Eight years ago, a mother named Tessa Davis got a call from her son's school outside Little Rock, Arkansas. He was in kindergarten, he had gotten in trouble, and the school gave her a choice: a three-day suspension, or a paddling. She could not afford to miss three days of work, so the family chose the paddling. "I just remember feeling like instant regret," she told NPR. Her son, she said, was afraid to go back.
That choice is still legal in much of the country. There is no federal law banning corporal punishment in public schools, so the decision is left to states and local districts. An NPR analysis found that 15 states have laws allowing it, while 30 states plus Washington, D.C., explicitly ban it, and the rest fall somewhere in between with no clear law and it's more of a gray area.
Where it is still legal
The states that permit corporal punishment are almost all in the South, and the practice is concentrated even within them. According to the U.S. Department of Education's Civil Rights Data Collection, there were almost 32,000 reported instances of corporal punishment on K-12 students in the 2021-22 school year, roughly one reported incident for every 2,000 students. Nearly all of those happened in about eight states, with Mississippi and Arkansas reporting the highest rates and states like Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Tennessee making up much of the rest.
Even where it is legal, it is usually not casual. Many states and districts require a parent to sign a consent form at the start of the year, and some administrators call home before each paddling. The federal count is also almost certainly an undercount, because not every district reports its numbers, and the data is dated: the most recent full release covers 2021-22, and the next one is running months late.
What the research says
On the effects, the professional consensus is not close. The American Psychological Association warns that corporal punishment can leave a child with the impression of being an undesirable person and can carry chronic consequences, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry advises against it. Joan Durrant, a child developmental psychologist who has spent her career studying the practice, said it does not do what adults hope. "It really fuels dishonesty," she said. "You learn how to lie. You learn to avoid punishment." She said it also models violence as a way to handle frustration, and that a large body of research links it to more aggressive behavior, not less, along with risks of anxiety, depression, and problems later in life. Durrant said the findings rest on hundreds of studies going back decades.
The federal data also shows the punishment does not fall evenly. Boys are paddled far more often than girls, and analyses of the civil rights data have found that Black and Native American students, and students with disabilities, are struck at disproportionately high rates relative to their share of enrollment. One 2021 study in the journal Social Problems went further, finding that counties with more historical lynchings were more likely to use corporal punishment in schools today, an association the researchers found was especially strong for Black students. The practice also carries an older, uglier history in American education, where it was once used to punish children for speaking Spanish and, in federal Indian boarding schools, to force Native children to abandon their languages and cultures.
Why it persists
Given the research, the obvious question is why 15 states keep it. Part of the answer is cultural. Morgan Craven, a policy expert with the Intercultural Development Research Association, said that in some Southern communities the practice is rooted in faith and long-standing norms, so "talking about ending corporal punishment in schools feels like some indictment of the way that they were raised." She noted that other communities in the same region are pushing hard against it.
Supporters also make a practical case. Randy Randleman, a licensed psychologist in Oklahoma who works with schools, is unusual among his peers in defending it, arguing that for a small group of students the mere threat of a paddling ends misbehavior. He calls it a last resort and says it should never be used except for deliberate defiance. David Vinson, superintendent of the small, high-achieving Warner Public Schools in rural Oklahoma, said the option lets students stay in class for infractions that would otherwise mean suspension. "The fact that we can paddle, I think, is a great deterrent to a lot of kids," he said, adding that it is rarely actually used.
Even its defenders draw lines. Warner's elementary principal, who keeps two handmade paddles, said a child is only paddled after repeated visits to his office and a call home, and supporters acknowledge the danger of it going too far. Asked about a 2025 case in which a Mississippi staffer broke a student's arm during a paddling, Randleman said it should have been stopped long before that point, while still opposing a legal ban.
Davis, the Arkansas mother, landed in a different place. She said the paddling did not work, and that spanking at home never had either. "The spankings never made the behavior stop, ever," she said. "In fact, it made it worse." Her family stopped, she now speaks publicly against corporal punishment in schools, and she said her son, now 13, has learned to manage his behavior better than she believes he would have otherwise. The debate she walked into is still unsettled state by state, which is what makes school discipline such contested ground. We have written about the calmer end of that same question in guides on what to do when your child is the one acting out and how schools and parents can work through behavior together, and on how support plans like a 504 plan or IEP change the picture for students with disabilities.
Sources
NPR: 15 states have laws that allow corporal punishment in schools. Here's where, and why
U.S. Department of Education: Civil Rights Data Collection
State-level figures reflect NPR's analysis of federal Civil Rights Data Collection data.
