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George Holden, Psychology, Texas anti-paddling activists see little response to education secretary letter

Houston Press

Originally Posted: December 13, 2016

It might be easy to imagine that the age of corporal punishment in Texas schools is, at last, at an end. Representative Alma Allen (D-Harris) and Representative Eddie Lucio III (D-Cameron) have both introduced bills this session to ban corporal punishment. Last month, Secretary of Education John B. King sent a letter to officials urging the 19 states that still allow paddling in schools to end it, while more than 80 advocacy groups – including organizations representing women, people of color and disabled people – penned an open letter recommending the same.

But advocates for the end of corporal punishment say that while these letters were exciting, they have yet to lead to actual progress in Texas, where nearly 30,000 students received corporal punishment in the 2011-2012 school year, according to a Society for Research in Child Development social policy report.

“I did send an announcement around [about King’s letter] to other advocates around the country and I did send it to the news media here in Houston and Harris County, but there’s no response to it,” said Jimmy Dunne. (Houston Independent School District, like many other urban school districts in Texas, doesn’t allow corporal punishment, though other nearby school districts do.) Even so, Dunne was still happy that the letter came out at all. “That’s the first time that I know of a Secretary of Education actually doing something like that.”

Dunne worked as a math teacher at Houston schools in the ’60s and, he says, paddled students. Yet he soon started questioning the practice, especially after he saw another teacher paddle one student. “I witnessed another teacher paddling, like, an 11-year old. Five hard swats, and the boy would start crying and begging for mercy,” he recalled. “And I thought it was just a pitiful situation, so I complained to the principal about it. And then I went before the school board in January of 1981, and called it legalized child abuse and said it should be abolished. That’s how I got things started.” READ MORE