The Corporal Punishment of Minorities in the Public Schools

Corporal punishment is still legal under various circumstances in the United States public schools. This practice is specified in the discipline policies of cities and towns in roughly twenty-two states. Corporal punishment usually takes the form of paddling with wooden paddles or sticks by school administrators with the consent of the parents. Research has shown that this type of punishment is disproportionately administered to minority school children. White students are paddled with far less frequency. Boys are paddled more often than girls over all. This practice teaches school children that it is acceptable for larger, older people to inflict pain on small, younger people. The behavioral and social ramifications for future behavior are ominous.     

Fierce Urgency of Now: Building Movements to End the Prison Industrial Complex in Our Schools

This article argues that prison abolition and education must be thought and practiced together, now more than ever. Drawing on a forum, Without Walls: Abolition & Rethinking Education in Oakland, CA to dialogue about strategies to challenge carceral logics in classrooms and communities, this article contextualizes the intensification of policing and the criminalization of young people and communities that continues to reach into and beyond all levels of K-12 schools. We share a number of suggestions and starting places based on the ways many educators and youth advocates are building the capacity to challenge the prison industrial complex.     

Rethinking Safe Schools Approaches for LGBTQ Students: Changing the Questions We Ask

In this article the authors address the limitations of framing “the problem” of in-school LGBTQ harassment within dominant anti-bullying discourses. They offer a critical sociological framework as an alternative way of understanding the issues of LGBTQ harassment and propose a research agenda in which school culture and gender policing are the objects of inquiry.