Spillover Effects of State-Level Corporal Punishment Bans on Out-of-School Suspensions in US Public Schools

• In Event: Enforcing Equity in PK-12 Schools: An In-Depth Examination of the Office for Civil Rights

Abstract

Corporal punishment—physical punishment of children for disciplinary purposes—in schools is still legal in about 70 countries (Sorensen et al., 2024), including the US (legal in 15 states as of 2020). The amount of corporal punishment (CP) declined dramatically across the country over the last five decades, largely driven by state-level bans in the use of CP in schools that began in the northeast in the 1970s. Did the effects of these state-level CP bans spillover to other school discipline outcomes, such as out-of-school suspensions (OSS)? Studies have documented severe resistance to desegregation in the south (see McClellan, 2024), including the flight of Black teachers to the north or who left the profession altogether (Thompson, 2022). This could have likely resulted in an increase in the use of suspensions, especially among minoritized students, during this period. On the other hand, states that adopted CP bans had lower CP use even prior to the bans likely reflecting a shift away from punitive discipline practices in schools overall. Given these competing hypotheses, it is important to compare the rates of suspension (overall and by race/ethnicity) before and after bans in states that adopted the bans vs. not. Exploiting the variation in timing of the state-level CP bans in schools and the recently released historical data archive from the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), we ask if there are causal spillover effects of CP bans on the overall punitive school discipline environment. We use event-study models and doubly robust estimators (Callaway & Sant’Anna, 2021; Roth & Sant’Anna, 2023) to account for the staggered adoption of state-level CP bans between 1970 and 2020 to estimate causal effects of the bans on out-of-school suspension rates.
Preliminary findings show a statistically significant negative effect of CP bans on overall use of out-of-school suspensions (OSS) in US public schools over this time; however, this decrease is driven primarily by a decline in OSS rates among White students. The lower magnitude and precision of negative effects on OSS rates among Black and Hispanic students over this period is noteworthy. Even though the pre-trends in OSS rates between the states that adopted the CP bans vs. those that did not are parallel and comparable, we interpret these results with caution given that the bans were adopted on the heels of several other co-varying policies/changes at the state-levels. We include several adjustments to make clean comparisons to avoid negative weights on our event-study models. Additional robustness checks and examination of heterogeneity by grade levels, regions, political leadership, and other potentially, covarying policies are planned.
In more recent years, several states (and school districts) have adopted bans in the use of suspensions and expulsions in select grades, and/or for selective infraction types. However, most rigorous studies evaluating these suspension bans showed null (or less precise) effects in mitigating the long-standing racial/ethnic disparities in punitive discipline (Hashim et al., 2018; Lacoe & Steinberg, 2018; Steinberg & Lacoe, 2018). Our findings add to this burgeoning literature.

Authors

• Maithreyi Gopalan, University of Oregon

• Dajung Sohn, Pennsylvania State University

• Erica Frankenberg, Pennsylvania State University

• Michael Cattell, Pennsylvania State University