Corporal Punishment in Public Schools in the United States

Corporal punishment has been present in public schools for decades. While certainly a diminished presence in 2025, it is still enshrined in state education statutes in at least 14 states as a legal way of disciplining students. This is in spite of research showing the harm in punitive disciplinary practices like corporal punishment (see here, here, and here). This brief will cover an overview of corporal punishment’s legal history, how corporal punishment has manifested in schools in the last several decades, and what it looks like today. We showed a snapshot of how state-level trends in CP by race/ethnicity has varied over the last decade in our prior brief on this topic.

Legal History of Corporal Punishment in Public Schools

While the Supreme Court has dealt with corporal punishment in other contexts, they considered its legality in schools in Ingraham v. Wright (1977). The case was brought by students in Florida who believed physical punishments levied against them in school were unconstitutional. These students were beaten so severely that, in an instance when mallets were used, a teacher fractured a student’s hand (see more about the facts here).

The 5 justice-majority opinion, authored by Justice Lewis Powell, ruled that:

1.)   The Cruel and Unusual Punishments clause of the 8th amendment does not apply to corporal punishment as a disciplinary practice in schools, and

2.)   The Due Process clause of the 14th amendment does not require notice or a hearing for a school to invoke corporal punishment against their students.

The majority opinion argued that the 8th amendment had, through 1977, traditionally only applied to criminal punishments, and declined to extend 8th amendment protections to students in schools. They argued that they would be “wrenching” the 8th amendment from its history and extending it to a place the writers of the Bill of Rights could never have envisioned. Countering the argument that prisoners would thus have more protections than school students, the majority states that public schools and the incarcerated are distinct; they are “…separated by the harsh facts of criminal conviction and incarceration”. “…[T]he support of family and friends…”, Powell writes, can sufficiently protect students from physical abuse at the hands of teachers and administrators. The Supreme Court has denied appeals attempting to overturn this decision since 1977.

In the years following the Supreme Court’s decision, many states took action to ban the use of corporal punishment in public schools. From 1983 to 1994, 22 states enacted bans on corporal punishment, joining 6 states that had previously enacted bans. After a lull, 6 more states passed corporal punishment bans between 2003 and 2023. All in all, 34 states explicitly ban the practice in public schools.

Some states, however, are permissive of corporal punishment in schools, particularly those located in the South. In the animated maps, southern states have higher rates of corporal punishment usage than other states that continue to allow its use. Alabama, for example, extensively justifies their corporal punishments protections in their statues, in part by saying, “[n]o student has a right to be unruly in his or her classroom to the extent that such disruption denies fellow students of their right to learn.” Other states are mute on corporal punishment’s use, either allowing it or banning it, such as Indiana and Kansas; the phrase “corporal punishment” exists nowhere in their statutes. Schools in these states have utilized corporal punishment, albeit minimally, within the last 10 years.

Corporal Punishment in Public Schools

Corporal punishment used to be a more common occurrence in public schools. In 1982, which had the highest nationwide corporal punishment rate among all students according to the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), 1 in 20 students experienced corporal punishment. Black students have experienced higher rates of corporal punishment than any other ethnoracial group in every CRDC since 1976, which is the first year any data on corporal punishment rates are available. This tracks with other patterns of punitive discipline we see in schools, where Black students experience higher rates of exclusionary discipline than their peers, especially their White peers. Black students in the South bore the brunt of this discrimination during this time, especially once states in other parts of the country began banning the practice in public schools.

Corporal punishment in recent years, however, in public schools is considerably lower. Much like corporal punishment at its peak, this impact is unequal. We published findings in 2024 showing despite declines in corporal punishment in schools, Black and American Indian/Alaskan Native students experienced slower rates of declining corporal punishment rates than did Asian, Hispanic, and White students.

Conclusion

Corporal punishment’s prevalence in schools has been quite diminished compared to 50 years ago. In 2018, the CRDC revealed approximately 70,000 students were subjected to corporal punishment. Despite this, it is still permitted in more than a dozen states, and permissible according to Supreme Court precedent. What is encouraging, however, is how nearly 70% of states (34) have banned the use of corporal punishment in schools, most recently Idaho and Colorado. It will likely require formal bans in all states to fully eradicate this punitive type of punishment that disproportionately affects students of color.