Marc Ecko Launches 'Unlimited Justice' Campaign To End Corporal Punishment In Schools

Alarmed that corporal punishment is still used to discipline students in many U.S. schools, fashion designer Marc Ecko has launched a campaign to end the practice.

ABC News reports Ecko's campaign, Unlimited Justice, features a website and mobile app that offers information and tools to encourage Americans to take action to end corporal punishment pressuring state legislators to ban physical discipline.

Teachers are still legally allowed to use physical force to punish a student in 20 states across the country.

WATCH:

Comments

[TheN8tureBoy]

10:44 AM on 03/31/2011

He uses stats on his website but it is pitiful emotions-based drivel. "Students who are paddled have a higher likelihood of dropping out of school." I need stats on that. I'm sure it is true but I'd love to counter that dropouts are the ones with the worst behavior and receive the most discipline. I'm sure it is also true that kids who get put in time-out are also more likely to drop out.

Ecko, you are a fool.

[Ann Thurlow]

09:11 AM on 03/31/2011

I doubt that anybody defends corporal punishment as a pedagogic tool anymore. All you have to do is compare the list of states where it is permitted with the states' educational performance statistics and see that there is close to an inverse relationship. I am repeatedly shocked by parents who endorse paddling in schools (parental consent is required almost everywhere), and who allow anyone else to inflict it on their children. I oppose corporal punishment on principle, but confess to having occasionally whacked a well-padded bottom. I can't imagine granting anyone else the right to do so, and would have reminded anyone who attempted it that no deadlier creature exists than a mother who sees someone imperiling her child.

[TheN8tureBoy]

10:45 AM on 03/31/2011

Thank you for the emotionally charged argument.

[Laura Hanna]

12:44 PM on 03/23/2011

But getting spanked was the only part I looked foward to!

[Godheard SentU]

01:53 AM on 03/15/2011

*"Most people in the US don't even realize that paddling children in school
remains legal in 20 states"
* http://www.unlimitedjustice.com/facts/

Mr. Marc Ecko,
Awesome website! Loaded with facts and other valuable information. I had no idea it existed in the US. Thank you for your time and effort.
It will be a Great day when this barbaric practice is outlawed everywhere.
Cheers

Special Thank you to Huffington Post for bringing this issue to your viewers attionion.

[EmmaNYC]

11:53 AM on 03/12/2011

Another arrogant non-educator who has made too much money off the middle class and now has too much time on his hands. What to do? Inflict his personal opinions on hundreds, if not thousands, of schools, children and teachers.

Regardless of anyone's feelings about corporal punishment in schools, the last thing the conversation needs is the forced-upon-us 'concerns' of a billionaire dress designer. The state of education in the U.S. will not improve until the 'gazilliones' who had trouble getting through college themselves stop telling professional educators what they should do and how to do it.

Go cut a pattern, Marc Ecko!

[brrr]

11:27 AM on 03/15/2011

or its possible that he wants to use his celebrity to make an impact

[EmmaNYC]

10:49 PM on 03/15/2011

He can make all the impact he wants. Just let him stick to skirt length, his area of expertise.

[DianaLynn1967]

09:58 PM on 03/20/2011

"Regardless of anyone's feelings about corporal punishment in schools, the last thing the conversati­on needs is the forced-upo­n-us 'concerns' of a billionair­e dress designer."

Well, if no one else is doing it, I'm glad that he is. Also, if these "professional educators" are so smart, why is it that the only technique they have for teaching a child right from wrong is to smack that child around? Can't they come up with a more intelligent solution to the problem?

[Lizzy28]

09:02 AM on 03/12/2011

Two words: Straight, Inc.

Well worth the search.

[CLSayles]

09:50 AM on 03/11/2011

I went to a Catholic elementary school and I have mixed emotions on this. The Nuns got on our butts, but we knew what he had to do to avoid the trip down the hall to the Head Mother's office. We just had to behave in class...

