The Case Against High-School Sports
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
The financial impact of high school sports aren't the issue. The real issue is their impact on high school culture. School sports, especially the big, spectator friendly, fast-twitch muscle oriented sports of football, basketball, and baseball, send a big message to the student body:
Athletic achievement is something that should be celebrated by all students, to the degree that it should be celebrated by the peers of the students on the field/court. As if a kid on the bleachers life has been improved because a fellow student succeeded in putting a ball through a metal ring.
Academic achievement is never glorified in this way. It is viewed as something that the student and their parents (and perhaps the more conscientious teachers/faculty) celebrate. Not until junior/senior year, when it becomes clear that certain students are going to universities with big, well-known, prestigious names, is there even a remote group admiration of academically achieving students.
Sports were a great thing for me. They helped me focus, taught me humility, and also how to internalize criticism into improvement. My participation in sports did jack shit to help the students who were forced to attend pep rallies, or sucked into the cultural celebration of not dropping the football despite taking a devastating hit as I passed the 1st down marker.
Sports are good, but I agree: get them the fuck out of academic institutions. They have no place there.
http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2011/03/shak...
Our society is very, very good at developing certain types of skills and certain types of genius. We are fantastically good at identifying and developing athletic skills—better than we are, really, at almost anything else
However, the US is pretty darn successful. And considering sports is such a big part of the cultural fabric I have to wonder if sports doesn't have something to do with that success?
Specifically, to throw out a hypothesis ... it would be that there are benefits to the dog eat dog competitiveness that sports teaches.
The counter example is that sports are linked (hitstorically) with (very) successful Academic Institutions. The notion that "they have no place there" is historically way off the mark.
[Edit: Examples]
[1] In 1815, Eton College documented its football [soccer] rules, the first football code to be written down anywhere in the world.
[2] In 1845, the first football [Rugby?] laws were written by Rugby School pupils
[3] Some historians have argued that the primary influence on Australian rules football was rugby football and other games originating in English public schools
Springfield College [MA, USA] is ... famous as the site where the sport of basketball was invented: instructor and graduate student James Naismith invented the game in 1891
{etc}
The real issue is their impact on high school culture.
Again, this is at best culturally specific and self-referential. At best this is a political position: more time and attention should be allocated to {X} group not {Y} group. It also hinges on the false notion that (political) "merit" is correlated with "academic" merit. This is also a an obvious falsehood, and frankly the purpose of sport in schools is to teach the opposite. To use a stratup analogy: ideas are a dime a dozen. Its execution that counts. So, character is something that matters.
And rightly or wrongly "character" and "teamwork" are subjects not developed/selected for in the classroom.
That's not a counter-example because you have cause and effect backwards. It's not that sports make the academic institution successful. Rather, successful academic institutions a) receive a ton of funding and can allocate budget for sports and b) their popularity helps them attract talented athletes.
Are you saying tha Soccer, Rugby, and Basketball invented Students? That seems rather unlikely.
Some of them. Others, less so.[1]
* Princeton University
* Harvard University
* Yale University
* Columbia University
* Stanford University
* University of Chicago
* Duke University
* Massachusetts Institute of Technology
* University of Pennsylvania
* California Institute of Technology
"And rightly or wrongly 'character' and 'teamwork' are subjects not developed/selected for in the classroom [but are on the sports field?]."
Sometimes. Others, less so.[2]
[1] http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...
[2] http://news.msn.com/crime-justice/off-field-arrests-for-viol...
http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/ivy-academic-i...
Secondly, are you suggesting that there the set (clever, assholes) is a null set?
[Edit: Examples]
* Between 2009 and 2012, the Allen, TX, Independent School District (which has one high-school) built a $60,000,000, 18,000 seat football stadium. "'It shows that the people of Allen support their kids,' said Allen head football coach Tom Westerberg."
http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/Allen-Unveils-New-Eagle-Sta...
* The football program at The University of Texas at Austin made $103,813,684 in 2011-12.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciajessop/2013/08/31/the-econ...
You act as if the root of these schools success is sports, as if the sports did ANYTHING to make these schools more successful.
