Journal of Disability Policy Studies, Ahead of Print.
Maintaining a safe and orderly school environment is challenging. In response, some schools resort to aversive punishments, including corporal punishment. Limited research has examined whether or not corporal punishment is disproportionately administered to certain students, particularly students with disabilities and black and Hispanic students. Therefore, we leveraged the most recent U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights data from the 2015–2016 school-year to evaluate disproportionate corporal punishment. We restricted the data to schools that reported at least 10 corporal punishment incidents and calculated risk ratios comparing students with disabilities to students without disabilities, and black and Hispanic students to white student. Then we estimated a series of robust variance estimation metaregression models and found evidence of statistically significant disproportionate corporal punishment administered to students with disabilities and black students. The largest risk ratio was for students with disabilities, indicating that they are much more likely to receive corporal punishment.