those kinds of things," she explained. "That was like a daily occurrence for him."

Which meant he often started the school day in a heightened state. "Always in fight or flight, for sure," his mom said.

After the paddling, Davis and her husband changed their approach to discipline. She said they no longer use corporal punishment at home, or allow it at school, and she started publicly advocating against it being used in schools.

"I still want him to be held accountable, but also in a way that's safe for him and for everybody else," she said.

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Today, C is 13 and he loves to dance – everything from musical theater and jazz to hip hop.

His mom described him as a helpful kid and good brother. He still struggles sometimes with his emotions or behavior, but she said he's now able to accept the consequences, which no longer include paddling.

Davis recalled a recent incident that happened at school – instead of trying to hide it from her, as he might have done in the past, he told her right away.

"I got home, he immediately told me, he immediately was very apologetic," she said.

"Then he also told me, you know, 'The assistant principal says I'm going to get a consequence.' And I was like, 'You know that's a bummer, dude, but you know, you can't do those behaviors.' "

Despite occasional outbursts, Davis said she thinks C has learned to regulate his emotions better than he would have had she continued using corporal punishment.

What the data shows

The best available data on corporal punishment in public schools comes from CRDC, and it dates to the 2021-'22 school year. CRDC traditionally publishes updated data about every two years, but the latest release, for the 2023-'24 school year, is more than six months late .

Even when new data is available, it's limited, because not all school districts report incidents of corporal punishment to the federal government.

The federal data that is available shows more than just how often corporal punishment may be happening. It also gives a sense of which students may be more likely to experience it.

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For example, an Education Department analysis of data from the 2017-'18 school year shows boys were more likely than girls to receive corporal punishment. And compared to each group's enrollment levels, white, Black and Native American or Alaska Native boys all experienced corporal punishment at disproportionately high rates, according to a federal analysis of data from the 2020-'21 school year .

A 2021 study published in the journal Social Problems used federal data to look at the relationship between a region's history of lynchings and the present-day use of corporal punishment in public schools. In counties where more lynchings occurred, the researchers found a higher likelihood of students experiencing corporal punishment at school and "that lynching is particularly predictive of corporal punishment for black students."

The negative impacts of corporal punishment

According to the American Psychological Association , corporal punishment "may create in the child the impression that he or she is an 'undesirable person'; and an impression that lowers self-esteem and may have chronic consequences."