They didn't.
Sports are good, but I agree: get them the fuck out of academic institutions. They have no place there.
To simplify this point, sports were created by students. That is the origin of their place in schools.
These schools, were british colleges (ie, high schools), not universities.
Your contention that they have "no place" in high school is historically mis-guided.
The theory that sports are only identified with sub-par academic performance is also mis-guided.
Sports originated in the highest-tier of Academic performance institutions.
The reputations of those institutions onlly increased, as did those of their graduates, for a long time after the introduction of sports.
Under your theory, their performance should have declined.
He thinks that participating in sports is making some kind of noble sacrifice for the greater good. At my parent's house he expects everyone else to sacrifice to enable him to participate, e.g., he is tired from running so someone else has to do his chores.
He's been taught by his coaches that what he does isn't recreation, it's a glorious pursuit that benefits everyone else.
Meanwhile, the basketball team making the state's Final Four game got three pep rallies, excused absences to attend, huge accolades from the administration for getting that far, etc.
As for cost, the article mentions that the school that shutdown sports was paying $1300 per football player - which just means they have poor accountants. At my high school almost all athletic costs were covered by student sports passes and event tickets. The problem is in the South where 'football is life' and they pay huge salaries for winning coaches and cathedral stadiums. Yet the South is the location of some of the worst school districts.
I also participated in a bunch of math and science competitions, and got basically no recognition for those (though I did get excused absences to attend).
I think the difference was the cheering section: We got to invite a bunch of friends and acquaintances to get an afternoon off from school and come make noise on a TV set. What high school student wouldn't want that? Then they went back and told their friends that it was pretty fun, and so each round we had a whole bunch more people who wanted to come. So there was a way for people who weren't on the four-person team to participate in some way and feel like they were connected to our success.
Was this a better use of school time and funds than athletics? That's unclear. I think glorifying an academic contest in the same way as an athletic one sends a better message to other students, that if you're looking for that kind of recognition, there are multiple paths that are possible.
[Edit: this was a public high school]
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that "Sports and physical fitness are good and should be encouraged for every student"? I hear you about the problems of excess focus on a few athletes, but some schools go too far and eliminate PE and fitness activities.
And on a side note - how is it possible to run long distance on a knee too injured to play football?
The varsity cross country team had an average GPA of 3.8. Some might think it would be grade-inflation, but several people went to private schools (they can participate in public school sports, because their school doesn't have a team), others took dual-credit classes at the community college. Running helped me focus, relieved stress, and gave me energy to do my homework. My grades always slipped in mid November, the only time I wasn't running.
ASB, our student government, was very diverse also. We rarely put on pep-rallies. Instead, each season we held an assembly that honored every team and club's accomplishments.
The point is, in my experience, the people that only participated in sports were likely to only see sports as valuable. The people that only participated in extra academics were likely to only see academics as valuable. Someone that just attended school, without doing anything else, probably wasn't doing well in school. But, someone that participated in sports and choir saw both of those as valuable, but saw academic achievement and the competitive welding team as valuable also, because they had a different perspective.
It might only be the way my high school worked, but the people that participated in several different things, no matter what they were, got along better and appreciated other people's achievements much more than those who didn't participate in extra-curricular activities.
I think that everyone should try a sport, try music, try drama, compete in poetry reading, or take an AP class, etc. I know my parents required us children to always do something extra. One sister is in choir, band, and drama. One is in cross country and reads a lot. Another sister plays volleyball. You won't be good at everything, but you will probably find something you are good at, and have a greater appreciation for what others do.
It's important that these all take place in schools, and are well-funded, because schools are a place where a whole community comes together, and everyone can participate, no matter their socio-economic background. Sports are valuable, but most people can't afford to do them outside of school.
For example, I played football in HS. It greatly improved my social status in school and allowed me to enjoy most of my 4 years of high school. The previous 6 years of schooling was marked with physical abuse because I was a fat geek. Football changed all that and provided my fellow geek friends some protection as well.
