Sports are embedded in American schools in a way they are not almost anywhere else. Yet this difference hardly ever comes up in domestic debates about Americas international mediocrity in education. (The U.S. ranks 31st on the same international math test.) The challenges we do talk about are real ones, from undertrained teachers to entrenched poverty. But what to make of this other glaring reality, and the signal it sends to children, parents, and teachers about the very purpose of school?
Even in eighth grade, American kids spend more than twice the time Korean kids spend playing sports, according to a 2010 study published in the Journal of Advanced Academics. In countries with more-holistic, less hard-driving education systems than Koreas, like Finland and Germany, many kids play club sports in their local townsoutside of school. Most schools do not staff, manage, transport, insure, or glorify sports teams, because, well, why would they?
Last year in Texas, whose small towns are the spiritual home of high-school football and the inspiration for Friday Night Lights, the superintendent brought in to rescue one tiny rural school district did something insanely rational. In the spring of 2012, after the state threatened to shut down Premont Independent School District for financial mismanagement and academic failure, Ernest Singleton suspended all sportsincluding football.
To cut costs, the district had already laid off eight employees and closed the middle-school campus, moving its classes to the high-school building; the elementary school hadnt employed an art or a music teacher in years; and the high school had sealed off the science labs, which were infested with mold. Yet the high school still turned out football, basketball, volleyball, track, tennis, cheerleading, and baseball teams each year.
Football at Premont cost about $1,300 a player. Math, by contrast, cost just $618 a student. For the price of one football season, the district could have hired a full-time elementary-school music teacher for an entire year. But, despite the fact that Premonts football team had won just one game the previous season and hadnt been to the playoffs in roughly a decade, this option never occurred to anyone.
Ive been in hundreds of classrooms, says Singleton, who has spent 15 years as a principal and helped turn around other struggling schools. This was the worst Ive seen in my career. The kids were in control. The language was filthy. The teachers were not prepared. By suspending sports, Singleton realized, he could save $150,000 in one year. A third of this amount was being paid to teachers as coaching stipends, on top of the smaller costs: $27,000 for athletic supplies, $15,000 for insurance, $13,000 for referees, $12,000 for bus drivers. There are so many things people dont think about when they think of sports, Singleton told me. Still, he steeled himself for the towns reaction. I knew the minute I announced it, it was going to be like the world had caved in on us.
Last fall at Premont, the first without football, was quieteerily so. There were no Friday-night games to look forward to, no players and their parents cheered onto the field on opening night, no cheerleaders making signs in the hallway, no football practice 10 or more hours a week. Only the basketball team was allowed to play, though its tournament schedule was diminished.
But there was an upside to the quiet. The first 12 weeks of school were the most peaceful beginning weeks Ive ever witnessed at a high school, Singleton says. It was calm. There was a level of energy devoted to planning and lessons, to after-school tutoring. I saw such a difference.
Nathan missed the adrenaline rush of running out onto the field and the sense of purpose he got from the sport. But he began playing flag football for a club team on the weekends, and he admitted to one advantage during the week: It did make you focus. There was just all this extra time. You never got behind on your work.
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, Premonts culture changed. Theres been a definite decline in misbehavior, says Desiree Valdez, who teaches speech, theater, and creative writing at Premont. Im struggling to recall a fight. Before, it was one every couple of weeks.
Suspending sports was only part of the equation, but Singleton believes it was crucial. He used the savings to give teachers raises. Meanwhile, communities throughout Texas, alarmed by the cancellation of football, raised $400,000 for Premont via fund-raisers and donationsmoney that Singleton put toward renovating the science labs.
In many schools, sports are so entrenched that no onenot even the people in chargerealizes their actual cost. When Marguerite Roza, the author of Educational Economics, analyzed the finances of one public high school in the Pacific Northwest, she and her colleagues found that the school was spending $328 a student for math instruction and more than four times that much for cheerleading$1,348 a cheerleader. And it is not even a school in a district that prioritizes cheerleading, Roza wrote. In fact, this districts strategic plan has for the past three years claimed that math was the primary focus.
Football is, far and away, the most expensive high-school sport. Many football teams have half a dozen or more coaches, all of whom typically receive a stipend. Some schools hire professional coaches at full salaries, or designate a teacher as the full-time athletic director. New bleachers can cost half a million dollars, about the same as artificial turf. Even maintaining a grass field can cost more than $20,000 a year. Reconditioning helmets, a ritual that many teams pay for every year, can cost more than $1,500 for a large team. Some communities collect private donations or levy a special tax to fund new school-sports facilities.
