Are Teachers Allowed To Embarrass Students?

Reviewed and updated August 2026 against Reviewed August 2026..

The reason this question is hard to answer with a straight yes or no is that two very different things share one word. Being asked a question you cannot answer is embarrassing. Having your grade read out to the room as a warning to others is something else. Most of the confusion clears up once those are separated, so that is where this starts.

The line that actually matters: embarrassment vs humiliation

The most useful distinction here does not come from law at all. Writing in Phi Delta Kappan, researcher Joan Goodman separates shame from embarrassment from useful guilt, and the test she uses is whether the student can work through it.

Mild shaming – which she labels embarrassment – is temporary. A child can resolve it by changing the behavior, and it can genuinely prompt them to. Deep humiliation behaves completely differently. As reported in Education Week, Goodman found the humiliated child is unlikely to reflect on whether the behavior was actually wrong, and more likely to conclude something about themselves instead – in her phrasing, “I must have done wrong because you think I did.” Shaming, she notes, involves “a painful negative scrutiny of the self.”

Nancy Flanagan, “When Teachers Use Shame as a Disciplinary Tool”, Education Week (Opinion), 4 Nov 2017 — reporting Joan Goodman’s Phi Delta Kappan research

Two honest caveats about that source. Flanagan’s piece is an opinion column by a practitioner, not a study. And Goodman’s research is quoted through that column here rather than read in the original – her data came from disciplinary procedures in the handbooks of nearly 500 charter schools, so it is real evidence, but it is charter-school policy documents rather than a cross-section of all US schools.

Even with those caveats, the distinction is the most practical thing on this page. It does not require you to prove what a teacher intended. Ask instead whether what happened was something you could act on and move past, or something that told you what kind of person you are. That is a question a student can actually answer.

So is it allowed?

There is no federal law that says “a teacher shall not embarrass a student,” which is why you will not find a clean legal citation for it and should be suspicious of any page that offers one. What exists instead is layered:

• District staff conduct policy. This is the real rule, and it is where humiliation as punishment is usually addressed directly. It is also the one people never read.
• Anti-bullying policy. Every US state has one. Many are written to cover adults in the building, not only students – worth checking, because it is often a stronger route.
• Civil-rights law. If the treatment is tied to race, sex, religion or disability, this stops being a classroom complaint entirely and becomes a formal matter with its own process.
• Professional standards for the teaching license. The most serious end, reserved for repeated or severe conduct.

The practical upshot: “allowed” is decided by the handbook, not the courtroom. That is better news than it sounds, because a policy breach is far easier to raise and far more likely to produce a result than a legal argument. For where a teacher’s authority ends more generally, see what teachers cannot legally do.

Why it happens

Worth understanding, because the response differs depending on which of these it is. None of them make humiliation acceptable – explaining a mechanism is not endorsing it.

Reading grades out to the class

Once routine, and still around: grades called out in class, posted on a board, or the lowest performers named at assembly. It is defended as motivation. For students who do not care about their performance it does nothing at all, and for students who do it mostly damages confidence – which is the opposite of the stated aim.

A word on the FERPA claim you will see repeated online. Reading grades aloud is generally lawful but commonly against district policy – FERPA governs education records rather than what is said in a room, and in Gonzaga v. Doe (2002) the Supreme Court held that FERPA is enforceable through the Department of Education rather than by a private lawsuit. So the federal route is a dead end for an individual student. The policy route is the live one, and it is where most districts have already written down that this should not happen.

Cold-calling a student who did not volunteer

Calling on students who have not raised a hand is a deliberate, widely taught technique, and the intent is usually to keep everyone thinking rather than to expose anyone. It reads very differently from the receiving end when you are unprepared.

The distinction that matters is what happens after the wrong answer. Moving on, or building on it, is teaching. Lingering on it, repeating it back, or inviting the room to react is not – and that is the point at which a normal technique becomes the other thing.

Insecurity

A teacher who feels shown up – by a student who knows more, or who has caught an error – occasionally responds by putting that student down. This is uncommon and it is entirely about the adult. If you are on the end of it, the tell is that it follows your competence rather than any misbehavior.

Establishing authority

Some humiliation is a display: a demonstration to the whole room of who is in charge, using one student as the example. This is the version most likely to be a pattern rather than a moment, and therefore the most worth documenting, because the same student is often chosen repeatedly.

Punishment

Standing in a corner, being moved to the front, being made to explain yourself to the class. The line here is a practical one: a consequence aimed at the behavior is discipline, while a consequence designed to be watched is something else. Two sanctions can be identical in effort and completely different in purpose depending on whether an audience is the point.

Does it actually work?

This is the part usually left out, and it undercuts the whole justification. Flanagan – a long-serving teacher, writing about her own practice – describes using low-key shaming early in her career and abandoning it after concluding it is “highly unreliable as a behavior modifier, and often backfires.” She is also candid that the impulse is near-universal among teachers, which is worth saying plainly: this is not a story about rare bad people.

Goodman’s finding gives the mechanism for why it fails. Shaming only works at all when the student believes they deserved it. When they decide the criticism was undeserved, the strategy does not just fail – it collapses into a power struggle, and the working relationship between that student and that teacher goes with it.

