Have Sports Teams Brought Down America’s Schools? (Elizabeth Kolbert)

[swag]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/09/have-sports-teams-brought-down-americas-schools.html?mbid=nl_Daily%20(13)

In her new book, “The Smartest Kids in the World,” Amanda Ripley, an investigative journalist, tells the story of Tom, a high-school student from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, who decides to spend his senior year in Wroclaw, Poland. Poland is a surprising educational success story: in the course of less than a decade, the country raised students’ test scores from significantly below average for the developed world to significantly above it; Polish kids now outscore American kids in math and science, even though Poland spends, on average, less than half as much per student as the United States does. One of the most striking differences between the high school Tom attended in Gettysburg and the one he ends up at in Wroclaw is that the latter has no football team, or, for that matter, teams of any kind.

Sports, Ripley writes, were “the core culture of Gettysburg High.” In Wroclaw, by contrast, if kids wanted to play soccer or basketball after school they had to organize the games themselves. Teachers didn’t double as coaches and the principal certainly never came out to cheer. Thus, “there was no confusion about what school was for—or what mattered to the kids’ life chances.”


I thought about Tom the other day, while I was watching my fourteen-year-old twins play soccer. It was the day before school began, but they had already been going to J.V. soccer practice two hours a day for nearly two weeks. I wondered what would have happened if their math teacher had tried to call them in two weeks before school started to hold two-hour drill sessions. My sons would have been livid, as would every other kid in their class. Perhaps even more significant, I suspect that parents would have complained. What was the math teacher doing, trying to ruin the kids’ summer? And why should they have to make a special trip to the high school so their kids could study trig identities?

That American high schools lavish more time and money on sports than on math is, I know, an old complaint. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that my own experience with high-school sports was limited to being cut from the tennis team.) But, as another school year starts, it is a lament worth revisiting. This is not a matter of how any given student who play sports does in school, but of the culture and its priorities. This December, when the latest Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, results are announced, it’s safe to predict that American high-school students will once again display their limited skills in math and reading. They will once again be outscored not just by students in Poland but also by students in places like South Korea, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland, Singapore, New Zealand, Canada, Switzerland, and Japan. (In the last round of PISA tests, administered in 2009, U.S. students ranked thirty-first in math and seventeenth in reading , among seventy-four countries.) Meanwhile, they will have played some very exciting football games, which will have been breathlessly written up in their hometown papers. (Ripley notes that at each Gettysburg High football game “no less than four local reporters showed up.”)

. . . more

[Drale]

1. I played Baseball in High School

and it was one of the best experiences of my life. The Coaches made sure you balanced the sport and your school work and if you have less than a B in every class you didn't play, unless you could show that you really were trying by doing extra tutoring and such, and things just were not working out, but if you had less than a C you didn't play no matter what. Its not the sports that hurt our children but the administrators, teachers and parents that allow athletes to slide on their grades because they are a star in a sport.

[swag]

3. Well, when I was in high school,

I signed up for general science during my freshman year. I was slotted in a section taught by the then-very-successful football coach. He rarely showed up for class. I complained to the vice principal, who explained to me, "Well, Mr. Stranahan IS the football coach!" Fortunately, I was able to transfer to a section taught by a very good, dedicated science teacher, from whom I later learned a lot about chemistry and physics.

I have no doubt that a lot of people had good, balanced experiences playing sports in school. Me, I never saw that the emphasis was balanced at all. Sports were held above all.

[grilled onions]

2. The Emphasis Is Sports

If you are not one of "them" then you are less. The in crowd, the ones who get their name in the student paper,local paper etc are always involved in sports. Sadly those who are not quite up to par must feel really bad year after year failing to make the team.
The time spent on practice goes for the team as well as groups like cheerleaders too. They need far more olympics in the scholastic realm. Many schools tend to fudge the grades of the sports players just to insure a good team. They are doing such a disservice to the student. First of all his grades will only get worse by the time he hits college(and unless he makes the grade there) will have to catch up or drop out. Secondly we are not teaching these kids anything if they realize that it's ok to cheat or pull strings as long as it's for a "good cause". That does not make a good lesson to keep for life.
While schools put so much effort and $$$ into teams,uniforms,playing fields etc they are putting less in books or competitions against other schools in their knowledge of subjects from science,math or history.
The arts also suffer although they can make claims that every sports team needs a band for half time!

[radicalliberal]

8. I believe in compulsory sports K through 12.

All boys in the schools should be forced to participate in team sports. Boys who don't participate in sports miss out on such a great deal and are actually deficient. Boys who have no interest in sports should be suspected of having homosexual tendencies because, dagnabbit, something is wrong with them! I tell you, it's positively un-American! The United States of America has been wussified by the lack of compulsory sports in the schools! Let's make real men out of them sissies! If they cry, hit 'em again harder! That will toughen them up!