[El Chingaso]

09:33 AM on 03/11/2011

Corporal punishment...is the tool of choice for the mentally deficient and issue-ridden (which describes many in education circles, believe it or not). If an adult cannot use mind over matter with a kid -- yes, psychological motivation -- then they shouldn't even be working in the field to begin with. Please bring back sanity to this issue...

[Paul Provence]

12:20 PM on 03/10/2011

I was paddled when I was in school (rural Oklahoma) and I taught for years in a school in Mississippi where corporal punishment was the norm.

The only problem I have with it is that it's ineffective. Kids hit each other (all in good fun) much harder than a teacher or administrator legally could.

[VanTroi]

11:35 PM on 03/10/2011

Really? kids needed medical care? I have a problem with someone hitting kids in general. The teacher in this case seems to enjoy hitting the kids, hits one everyday. that's not discipline that's someone being a sadist. Hitting a kid so hard that they are black and blue is ABUSE. Try that crap in NYC or NJ, the parents would deal with the teacher accordingly.

[2ewdee]

08:26 PM on 03/22/2011

Yes, I remember the teacher who paddled me. I realized that even back then she had some really deep-seated issues, particularly, with a child like myself being as bright as I was. A lot of kids were terrorized by her paddling which she was more capable of than teaching. I got back at her when after I was told to bend over in class, ( public humiliation added) I refused to cry or let one tear roll out of my eye. The class was awed. When she figured out what was going on, she immediately stopped. Then it was back to being forced to sit in class alone while others went out to recess told write some sentence over again one hundred time. What did I do wrong ? I don't even remember. But generations later, I believe that these are amongst the main reasons parents have no trust in their kids teachers and that teachers are practically demonized these days causing the education system, particularly the public education system to further decline.

[VanTroi]

12:17 PM on 03/10/2011

Spanked for getting a bad grade??? The kid is black and blue! So beyond outrageous.

[DarkKarma]

11:59 AM on 03/10/2011

Marc loves to have his bottom spanked !

[carmenalex]

11:57 AM on 03/10/2011

I grew up in a Catholic school. All the nuns would be in the yard at recess and lunch time with belts and would whip us willie nilly if we got out of line. I remember once I had a red rubber band in my hair and since the uniform is strictly black and white a nun felt it her duty to "discipline" me by ripping the band out of my head along with more than just a few hairs.....all this did was induce sick fantasies of me wielding a belt and beating all the nuns with it.

[buzzardwhiskey]

11:47 AM on 03/10/2011

I still remember the sadistic f&*k who beat me with a paddle in eighth grade. I was a precocious kid from Detroit who had moved to a sparsely populated county in rural Ohio. He was a physical education teacher who’d been pressed into service in an embarrassing “history class”.

He lost his patience with the room as a whole and in a moment of the amazing slow-motion transformation of screaming rage to completely calm revenge he asked the straight-A weird kid to come out into he hall where he told me to bend over.

He was sick. His whole life had been sickened by violence – parents, teachers, his whole world. And that sickness did its best, like any virus, to spread and jump from one host to another that day.

[DefeatDems2012]

11:10 AM on 03/10/2011

Spanking should only be between two consenting adults. With that said, I grew up in Nigeria where corporal punishment is the norm in schools, I turned out just fine.

[Lizzy28]

09:05 AM on 03/12/2011

Your first sentence blends well with your second.

[supportamerica]

09:38 AM on 03/10/2011

Several years ago I was hired to "teach" 12, 13, and 14 year old boys in a special ed class. The first class I was sent to, before starting work , was a self defense class on how to protect my self. I was locked in a room with 10 students for the entire day, with an intercom ,my only link to the administration office. I am only 5'1' and some of these students were much larger than I.

The funny thing is, that I never had to use corporal punishment on any student, I used other techniques to get them to comply. Since my room could be divided by a curtain, I simply used isolation to from the rest of the class and once they could not put on a "show" to every one else they calmed down. There was one student though who decided to go home and get his Father's gun and return to the school, so I was late getting home that evening.He wasn't mad at me but at the situation he was in, and did not want to be in special ed, but he was uncontrollable at times, and the police were called to remove him from the school.