Which means a teacher relying on humiliation is running a technique that fails precisely in the cases they most want it to work: the student who thinks the treatment was unfair. The students it lands on hardest are the ones it helps least.

When it crosses the line, and who to tell

Some of this is a bad day and some of it is reportable. The markers:

• It is a pattern, not a moment. The same student, repeatedly.
• It is about who you are – your race, sex, religion, disability, accent, or family circumstances – rather than about anything you did. This is a civil-rights matter with its own formal process, not a classroom disagreement.
• It happens in front of an audience by design, when a private version was available.
• It involves your medical or family information, or anything else discussed in front of people who had no reason to hear it.
• It got worse after you or a parent complained. Retaliation is treated seriously in its own right, often more seriously than the original incident.

Who to go to, in order: your school counselor or head of year, then an assistant principal or principal, then the district office. Titles vary by district, so the reliable rule is to go one level up at a time rather than starting at the top. Going to the teacher first is reasonable for a one-off; it is not required, and for a pattern it is often better to have someone else present from the start.

Bring three dated examples rather than a description of how it felt. Specifics are what move this from a personality clash to a policy question, and the policy question is the one a school has to answer.

If it is a younger child, this works differently

Everything above assumes a student old enough to notice a pattern, keep a note and ask for a meeting. For a child in elementary school none of that holds, and the failure mode is specific: young children usually cannot tell you what happened, only how it felt. What arrives at home is a stomach ache on Tuesday mornings, or a sudden refusal to go, rather than a sentence about being made to stand at the front.

So the useful questions for a parent are narrow and concrete rather than open. Who sat next to you? What happened right before lunch? Did anyone laugh? Open questions like “how was school” reliably produce “fine”, and “is your teacher mean to you” invites the answer the child thinks you want.

The other difference is that the child cannot be the one to escalate. With an older student, going to the teacher first is often the right first move. With a young child it usually is not, because they still have to sit in that room every day afterwards and they have no way to manage what follows. Go to the teacher yourself, and if that does not resolve it, straight to the principal.

What to do if it is happening to you

• Write it down the same day – the date, what was said, and who else heard it. Memory blurs and the detail is what makes it credible later.
• Check whether it is only you. Ask a classmate. If the whole class gets it, the problem is real but different, and it is easier to raise collectively.
• Ask for the private version. “Could you tell me that after class instead?” is a reasonable request, and a teacher’s response to it is informative either way.
• Tell one adult early, even if you are not ready to make a complaint. It puts someone on record as having heard it at the time.
• Do not stop attending. Withdrawal is the natural response and it hands over the narrative – attendance and missed work become the story instead of the conduct.

And the thing worth saying directly: if you have been disruptive, that is a separate conversation and a fair one. It does not entitle anyone to make an example of you. A school can hold you to account for what you did without holding you up to the room. Those are different acts with different purposes, and only one of them is discipline. If it is starting to feel personal rather than procedural, can a teacher hate a student covers how to tell.

Frequently asked questions

Are teachers allowed to embarrass students?

There is no single law that says a teacher may not embarrass a student, and mild embarrassment – being corrected, being asked a question you cannot answer – is a normal part of a classroom. What is not permitted is humiliation used as a punishment, and most districts say so in their own staff conduct policy. So the honest answer is that it is governed by school policy rather than by law, and that policy is usually stricter than people assume.

What is the difference between embarrassment and humiliation?

Researcher Joan Goodman draws the line at whether the student can work through it. Mild shaming – embarrassment – is temporary and a child can resolve it by changing the behavior. Deep humiliation is different: the humiliated child tends not to reflect on the behavior at all, and instead concludes something about themselves. That is the line worth using, because it does not depend on how anyone intended it.

Is it illegal for a teacher to read grades out loud?

In most cases this is lawful but against school policy, and that distinction is the useful part. People assume it breaches FERPA; FERPA governs education records rather than what is said aloud in a room, and the Supreme Court held in Gonzaga v. Doe (2002) that FERPA creates a right enforceable only through the Department of Education, not a personal lawsuit. Many districts prohibit the practice in their own policy, so raise it there – that is the route that actually produces a result.

What should I do if a teacher humiliates me in class?

Write down what was said and when, check whether classmates are treated the same way, and raise it with your school counselor or head of year rather than only with the teacher. If it is a pattern rather than a single bad moment, put it in writing so there is a record and a date.

Can a teacher be disciplined for humiliating a student?

Yes. Public humiliation used as punishment is the kind of thing that appears in staff conduct policies, and repeated or severe cases can lead to disciplinary action against the teacher. It becomes considerably more serious if the treatment is tied to a student’s race, sex, religion or disability, which moves it out of a conduct question and into a civil-rights one.

The bottom line

Teachers are allowed to embarrass students in the ordinary sense, because teaching cannot be done without occasionally putting someone on the spot. They are not allowed to humiliate students as a punishment, and where that is written down it is written in district conduct policy rather than in law.

The test worth carrying is Goodman’s: could you work through it and change something, or did it tell you what kind of person you are? The first is discipline. The second is the thing this page is about – and it is also, on the evidence, the version least likely to produce the behavior anyone wanted.