Sports ain’t the problem.
In life, there are brains, brawn, looks, and character.
Brains are important, to be sure. But I can tell you after spending over two decades in electronics, that the kind of people you get when you solely focus on brains won’t be there to help you when the chips are down.
Sports are essential to physical and mental toughness, and to character, and to maintaining your corporeal self.
All four are needed for us to fulfill what God had planned for us when He made us.
You wanna know who brings home the most moolah at your local high school? More than a 20 year teacher? More than even the principal? Often a six figure salary? Hell, even some assistant coaches earn more than the principal.
FWIW.
Sorry Amanda. You can’t blame this on sports. Take a closer look at the “programmers” that we force our kids to be brainwashed by and get back with us. IMHO, we need to go back to hiring TEACHERS at our schools.
Purpose of high school sports: to keep the boys and girls distracted enough that they are not all screwing each other.
Before we discuss rankings, let’s separate U.S. students by demographic.
Then we’ll talk, teacher unions.
She offers only the standard leftist solution: i.e. an endless ever increasing flow of dollars. They ever forget that it is not the role of schools to promulgate social engineering concepts but to to discipline a students cognitive abilities. The schools need to rigidly segregate the able from the mediocre and unable. To focus the able and maybe the mediocre student on cognitive tasks. We need group cohesion and an us versus them mentality a belief that we students are the bright ones, the happy ones, the glorious ones and we will someday make the laws. If interscholastic sports help to achieve the aforementioned then they should be kept.
The US spends more per capita on education than any other developed country. The sports money is irrelevant. Throwing money at education in the US doesn't work.
The Fremont district was threatened with shutdown due to mismanagement and failing results. They completely retooled their program and curriculum. That, I submit, had a lot more to do with Fremont's improvement that shuttering sports.
Sports teaches people about hard work and also how to relate with others. It also kept me off drugs. I would not be where I am today without sports.
It’s actually a good article. She makes a lot of good points.
Not in my town. The high school booster club comes with with lots of cash for stuff the team needs. The taxpayer pays hardly nothing.
And our team has been in the championship game 15 of the last 16 years.
And our high school stands head and shoulders academically over most schools in the state.
It is possible to do both academics and sports. It requires common sense and participation.
I didn’t play Little League and grew up with school based sports. My experience with club sports is from my daughters’ participation in, principally, soccer. I have come around to the view that the club model is superior. It is broad at the base. In principle, one can have an unlimited number of teams. It can get extremely competitive at elite levels but there is a team and a level for everyone who wants to play. And all of the notorious abuses of high powered athletics making a mock of academic standards are avoided.
I would favor getting athletics out of schools.
Last time I checked, the Math Bee didn’t generate much revenue for a high school, but one football playoff game sure does.
South Korea is known for what, exactly, besides teenage suicide and mass depression? I spent a long time in Texas public education. There’s more to this than simplism and stereotypes. Yes, a coach will make more than a sixth grade math teacher but so will a high school ag science teacher. That’s because the coach and the ag science teacher have an extended year contract and both spend tons more hours on the job than the math teacher. In most cases coaches work more days than assistant principals. Like any other profession, 5% are geniuses; 5% are idiots and 90% fall somewhere in between. As to the per capita expense, all the kids take math; far fewer play football and football generates gate receipts that pay the operating costs of the other sports. Here’s a news flash: no football = no band in most cases.Finally, why is an art teacher more important than a football coach except to folks who hate testosterone?
Get rid of public schools and their damn sports programs.
Meanwhile, over at Harper's, Nicholson Baker makes the case against high school math and wonders why we require it and devote so much resources to it. I'd have to give him the award for most contrarian article of the month. It's certainly more provocative than going after sports yet again.
In my county every time the public schools want more money they threaten to end football. The idiots here line up like lemmings to give them what they want.
Tell you what, all you suburban welfare queens, if you want your kids to play games and be in clubs, open up your own damned checkbooks and pay for it yourselves. Stop sticking your neighbors with a large part of the bill to entertain and recreate the kids you chose to bring into the world.