I would not have been able to play had football been privatized. My parents didn't have a lot of money, we couldn't buy pads like the hockey players did. At my school, hockey wasn't a school sport. Too expensive. As a result, the hockey players were even more popular than the football players at my school because there were so few of them.
When done right, there's a benefit to running youth athletics through schools: Practice time and other scheduling can be balanced against academic requirements, coaches (who are often also teachers) can monitor how performance is being affected on and off the field, etc.
Like anything else, there are tradeoffs and in a nation with tens of thousands of locally-run school districts some places will go way too far in one direction, but it's Utopian to imagine that, say, kids in rural Texas will stop playing football.
(And this is all without mentioning the many positive influences of well-run athletic competition on students: Health, teamwork, the rewards of focused effort...)
The standard model for eligibility for scholastically sponsored sports at the high school level is wholly dependent upon were the child lives. Thus High School athletes typically are not free to choose a team which best meets their individual needs.
If the coach basketball coach has a bias against atheists [and in plenty of public schools team prayer is regular and expected] or there is depth at their position or the program simply operates on a seniors-get-first-priority basis, the player is not free to move on.*
In other words, public school sports are largely organized around exclusive geographic franchise rights and there are extensive rules to prevent playing for whom one chooses and severe penalties for doing so by circumventing those rules.
Furthermore, many high school athletic associations restrict how, where, and with whom a player may play in the off season - e.g. by limiting the number of players from the high school team who may play on a club basketball team together during the off season [and that's without considering restrictions on their ability to monetize their athletic fame or talent].
* NCAA rules also severely restrict player movement at the college level - while coaches may switch teams every season.
Schools spend a lot of money on athletic programs because school boards approve budgets that allocate those funds. The school boards do this because the voters who elect school board members like athletic programs. Further, those same voters and parents often contribute funds for athletics above and beyond those being contributed by the taxpayer.
Voters want school athletics, voters get school athletics. The degree of "freedom" that students enjoy within the school athletic system wasn't what I meant by "democratic".
And then she reviews the history of high school sports in the United States, and points to some key examples of places where high school sports are a big part of the local culture (Texas) and what happened when one high school there shut down its competitive sports program: "That first semester, 80 percent of the students passed their classes, compared with 50 percent the previous fall. About 160 people attended parent-teacher night, compared with six the year before. Principal Ruiz was so excited that he went out and took pictures of the parking lot, jammed with cars. Through some combination of new leadership, the threat of closure, and a renewed emphasis on academics, Premont’s culture changed. 'There’s been a definite decline in misbehavior,' says Desiree Valdez, who teaches speech, theater, and creative writing at Premont. 'I’m struggling to recall a fight. Before, it was one every couple of weeks.'"
Simply put, the author is giving a balanced account that does not accuse sports of being all bad, but simply suggests from real-world examples that SCHOOL sports are overemphasized in the United States. Having lived in two different countries, and having decided to have all four of my children involved in competitive, organized team sports through local "travel" soccer programs, I have to agree. The trade-offs the author recommends make sense for a balanced United States education policy.
1) Giving Teaches more time for training and planing 2) Making students wear uniforms 3) Aligning the curriculum with more rigorous state standards 4) Drop the sports program
Then spends the rest of the article giving all the credit for the improved test scores to a lack of sports.
I did participate extensively in high school sports. I think that the benefits far outweigh the costs. In evaluating solutions like dropping sports programs, I believe that other options for performance improvement should both jointly and individually be considered, e.g., minimum GPA for sports participation, uniforms, longer school hours, mandatory summer school, etc.
"minimum GPA for sports participation"
You wouldn't believe the kerfluffle that caused in Texas[1]. As I recall, the result was rather predictable grade inflation.
Yes, some teachers are hired primarily to be coaches. Some, not all of coaches teach gym class. However, my best teacher ever was a guy called Coach K because he and his father coached football for years. Coach K taught AP physics and engineering courses in high school. He was an Army guy and previously worked at McDonald-Douglass. He made learning fun and exciting. Perhaps Coach K is the exception. Student athletes are there to learn first and a teaching coaches' primary job is to teach.
