Still Legal, Still Used: America’s Schools Still Paddle Students in 2026

Fifteen states still let a teacher or principal strike a student with a wooden paddle as punishment, and the practice isn’t rare. According to the federal government’s own accounting, it happens tens of thousands of times a year.The tally comes from the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection, the government’s most comprehensive record of what takes place inside America’s public schools. The most recent full snapshot, covering the 2021-22 school year, counted close to 32,000 reported instances of corporal punishment nationwide — roughly one for every 2,000 students enrolled. The practice has vanished from most of the country. Where it survives, it survives heavily, concentrated in a handful of Southern states.Eight states account for nearly all of the country’s cases: Texas, with more than 11,000 reported instances a year, followed by Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Tennessee.“These states have deep-seated values that stem from religious beliefs on how to discipline and raise children,” a professor of social welfare and education at the University of California, Los Angeles, Ron Astor, tells The New York Sun. He points also to a strong regional belief in local control over school discipline and a preference for a punishment that is over quickly rather than one, like suspension, that pulls a child out of class.“Many adults who were paddled at school feel that it did not affect them in the way that researchers and others propose.”How, then, has a punishment banned across most of the industrialized world persisted this late into 2026, and why has Washington gone half a century without saying a word?What Half A Century Of Law Has Not SettledThe Supreme Court settled the constitutional question in 1977, ruling in Ingraham v. Wright that paddling a student did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, since that protection was written for convicted criminals rather than schoolchildren.The decision left the matter entirely to the states, and most of them, over the following decades, chose to ban the practice outright. New Mexico was the most recent, in 2011.Today, 30 states and the District of Columbia prohibit the practice by law, and 15 still allow it outright. A handful of others, including Indiana and Kansas, have no statute on corporal punishment specifically but leave school staff free to use “reasonable” physical force under broader discipline laws.Even where it is legal, the punishment is bound by rules which, in most states, require that a school employee witness the paddling. Policies are less consistent on parental consent: In some states, a parent must agree in writing before or after punishment while in other states, including Texas, parents are presumed to have given permission unless they file paperwork.Congressional testimony on the practice has described the standard implement as a wooden paddle roughly 15 inches long, two to four inches wide, and half an inch thick, with a six-inch handle, used to strike a student on the buttocks while the student bends over a desk or chair.It depends on the state, and the rules cut both ways. In Texas and North Carolina, corporal punishment is the default and parents must actively opt out. In the Port Arthur Independent School District, for instance, a parent must file a written statement each year if they don’t want their child to be subject to paddling.Florida went the opposite direction in 2025, when a law took effect requiring parents to sign an annual consent form before a school can paddle their child. Louisiana goes further, requiring written parental permission for each instance. In some districts, there’s no opt-out on the books at all; the policy applies to every student, and parents have no say.In Mississippi, an eighth grader named Trey Clayton was paddled three times by an assistant principal at his Tate County school, fainted afterward, and fell face-first to the floor, breaking his jaw and five teeth. He and his mother sued under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments but a federal appeals court rejected the case, ruling it was bound by Ingraham regardless of the injury.It is the pattern most such suits follow: Courts treat the 1977 ruling as settled law, and constitutional challenges to corporal punishment itself rarely succeed, no matter how severe the outcome.Defenders of the practice tend to describe it more narrowly than its critics. A licensed psychologist who consults for dozens of small Oklahoma school districts, Randy Randleman, has said he considers paddling an effective, last-resort deterrent for a small number of students who consciously choose to misbehave, and that removing the option leaves schools “at a disadvantage.”A rural Oklahoma superintendent, David Vinson, has said much the same about his district, roughly 70 miles southeast of Tulsa: It rarely uses corporal punishment, but the mere threat helps keep students out of suspension and in the classroom.There is, however, a requirement to record these incidents. The Civil Rights Data Collection is a mandatory survey that schools and districts receiving federal money must complete, authorized under regulations implementing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and enforced by the Office for Civil Rights since 1968.Still, the official count runs low because of issues of compliance and candor. Some districts file survey late; others simply decline to report the paddlings at all. The Racial And Disability DivideThe Civil Rights Data Collection does more than count incidents — it shows who is on the receiving end, and that breakdown has become central to the argument for a federal ban.In an earlier round of federal data, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that boys were struck four times more often than girls, and that within schools utilizing corporal punishment, black students and students with disabilities were struck at higher rates than white and non-disabled students.