Many of the costs are insidious, Roza has found, buried in unidentifiable places. For example, when teacher-coaches travel for game days, schools need to hire substitute teachers. They also need to pay for buses for the team, the band, and the cheerleaders, not to mention meals and hotels on the road. For home games, schools generally cover the cost of hiring officials, providing security, painting the lines on the field, and cleaning up afterward. Logistics are a big challenge, says Jared Bigham, until recently the supervising principal of two schools in Copperhill, Tennessee, and a former teacher, coach, and player. Even though the coaches are in charge of the budgets, I still have to oversee them and approve each expenditure. Youre looking at 10 different budgets you have to manage.
That kind of constant, low-level distraction may be the greatest cost of all. During football season in particular, the focus of American principals, teachers, and students shifts inexorably away from academics. Sure, high-school football players spend long, exhausting hours practicing (and according to one study, about 15 percent experience a brain injury each season), but the commitment extends to the rest of the community, from late-night band practices to elaborate pep rallies to meetings with parents. Athletics even dictate the time that school starts each day: despite research showing that later start times improve student performance, many high schools begin before 8 a.m., partly to reserve afternoon daylight hours for sports practice.
Premont is not alone. Over the past few years, budget cuts have forced more school districts, from Florida to Illinois, to scale back on sports programs. But in most of these places, even modest cuts to athletics are viewed as temporaryand tragicsacrifices, not as necessary adaptations to a new reality. Many schools have shifted more of the cost of athletics to parents rather than downsize programs. Others have cut basic academic costs to keep their sports programs intact. Officials in Pasco County, Florida, have considered squeezing athletic budgets for each of the past six years. Theyve so far agreed to cut about 700 education jobs, and they extended winter break in 2011, but sports have been left mostly untouched.
In these communities, the dominant argument is usually that sports lure students into school and keep them out of troublethe same argument American educators have made for more than a century. And it remains relevant, without a doubt, for some small portion of students.
Andreas Schleicher, a German education scientist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, has visited schools all over the world and is an authority on different regional approaches to education. (I profiled Schleicher for this magazine in 2011.) He is wary of the theory that sports can encourage sustained classroom engagement. Our analysis suggests that the most engaging environment you can offer students is one of cognitive challenge combined with individualised pedagogical support, he told me in an e-mail. If you offer boring and poor math instruction and try to compensate that with interesting sport activities, you may get students interested in sports but I doubt it will do much good to their engagement with school.
Exercise, without a doubt, is good for learning and living. But these benefits accrue to the athletes, who are in the minority. What about everyone else?
At Spelman College, a historically black, all-womens college in Atlanta, about half of last years incoming class of some 530 students were obese or had high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, or some other chronic health condition that could be improved with exercise. Each year, Spelman was spending nearly $1 million on athleticsnot for those students, but for the 4 percent of the student body that played sports.
Spelmans president, Beverly Daniel Tatum, found the imbalance difficult to justify. She told me that early last year, while watching a Spelman basketball game, it occurred to me that none of these women were going to play basketball after they graduated. By that I dont mean play professionallyI mean even recreationally. I thought of all the black women I knew, and they did not tend to spend their recreational time playing basketball. So a little voice in my head said, Well, lets flip it.
That April, after getting approval from her board and faculty, she gathered Spelmans athletes and coaches in an auditorium and announced that she was going to cancel intercollegiate sports after the spring of 2013, and begin spending that $1 million on a campus-wide health-and-fitness program.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-case-against-high-school-sports/309447/
Ive linked this article a few times in other threads, but I think it deserves its own thread because its just really good and pretty eye-opening.
If these costs are pretty typical for sports in every public school system, I think the only sane thing to do is get rid of them. Like the article said, its not just the financial cost, its the time spent by teachers and principals to organize and deal with stuff that could be spent preparing for class. Plus, if every school sees such a dramatic adacameic and behavioral turnaround like Piedemont, Texas, well, we would be stupid not to do it
I especially liked the part where those Texas boosters raised 400k for the school, and the principal re-modeled the science rooms instead, lol. Dude is awesome
And yes, i know. super long, blah blah. Read it! Its good!