For example, here is one quote from 2011, something like 25 years after the no-pass-no-play law was passed[1]:
"Dr. Victoria Martin, a Child Psychiatrist in Richardson, TX,...continued by saying: 'Instead of beating these children down even more, we should be encouraging them to participate in activities where they have talents and abilities. We are punishing the “good” kids, the ones who care about their school and want to participate in school activities instead of being involved in gangs and other destructive groups.'" [Emphasis mine.]
As far as teaching coaches go, I'll just mention one of my high-school history teachers, whose primary qualifications as a history teacher seem to have been that he was a very decent football coach.
[1] http://www.adhdtexas.com/no-pass-no-play-law-has-very-advers...
If sports don't serve this purpose in Europe, there must be something else that brings small local communities together there?
Adult sports serve that purpose. Children play sports because competition is good, and because fitness is good.
Of course, it took an act of Congress to even get lip service to equality and while expenditures per individual athlete may be similar between cheerleading and football, there are often 60 or more players dressed out for a high school game and only a fraction of that hollering "Two Bits."
But lest I be misunderstood, scholastically sponsored sports remains the elephant in the room.
The reason for pay to play is maintaining eligibility for scholastically sponsored competitions which require amateur status, e.g. the NCAA. Elsewhere in the world - and in the US for individual sports such as tennis and golf - the professionalization of young elite athletes and the subsidizing of their development is treated as a normal part of the sports business.
In the footballing world, players are developed for the same reasons YC funds startups - the outliers pay for all the failures. For selling clubs, selling on a player Wesley Schneider provided a substantial return on Ajax's entire youth development expenditures during the years he was with the club.
In contrast, the expenditure of a high school on development of a blue chip quarter-back recruit to an SEC football powerhouse is exactly zero. Likewise five years later for the college program should that same player sign on with the NFL.
[edit] The punch line is that when talking about scholastically sponsored sports in the US, the conversation always gravitates to pointy football, and its unique status often clouds our thinking. For example, we tend to think of athletic scholarships for NCAA sports as if football's 85 full grants in aid at the division I level was in keeping with other sports. A NCAA DI women's soccer team has 12 - spread among 24 or so active players plus redshirts. Scholarships tend to be partial, and thus college sports tend to continue the pay to play model [It's less promising for your boy, there are almost as many NCAA football scholarships in Alabama as for all of men's DI soccer, and DI college coaches tend to use those scholarships to recruit players from outside the country]
There's a reason that "soccer mom" has become synonymous with out of touch, privileged, upper-middle-class, stay at home mothers. Being able to afford this shit, especially for four separate children, puts you well to the right side of the socioeconomic bell curve. If these things are important to your children, aren't they equally important, if not more so, to the children of a single mom working for minimum wage that have no other way of gaining access to sports outside of the public school system?
But I'm going to put it to you that you are criticizing the wrong person if you think I don't care about good education for poor people. The FINE SUBMITTED ARTICLE talks about a poor neighborhood in Texas where academic achievement rose, and thus future opportunity for the students rose, after the high school recalibrated from an emphasis on sports to an emphasize on care school academic subjects. My big-time pet issue on HN, as is easily verifiable by looking at my user profile and my submission history and comment history, is better quality K-12 education for all learners all around the world. Children in poor neighborhoods in the United States ought to enjoy better instruction in reading, in mathematics, in writing, in history, in science, and in all academic subjects in school. I've posted numerous links to authoritative publications about that crucial issue. Along the way, if all young people can also learn a competitive team sport if they like, I will be glad about that. But I will be especially glad if all high school students in the United States grow up to be numerate, literate, and able to support themselves in the changing economy of the twenty-first century.
[1] Oddly, even though I am a dyed-in-the-wool, take-no-prisoners advocate of homeschooling, my three children who are still at home (my oldest son has grown up and is supporting himself) are this week all in their third week of full-time enrollment in public schools--the first time in twenty-one years of parenting that I've ever had all my children at home in public school. My second son plays JV soccer and runs track on the teams of our friendly local high school.
Apart from all the soft skills that are tough to test for like leadership, organizational skills, and work ethic, sports have a tangible effect on grades; that is they improve them. I would cite studies but there are literally too many to cite. Just google "athlete gpa vs non athlete" or something similar and there won't be one link suggesting that non-athletes get better grades (on average).
