From the article:

> In 2018, the year for which the latest numbers are available, 69,000 American children were hit by public-school staff

I stand corrected, that's wild.

From my generation at least (teenagers from the 90's), I heard stories not of beatings, but getting whacked on the knuckles by nuns in private catholic schools.

The private catholic schools in my town being a mix of kids with religious parents, bad kids who got kicked out of public high schools and parents who didn't want a co-ed education for their kids.

> There's some law on the books (Texas maybe?) about it being a hanging offense to engage in cattle wrustling. Perhaps I'm remembering it incorrectly.

You are not wrong: "cattle rustling" is indeed still a hanging offense in Texas.

What makes this a bit interesting is that, technically, if you eat a steak and then don't pay for it, you have engaged in "cattle rustling".

So, dine and dash at a steakhouse could legally be punished by a hanging.

> This is likely to be a similar sort of law (or lack of a law saying it isn't allowed), where it may technically be true that this is allowed but realistically you would end up in all sorts of legal trouble for hitting students.

It is not; in fact, the reason states mostly have some explicit treatment in law, is that this waa tested the whole way up to the Supreme Court—Ingraham v. Wright, 430 U.S. 651 (1977)—which found, that, in the absence of specific state law to the contrary, corporal punishment, by public schools, without parental consent or even notice, was Constitutionally permissible. Even people that support corporal punishment in schools often weren’t happy about this. There's no secret additional layer of law beyond the overt ones which will get people in trouble for this.

A detailed Volokh retrospective on that case:

https://reason.com/volokh/2018/09/19/the-schoolhouse-gate-sc...