“It is also disproportionately used on male students of color and students with disabilities,” Mr. Astor underscores. “The data and research show how corporal punishment is often tied to issues of socioeconomic status, race, and ability.”A 2021 study published in the journal Social Problems cross-referenced county-level histories of lynching with present-day corporal punishment data. Researchers found that counties with a heavier history of racial violence were more likely to see paddling used today, particularly against black students.In Mr. Astor’s telling, the research leaves little room for interpretation.“It has many well-documented negative effects,” Mr. Astor says, listing lower academic achievement, impaired cognitive development, increased aggression, and eroded trust between students and educators. No school of education in the country trains teachers to paddle children, he notes, and no textbook grounded in current science endorses it. “Physical punishment activates the same stress response areas in the brain as severe abuse.”The American Academy of Pediatrics told the Sun that the organization is firmly against corporal punishment, referring to the practice as “not an effective or ethical method for management of behavior concerns.” The academy urges that it be abolished in every state by law.Suing over a paddling, however, is a difficult path. Courts have treated Ingraham v. Wright as binding for nearly 50 years, and constitutional challenges built on the Eighth or Fourteenth Amendments routinely fail as a result.A mother’s federal suit against the Port Arthur Independent School District, in Texas, brought on behalf of her nonverbal, autistic son, was dismissed in March. The case, Shields v. Port Arthur Independent School District, ran into the same wall nearly every corporal-punishment suit in the Fifth Circuit has hit since Ingraham. Courts there ask only whether school staff intended to discipline the student, not to harm him or her “for no legitimate pedagogical purpose,” a standard that, in practice, protects most paddlings from a constitutional challenge no matter how the families experienced them.Schools tend to face real liability only when the paddling breaks a rule beyond the corporal-punishment law itself. In Nevada, where corporal punishment is banned outright, the Clark County School District agreed in August to pay $1 million to settle a suit after a substitute teacher allegedly struck an autistic 13-year-old with a shoe.A Divide Washington Has Never ClosedWhat has not changed is the absence of any federal law addressing the practice directly. Bills that would ban corporal punishment in any school receiving federal money have surfaced in Congress periodically for more than a decade but have never reached a floor vote. In 2016, the Obama administration’s education secretary, John King ,sent a letter to governors urging them to eliminate the practice, citing its disparate impact, though the letter carried no legal weight.Some movement exists, if not much. In May 2025, a group of Democratic lawmakers reintroduced the Protecting Our Students in Schools Act which would ban the practice in any school receiving federal funding, representing the latest version of a bill that has failed to advance in some form since 2010. With Republicans controlling both chambers, its prospects remain the same as those of its predecessors: introduced, praised by advocacy groups, and left to expire without a vote.The United States is one of the only developed countries where school corporal punishment is still active policy, not just a legal technicality. Singapore is the country most often named alongside it. Its education ministry even expanded the rules this year, allowing schools to cane boys as young as nine as a last resort for serious bullying, with the new framework rolling out in 2027.The data collection in the United States, meanwhile, has become a flashpoint. The Department of Education normally releases the survey every two years, and the 2023 to 2024 update was significantly delayed, arriving without notice in early September — well past the usual cycle. Researchers say the holdup coincided with staffing cuts at the Office for Civil Rights, which oversees the collection, and the Trump administration’s plan to fold that office into the Justice Department, although the agency has not said what caused the delay. Researchers are still combing through the new numbers and haven’t broken out what it shows for corporal punishment specifically, so the 2021-22 figures remain the best national picture there is.For now, whether a teacher can legally hit a student for misbehaving still depends entirely on which side of a state line that student happens to sit.

Still Legal, Still Used: America’s Schools Still Paddle Students in 2026

Still Legal, Still Used: America’s Schools Still Paddle Students in 2026

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