Athletics are also a path to a better college and give kids constructive outlets for their time and energy. Yes they happen to be pretty expensive but are totally worth it IMO because, guess what? I don't want to be like some other countries that keep their kids' noses to the grindstone all day to prep them for "a test of critical thinking in math". We should really be teaching our kids how to do their taxes, change a tire and interpret medical test results and not how to take tests.
Local sports can be good; I played soccer in a non-school league. School-sponsored teams only divide students and create perverse incentives.
PS: You can correct for these factors, but it's far less common than you might think to do so as correlations are published more often than null results.
Playing sports will make you healthier.
Edit: also the whole holding student athletes to a higher standard (need to get a 2.0) makes them get better grades and do better on tests is kinda my point. School sports helps people do better in school and in life. Isn't that what people who are against sports want?
That only helps the athletes, while (at least in my high school) creating a stratified society where everyone else was treated as inferior.
School sports are good because their cost is only around $100 for a season, with generous financial aid for those who cannot pay, vs. local teams which can be thousands. Only upper middle class families can really afford to put their kids into those programs. School sports allow people of all socio-economic status to participate, which brings students on the team together more than it brings them apart.
Does that mean it is bad? No, I don't think so. Last year, the high school I coached at had to raise about $30,000 for it's football program. The school or district didn't pay for it, the program had to raise it itself.
Also, most of the players were low-income, high risk students. Football gave them a reason to go to school and a way to go to college.
On average, just our team has helped 7-10 players each year go to college when they probably wouldn't have done so without football.
Could their be a better system? Of course, but right now, high schools sports are a net positive, I think.
If anything, there is too much "learning" in school and not enough sports! All over the country, physical education programs are being cut to make way for more instruction on native Americans, as if that's really what society needs.
What high schools should have is a continuum of the physical education classes in middle school. In fact I think it would be much more productive a class in high school because by then the students would be mature enough to understand that the class is not just an hour of wasted time.
[[Citation Needed]]
They had to pass their classes now because they wanted to play, and we taught them to be more respectful of their teachers and administrators. These kids went from being trouble at the school to just normal kids. That is because of sports and nothing else.
Could they have afforded to play on a team not affiliated with the school? Probably not.
I find a lot of arguments about sports to come down to not everyone enjoys or participates in sports. I find that a dangerous way to think since that could just as easily lead to the cancellation of other programs. For a lot of kids, sports and the academic requirements to participate in sports are the only thing keeping them interested in school.
Sports were treated as "just another club," and while their budget was obviously larger than other clubs (some larger than others), I don't think they were anything near the stories we hear about the southern states who can't afford text books but have football stadiums that rival some colleges.
Schools need a healthy balance between education and personal development, and I think that sports go a long way towards personal development, whether they be team sports or individual sports.
I've played sports, both in-school and out-of-school, almost my entire life and I love sports as much as anyone else, and I think the article makes a valid argument. Sports are great and kids can learn a lot from them, but I don't think school-affiliated sports over many benefits over club-affiliated sports, and even if they did, I question whether those benefits outweigh the costs of schools putting so many resources into them.
edit: I was missing a word
Try to do this and you'll invoke the wrath of the most powerful entertainment sector on the planet. They will shut you down faster than the Falcons get owned at the playoffs.
I call b___s___ on that, having lived in one of those countries, and invite you to produce statistics backing up your statement. The East Asian country I know best, Taiwan, has had more female than male participation in higher education for at least a generation, and generally has equal pay for equal work and plenty of female access to professional occupations. The same is surely true of Singapore, a country many of my friends live in. I cannot attribute any remaining gender inequality in that country or other countries to an emphasis on strong mathematics education--to the contrary, helping elementary pupils get a good background in mathematics probably helps women cope with the tough issue that they deal with, having to do more to reproduce the next generation than men have to do.
I can't find any information on Taiwan, but have a look a some of the gender equality for Japan/Korea. The numbers are quite abysmal. On the other hand Singapore is top of the world.
