No paddle

Legislators should pass bill stopping school spankings.

For nearly 40 years, Houstonian Jimmy Dunne has importuned Texas lawmakers to ban corporal punishment in Texas public schools, to no avail.

As a math teacher in 1981, he had a Damascus Road experience while paddling a student that convinced him beating a child was no way to address student misbehavior. He formed an organization that campaigned to end the practice, and over the years he has sent images of deep bruises on student backsides to state lawmakers to show the kind of injuries inflicted by paddling, testified in hearings in Austin and even held a demonstration of paddling on the Capitol grounds. He pushed the Houston Independent School District to end corporal punishment in 2001.

Dunne, 83, is still agitating for change and is optimistic that House Bill 420, authored by state Rep. Diego Bernal, D-San Antonio, could gain some traction beyond a committee hearing where previous bills have not. The bill would ban “hitting, spanking, paddling or deliberately inflicting physical pain” as a punishment in Texas public schools. Most corporal punishment is delivered using a 2-footlong wooden paddle.

“School paddling is clearly child abuse, and child abuse should not be tolerated at home or in school,” Dunne told the editorial board.

Texas is one of 19 states where corporal punishment in public schools remains legal. The state ranks just behind Mississippi among states that spank their students the most, according to the Department of Education’s 2013-2014 statistics on corporal punishment in public schools. And 31 states and the District of Columbia have stopped the practice, according to University of Texas at Austin associate professor Elizabeth T. Gershoff, whose research focuses on how corporal punishment impacts student development. The practice, which occurs in mostly rural areas, is not allowed in most Texas school districts, especially those in the major urban areas, she said.

According to a 2018 Education Week review of federal civil rights data released by the U.S. Department of Education, the percentage of K-12 students who are subject to corporal punishment in schools continues to drop. However, nearly 100,000 children were still spanked or paddled in schools in 20152016, and black students are still more likely to receive corporal punishment.

Gershoff said some Texas school administrators and state lawmakers defend corporal punishment as the only way to ensure that children behave in school. Studies have shown, however, that spanking improves neither students’ behavior nor their grades.

As Dunne has been saying for decades, if someone inflicted the kind of corporal punishment meted out to students onto a teacher, it would be called assault. That’s why Texas lawmakers need to put an end to spanking in schools and pass HB 420.