[Blue_Tires]

4. Sports isn't the problem

kids in Japan play sports in school...The only difference is the U.S. has let things get way, way out of perspective when it comes to the overall importance of sports...

[radicalliberal]

6. Witness Steubenville (not to mention other communities), where the coverup is still underway . . .

. . . to prevent the rest of the truth from coming out and where the victim has received death threats. If members of the Chess Club had committed a rape (ever hear of such a thing?), there would have been no coverup; and there would have been no caterwauling by the likes of Poppy Harlow and Candy Crowley about young lives being ruined (referring to the perps, not the victim).

Let us not forget Penn State. The student rioters were upset not because a pedophile coach had been allowed to rape young boys, but because their little god JoPa had just been fired. A Penn State coed who was the sister of one of the victims had the experience of listening to classmates mock the victims by turning "Sandusky" into a verb, as if the scandal were nothing but a big joke. One of the other victims, who was a high-school senior at the time of the scandal, was outed as one of the victims at his school. A grandmother of one of the Penn State football players walked up to the mother and said, "Now my grandson's football team is going to lose, and it's all your son's fault!" (How would YOU feel if you were the mother or father of the rape victim and that hag walked up to you and said it was all your son's fault?) The victim was bullied by fellow students who were Penn State fans and blamed the victim for tarnishing JoPa's image! They bullied him so much that he had to drop out of high school. They had no sympathy for their classmate who had been RAPED by a pedophile! No empathy at all, and all in the name of sports!

You're not kidding about being "way, way out of perspective"! Pity any rape victim who "gets in the way" of a high-school or college football program.

Isn't it interesting that the worst enemies of school sports are not "sports haters," but are the fans who only care about having a wining season but don't believe that players (and coaches) should be held accountable for the way they treat others away from the game, as if they have the RIGHT to run roughshod over others? If I were a fan, I'd be opposed to this sort of corruption in my beloved sport; but with the exception of morally principled individuals such as the former NFL player Joe Ehrmann, all I hear for the most part is silence.

Just one more observation: We live in a society that is profoundly anti-intellectual. Radio personalities such as Dennis Miller ridicule "nerds" on the air, which undoubtedly encourages bullying at the schools. Scientists are routinely dismissed as "pencil-necked geeks" while studious nonathletic boys are labeled as sissies or "feminized males." (Yes, I know there are school athletes -- not exactly a marginalized group, to put it mildly -- who are also quite studious; so, please don't bother to say that.) Athletic prowess has become the standard of masculinity, despite the fact that there have been many courageous men who never participated in team sports or simply had no interest in them. Because the popular culture of our society is saturated with sports, young boys who have no interest in sports are likely to be marginalized and bullied at their schools; and next to no one cares. No wonder traditional mandatory boys' P.E., which is completely centered around sports to the exclusion of exercise programs that would benefit the nonathletes, has always had the notorious reputation of being a bully's paradise.

[Uncle Joe]

5. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, swag.

[radicalliberal]

7. Thank you very much for the OP, swag. You have more courage than I.

(Before I continue, let me say I'm perfectly aware that there are sports fans, including guys with athletic backgrounds, who deplore scandals such as Steubenville and Penn State and sympathize with the victims instead of the victimizers. I respect and admire those guys.)

Expect to be flamed by some of the sports fans, who are blind to the abuses and are opposed to any reforms of school sports. They will attack you personally, saying "You're just jealous," blah blah blah.

[swilton]

9. Extremely interesting topic

My thoughts and feelings about its insights go far beyond my ability to write and post in such a short space and time frame.

Totally agree with the author.

Having said that - especially true in states like Pennsylvania and others (Oklahoma, Texas to name but two) which have big school football program....

The PSAT scores (imho) are the tip of the iceberg - not mentioned is the phenomenon of multi-lingual ism and how many students outside the US know more than one language fluently whereas those in the US can barely pass 'inglish' 101. Yes Americans are isolationist - hard to defend in an ever globalizing world where the majority of computer users will be non English speakers. Also - isolationism contributes to other cultural features - exceptional ism, ethnocentrism, among others.

Emphasis on athletics in the public school system also negatively impacts on colleges but differently. Consider the privatization of college sports teams in universities. Not my field really but I notice it more than just casually....There is an argument that college teams should be paid as professional athletes - some would argue that such programs help give athletically talented/academically challenged students a career that they would otherwise not have. I have never seen those statistics. Others point to college football coaches making more $$ than professors, the college sports teams are no longer for the students but for rich alums, and that the college football programs detract from academic programs....As my title states an extremely interesting topic....