See: http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GenderGap_Report_2012.pdf
p.224 Japan ,p.232 Korea, p.358 US, p.318 Singapore.
It seems the problem is isolated to Japan and Korea, and likely has nothing to do with sports, math education, nor East-Asia.
Another factor is the way testing is done. For far too long I've been hearing about the problems of standardized testing, and the problems it holds. These rankings: how are they determined? Are they any better then standardized testing?
Finally, we ignore the fact that math and science are not the end of the road. I've seen more done by sports teams to help the community then by any chess club (and yes, I was on the chess club). Working with under-privileged or special needs children, being involved with the community, and all together, learning to be leaders and contributors in society. What values are we losing by removing sports?
Yes, their might be other ways to obtain those values. But we are throwing out the baby with the bathwater here. At the end of the day, what seemed to matter was proper budgeting, increasing standards, and overall, the attitude of the administration.
The kid giving me the tour was proud to announce "we take care of the high school football team!".
I looked it up after and it turns out the school pays for these kids to get massages so they play better football. I pay nearly 700 a month to the ISD in taxes because I own a home. It hurts me to know that some of that pays for a teenager to get a massage before each big game.
I realize I am in Texas but it's still maddening that this goes on.
I agree that they develop hard work and commitment, but I've always been sceptical about the teamwork aspects.
Teamwork should enable a group of people to achieve more than the individual. Most sports are not like that: practically, it makes no difference if each football team has one player or 11. The objective ( score against the opposition ) would still be achieved. Perhaps to a lesser magnitude, but still achieved.
Real teamwork development requires tasks that are physically impossible for a single person.
That said, how about the professional leagues sending money back into school budgets (x% of ticket sales)? They also benefit from HS sports...
Certainly money is not the only answer to the overall education problems raised in the article - but it could be part of the solution - and I think we want to find sources that don't potentially rob Peter to pay Paul, or have significant intended and unintended consequences and ripple effects.
Of course American kids spend more time on sports. They don't have super fast internet and live in a country where Starcraft players can get corporate sponsorship and make a living playing the game. Did the study take this into account?
Unfortunately, what I just described isn't really sports in America. There's no way to tell this next anecdote without admitting that I watched "The Biggest Loser", so let's just get that out of the way now. Ok. so. There was this section where an NFL player shows up to talk about how the NFL takes fitness and obesity seriously, and so, they're announcing a "fifteen thousand dollar" (well, I don't remember the exact amount) donation to help fight obesity.
So, a league that makes billions off people who rarely exercise and sit on their sofa watching people play an expensive sport that probably badly harms people when played as intended and is largely inaccessible in the form played professionally (tag or flag football is a different thing, and is kind of fun in my opinion), raking in millions (billions?) in ad dollars by subjecting the non-exercising viewers to barrage of advertisements for empty calorie foods supplemented with a chemical scientists use to induce obesity in lab rats, is now going to donate 0.000001% of the budget to purchase some unused exercise equipment to help fight obesity. Ok, I'm not sure it goes exactly like that, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't go exactly unlike that.
And here's one more problem - I really like college football. I just hate what it has become. There may be a middle ground here.
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/04/22/should-colle...
And supposedly (according to the NYTimes) watching pro tennis players does improve the games of amateurs, so maybe there's some benefits to watching instead of just playing. At least, that's what I'll tell myself for now...
Hmm apparently I'm not nearly on as solid ground as I thought with regard to this. I've been in the States for 11 years and apparently still have a UK/Euro bias.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession#Definition
In the United States, the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is generally seen as the authority for dating US recessions. The NBER defines an economic recession as: "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales."[5] Almost universally, academics, economists, policy makers, and businesses defer to the determination by the NBER for the precise dating of a recession's onset and end.
In the United Kingdom, recessions are generally defined as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth, as measured by the seasonal adjusted quarter-on-quarter figures for real GDP.[6][7] The exact same recession definition apply for all member states of the European Union.
rather, we should spend less money on things like policing the rest of the world/inflating the defense sector's wallets and channel THAT money into education/infrastructure/healthcare/many other things