Not enough information, but interesting.

[velvetpage]

I followed a link somewhere and came up with a page about corporal punishment in U.S. schools. It seems 21 states have not yet banned corporal punishment, and of those, about 13 use it on more than 1000 students per year.

While that is nothing short of appalling, I found one image even more interesting. It's the map of which states have banned corporal punishment, which punish fewer than 1000 students per year, and which punish more than 1000 per year. Here's the map.

Now, that map made me sit up and take notice, because it looked an awful lot like a memory I had of maps from a few years ago. So I went looking, and I found:

1) Not a single state that went blue in 2004 allows corporal punishment.
2) The states that have been Republican stronghouses for as long as I've been an adult almost all not only allow it, but have more than 1000 cases of such punishment per year.
3) The states that go back and forth between Republican and Democrat in recent years make up the bulk of the states that allow corporal punishment but practise little of it. There are states in this category that fall into all three categories on the corporal punishment map.

Now I want a study of the possible correlation between the state of the education system and the likelihood of states voting a certain way. This has peaked my curiosity.

Comments

[paka.livejournal.com]

I think you could also do an interesting comparison of corporal punishment by state, versus funding for the DoE per state, versus some sort of achievement per state. My theory is that states with less money available for public schools might not stack up as well, and might have a higher rate of corporal punishment as teachers and administrators attempt to maintain control in the most basic ways.

I do feel - as a proud graduate of the Georgia public school system - that the states which rely upon corporal punisment tend to rely on really rote instruction. This reflects a general social attitude which includes politics; it's not that southerners are innately right-leaning and that comes out in our predilection for beating the bejeezus out of the kids, it's more like the tendency to be right-leaning and to hit the kids both have their roots in the idea of teaching things simply by holding only one acceptable point of view.