Rural Matters

First, let’s report the good news. Between school years 1988-89 and 2003-04, the number of kids who were physically attacked as a matter of discipline in Florida schools fell by 85 percent. The bad news is: That’s still 9,472 beaten kids.

By the way, that’s the number of kids who got hit, not the number of times they got hit, or the number of episodes in which they got hit. No one keeps those scores.

According to the Center for Effective Discipline (www.stophitting.com/disatschool/statesBanning.php), 22 states, mostly in the South and West, permit corporal punishment. The other 28 have come to their senses. In nine of those 22, over half the students are in districts that have banned it. Florida is one of those nine.

These data speak between the lines to a rural problem, and a closer look at Florida reinforces that view.

Forty-three of Florida’s 67 districts allow corporal punishment. But six of Florida’s seven largest districts, with over 100,000 students each and a total enrollment of half the state’s public school children, prohibit corporal punishment or don’t use it as a matter of practice. The seventh, Duval, serving Jacksonville, lead the state with 1,026 student victims in 2003-04. But that represented fewer than one percent of its 129,553 enrollment.

Contrast that with the state’s ten smallest rural districts that together enrolled only 17,053 students that year. They hit 1,258 kids, over seven percent of the kids in their charge. Three of those tiny districts did most of the damage. They struck 856 kids. Some of these numbers are staggering.

Gulf County District administered corporal punishment to184 kids – a different kid every day for the entire school year. One out of every dozen kids got hit.

Jefferson County District hit 273 of only 1,485 kids enrolled there – 18 percent.

But the trophy for madness goes to Hamilton County which pummeled 399 kids – more than two different kids on average every school day – a buttocks-numbing 19.4 percent of their 2,057 students got taken to the woodshed.

And I repeat, those are the number of kids that were hit, not the number of times kids were hit. Each of those 399 might have been hit a dozen times during the year.

Hamilton was almost, but not quite, as likely to hit a kid as it was to suspend one. It locked 448 kids out of school that year, and isolated 423 of them with in-school suspensions.

Like a lot of district level data, these are subject to reporting error. One superintendent thinks grabbing a kid on the arm is corporal punishment. Another thinks it’s not a reportable incident until you beat the kid with a stick.

But I think these differences are strikingly real, not just reporting errors. And it is a rural problem. Is that because rural parents expect – even want – harsher punishment? Is it because no one talks about these things in rural areas? Is it a rural code of respect for authority? How big a factor are race and poverty?

And how much of this goes on in ninth grade, that year before the No Child Left Behind mandated accountability test?

Florida has bragged about how it has boosted test scores and reduced the achievement gap between White and Black high schoolers. But Boston College researcher Walter M. Haney has shown statistically that Florida’s apparent gains are only the result of an explosion in the retention rate of low-income and minority students in ninth grade. Keeping the poorer test takers back “improves” the test performance of tenth graders. Haney calls it the Florida Fraud.

Are suspensions, beatings, and other disciplinary practices part of an instinct to get rid of poor test takers before they can ruin the state’s image as an education miracle worker?

We don’t know that. We don’t accuse. But we wonder.

And if it is, no one should assume that Florida is unique.