Use of Corporal Punishment in Schools

Re “My Special Education: Spare the Rod and Discard the Student,” Opinion, Feb. 2: Bravo to Ruben Navarrette! He hit a bull’s-eye! No amount of money given to schools for new programs, or for teacher salaries (which need increasing to keep talented teachers in the profession), or the false idol called vouchers will bring our schools up to world standards until the “teacher-student dynamic” is re- solved.

In my 25 years as a public school teacher (both here and in Australia), I have witnessed the teacher in the classroom being hamstrung by well-intentioned but misguided (even self-serving in some cases) advocates of children’s rights. While I am not ready to advocate spanking kids in school, I see nothing wrong with grabbing a student by the arm and forcing him/her into a chair. One of my colleagues recently witnessed an administrator racing after a student who was walking out of school during class. Unable to use his hands, the administrator was reduced to demands and pleas to return to school; naturally, the student ignored him and kept on walking. Where is that student’s education going? What has he learned? The administrator, by the way, has discovered how impotent he is.

The answer lies with everyone involved, beginning with the family and the community. Values have to change. Lawyers have to agree to back off and let us do our (difficult) jobs. Would they tolerate this kind of behavior in a courtroom?

MICHAEL DOTY

Oxnard

*

When Navarrette reflects on his experience as a four-week, long-term substitute teacher in a poor San Joaquin Valley town, he boasts of only one accomplishment: reducing one of his special education students to tears during a shouting match. His zero-tolerance discipline policy produced reactions ranging from anger to resentment to depression. He feels his experience qualifies him to recommend corporal punishment as the solution to our schools’ problems.

His story supports a different conclusion. He describes his students as “the throwaway kids whom no one wants to teach.” Was he the first long-term sub to whom they had been entrusted? At my South-Central Los Angeles high school, numerous teaching positions routinely go unfilled, because my urban students are also kids whom few people want to teach. Is it possible that a class on its second or third long-term sub perceives that no one wants to teach them? Navarrette should be glad that his students resorted only to disobedience and petty torments to dramatize their plight, and did not stoop as low as the violence that he wished to visit upon them.

It has been my experience that when we give students qualified, committed and sensitive teachers, they respond with respect.

SCOTT BANKS

Los Angeles