Educator quits after refusing to paddle student

MERIDIAN, Miss. — The debate over whether corporal punishment has a place in American education became personal for Ralph McClaney when the Carver Middle School principal ordered him to paddle a sixth-grade student who had acted up in class.

"The idea of a big white guy hitting an 80-pound black girl because she talked back to the teacher did not sit well with me," said McClaney, who resigned his assistant principal's post rather than carry out his superior's instructions. "I decided I did not get my master's degree in education to spend my time paddling students."

A decision last month by the Canadian Supreme Court to outlaw the use of the strap by teachers has left the United States and a lone state in Australia as the only parts of the industrialized world to allow corporal punishment in schools, according to anti-paddling activists. While 28 U.S. states, including Washington in 1993, have outlawed paddling over the past three decades, the practice remains commonplace across much of the Southern Bible Belt.

10 percent paddled each year

In Mississippi, the nation's top paddling state, nearly 10 percent of students are paddled every year, according to statistics collected by the federal Department of Education. In poorer parts of the state, where a higher proportion of children are from minority and single-parent families, the use of corporal punishment is more frequent.

"The point is to get the students' attention, not to inflict pain," said Carver Middle School principal Earnest Ward. "Sometimes all you have to do is hold a paddle up and it will scare a student to death. Others are not afraid of it at all."

Although child psychologists say corporal punishment risks reinforcing negative behavior, many Meridian teachers and parents consider it an effective form of discipline, particularly at the elementary- and middle-school level. They maintain that three quick licks (the maximum permitted by the school board) with an officially approved, quarter-inch-thick wooden paddle often is preferable to keeping children out of class.

Then there is religion.

"Are we going to believe man's report or God's report?" asked Cherry Moore, a special-education teacher at Carver and co-pastor of a local church. She said she believes that Old Testament references to "spoiling the child by sparing the rod" should outweigh the allegedly negative effects of corporal punishment cited by child-development experts.

Studies have shown that there is a high correlation between paddling and poverty, and corporal punishment is more common in rural areas than in urban areas.

Although McClaney had taught in other Mississippi schools, mainly in the metropolitan Jackson area, he concedes that he felt out of place at Carver. The school draws most of its students from nearby housing projects. More than 90 percent are eligible for free and reduced-price lunches, a common measure of poverty. Three-quarters of the children come from broken homes.

"In other Mississippi schools where I have worked, the paddle was a dusty relic," McClaney said. "It was put on the shelf and used when the football player didn't want to miss the big game."

When McClaney was appointed assistant principal of Carver Middle School last summer, he did not realize he would be expected to paddle as many as 10 to 15 students a day, he said. When he sought other methods of disciplining students, such as detention, colleagues complained.

'Burn their butts'

According to written notes kept by McClaney, he received repeated admonishments from Ward, the principal, including comments such as, "These kids are different, all they understand is the paddle," and "walk the halls and, if the kids are out of line, burn their butts."

McClaney says he resigned Sept. 30 when it became clear to him that the alternative was to be fired for insubordination.

Ward refused to discuss his conversations with McClaney and described the resignation as a private personnel matter. He noted that corporal punishment at Carver is carried out in strict accordance with policies laid down by the school's Board of Trustees. The punishment must be carried out by an administrator, in his office, in the presence of a witness, and advance parental consent is required.

According to federal statistics, the use of corporal punishment has been in sharp decline since the early 1970s, when states began to outlaw the practice. In 2000, the most recent year for which figures are available from the Department of Education, 342,038 public-school students were paddled, down from 1.5 million in 1976. The figures do not include paddlings in private and religious schools.

"Under U.S. law, children are the only class of individuals who can be legally hit," said Nadine Block of the Center for Effective Discipline, a leading anti-paddling group. "Children have less legal protection than someone who is in jail, or in the army."

The top paddling states after Mississippi are Arkansas (9.1 percent of students paddled in 2000), Alabama (5.4 percent) and Tennessee (4.2 percent.)

According to Block, black students are paddled more than twice as often as other students, proportionate to the overall population.

Corporal punishment in schools is illegal in most of the rest of the world, and has been banned in most of Europe for several decades. Zimbabwe, Zambia and Pakistan have outlawed the practice over the past few years.

The Canadian Supreme Court ruled Jan. 30 that teachers could use "physical force" to restrain fighting students, but were not permitted to use disciplinary instruments such as a paddle or strap.

Court upheld paddling

In its most recent ruling on paddling, the U.S. Supreme Court said in 1977 that the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, applied to convicted criminals but not to students. It also ruled that teachers could punish children without parental permission.

McClaney, who came to teaching from a civilian job in the Navy, was loath to give up his assistant principal's post, which paid $53,000, "good money for Mississippi," he said.

When he asked the state Attorney General's Office whether he could refuse to paddle a student on grounds of conscience, he was told that there were no grounds for refusing "a valid, legal order" from his supervisor. A lawyer hired to represent him by the teacher's union gave him similar advice.

"In the end, I resigned because they made it very clear they were going to fire me otherwise," said McClaney, who is still looking for another education job.