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U.S. Education
Secretary John B. King, Jr.
The Washington Post
Education
Secretary calls on all states to abandon corporal punishment
By Joe Heim
The Obama administration Tuesday called for an end to corporal
punishment in states and school districts that continue to allow the
practice.
In a letter to governors and state school leaders, U.S. Education
Secretary John B. King, Jr., called corporal punishment “harmful,
ineffective, and often disproportionately applied to students of color
and students with disabilities.”
He urged states that had not yet ended corporal punishment — generally
defined as paddling, caning or otherwise using physical force to
inflict pain as punishment — to “eliminate this practice from your
schools, and instead promote supportive, effective disciplinary
measures.”
While corporal punishment is banned in 28 states and the District of
Columbia, there are 15 states that permit the practice and seven more
that do not expressly prohibit it.
A study published in January and released by the Brookings Institution
found that seven states accounted for 80 percent of in-school corporal
punishments in the United States: Mississippi, Texas, Alabama,
Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee and Oklahoma.
More than 110,000 students received corporal punishment in the
2013-2014 school year, according to the Education Department’s Civil
Rights Data Collection. Of those students, King wrote in his letter,
more than a third are black despite that group making up just 16
percent of the public school population.
The data also show that students with disabilities were subjected to
corporal punishment at a rate higher than students without disabilities.
“These data shock the conscience,” King said in a conference call with
reporters on Monday.
Read this and other articles, plus see the video, at The Washington Post
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