Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

The author notes about herself, "When I was growing up in New Jersey, not far from where Jenny now lives, I played soccer from age 7 to 17. I was relieved to find a place where girls were not expected to sit quietly or look pretty, and I still love the game. Like most other Americans, I can rattle off the many benefits of high-school sports: exercise, lessons in sportsmanship and perseverance, school spirit, and just plain fun. All of those things matter, and Jenny finds it refreshing to attend a school that is about so much more than academics. But as I’ve traveled around the world visiting places that do things differently—and get better results—I’ve started to wonder about the trade-offs we make."

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.

"Travel teams" in the US are almost entirely dependent upon pay to play economics, whereas scholastically sponsored sports programs traditionally are not. And over the past four decades, scholastically sponsored sports has massively raised the profile of women's athletics, not just in the US but world wide.

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]

The problem is that multiple changes we made at the same time in that school:

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.

You made an excellent counterpoint. The improvements in performance were not solely due to dropping sports programs. It may be difficult to tease out the impact that each of the major changes had on performance.

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.

Out of curiosity, how many of your teachers were hired primarily as coaches in the sports programs?

"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.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Pass_No_Play

I hear you. My mother enforced a minimum GPA for sports participation. I took mostly Honors and AP courses. I had a C midyear on my report card in a math course and my parents told me there would be no more sports until I had only As and Bs.

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.

When I say "kerfluffle", I don't mean on an individual level. I mean people who ought to know better predicting massive numbers of drop-outs, gang activity, and the failure of school systems. (Also, not having any local sporting events on Friday nights.)

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...

My understanding was that the lack of sports lead to more money, which enabled those things.

> having decided to have all four of my children involved in competitive, organized team sports through local "travel" soccer programs

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?

I can tell you are new here. My reputation in this community as involved DAD who homeschools[1] his four children (my wife and I have adjusted our careers to trade off time for our children's education) is well established here. But I empathize with your point that families even poorer than mine (my family was quite poor when my dad was slowly dying after a catastrophic injury that left him a quadriplegic for the last six years of his life) should have opportunity to learn everything that is useful for good development. One of my children received a "scholarship" (fee waiver) based on financial need from our local travel soccer program. I return the favor by being an active volunteer (team manager) in the program.

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.

The problem is not sports but the undue attention given to school sports teams. In Europe every school has sports teams but nobody cares or even knows who is on the team, nor are matches given any attention or even known about outside the sports teams.

In many (perhaps most) areas of the US, school team sports serve to represent a geographical area and its community in much the same way as professional team sports. From an anthropological point of view, this is hardly negative or surprising.

If sports don't serve this purpose in Europe, there must be something else that brings small local communities together there?

> 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.

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