Posted on 01/08/2014 6:41:06 AM PST by RightGeek
(CNN) -- Early in her career as a learning specialist, Mary Willingham was in her office when a basketball player at the University of North Carolina walked in looking for help with his classwork.
He couldn't read or write.
"And I kind of panicked. What do you do with that?" she said, recalling the meeting.
Willingham's job was to help athletes who weren't quite ready academically for the work required at UNC at Chapel Hill, one of the country's top public universities.
But she was shocked that one couldn't read. And then she found he was not an anomaly.
Soon, she'd meet a student-athlete who couldn't read multisyllabic words. She had to teach him to sound out Wis-con-sin, as kids do in elementary school.
And then another came with this request: "If I could teach him to read well enough so he could read about himself in the news, because that was something really important to him," Willingham said.
Student-athletes who can't read well, but play in the money-making collegiate sports of football and basketball, are not a new phenomenon, and they certainly aren't found only at UNC-Chapel Hill.
A CNN investigation found public universities across the country where many students in the basketball and football programs could read only up to an eighth-grade level. The data obtained through open records requests also showed a staggering achievement gap between college athletes and their peers at the same institution.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
You must have missed the unintelligible post game interview with the winning quarterback...
Getting a four-year college degree also means being able to WRITE well, as in term papers, which require research of some kind.
I actually got my B.A. in four years because my parents let me go to school without working. I did work summers and Christmas but those jobs didn't even pay for my books.
Those who cheat on that may get a job, but without the skills of being able to write well, at a college level, they won't KEEP those jobs.
One doesn't need to read to sell/cook burgers--the company uses PICTURES. Nothing wrong with those jobs, as they are decent work, but the athlete HAS to go beyond the 5th grade reading/writing level to EVER get his four-year (120 units of real classes) degree...and thus become a head coach.
Is anyone surprised by this?
Haven’t we known for ages that many athletes are promoted for their ability to win on the field?
But that can’t be the blame. No, and we can’t blame any of the dumbing-down PC issues brought to us by leftist policies.
So the answer must be that we just don’t care enough about the poor.
This is looking like a branch of the inequality tree leftists are nurturing.
During the O.J. trial, O.J. had to read something aloud. He was barely able.
Is that Winston? FSU? I’d like to see that.
Maybe you’re referring to “reading ar an eighth grade level” of the 60’s. Besides, the article is actually referencing athelets that “read”at a FIRST grade level,
Using gender to get these men to read and write sounds like a good idea. What WOULD those feminists say? :o)
Did you work with the illiterate female athletes too?
You have the fsu QB name wrong. Terribly wrong.
LOL...there are college athletes who graduate with a BA or BS who have never set foot in a classroom, never read a book or written a paper.
Had an aunt who took on the care of her late sister’s boys. The father couldn’t manage
One of the boys was a very good athlete, all county football in ny suburbs
When it came time for him to choose which of the recruiting colleges to attend, she sought out the one the found out would give him an education.
But she visited and asked questions
He ended up with an engineering degree, turning down an NFL invitation
He said he’d be a mess if he ever got seriously hurt, no job
That was a long time ago
Parents can’t go to the school and ask if he’s going to get an education? They can’t teach their kids to get an advantage from an opportunity?
Why should the colleges take advantage of these kids? Who cares? By the Ted a college kid figures out he’s been had its too late
Ditto liberal brainwashing schools and also all the other bad deals kids are getting at school
Who is looking after these kids? CNN?
Sorry. I agree with your post, btw.
It’s surprising when you’re older. I guess the “dumb jock” meme came from somewhere, but where I went to high school (a gazillion years ago), football players were at least in the upper third of our class. I don’t remember any of them being stupid or inattentive & our teachers would have surely made a point of it if they had been.
Michigan Tech...
Just like homeschooling.
Oh, yeah. Not really. Homeschooling sixth-graders read at a 12th-grade level.
I know. How SAD that all the people that were supposed to LOVE them, teach them and get them to be independent people FAILED them.
Those people set up their beloved sons to FAIL.
Academic vs. athletic scandalAs a graduate student at UNC-Greensboro, Willingham researched the reading levels of 183 UNC-Chapel Hill athletes who played football or basketball from 2004 to 2012. She found that 60% read between fourth- and eighth-grade levels. Between 8% and 10% read below a third-grade level.
"So what are the classes they are going to take to get a degree here? You cannot come here with a third-, fourth- or fifth-grade education and get a degree here," she told CNN.
The issue was highlighted at UNC two years ago with the exposure of a scandal where students, many of them athletes, were given grades for classes they didn't attend, and where they did nothing more than turn in a single paper. Last month, a North Carolina grand jury indicted a professor at the center of the scandal on fraud charges. He's accused of being paid $12,000 for a class he didn't teach.
When Willingham worked as a learning specialist for athletes from 2003 to 2010, she admits she took part in cheating, signing her name to forms that said she witnessed no NCAA rules violations when in fact she did. But the NCAA, the college sports organizing body, never interviewed her. Instead, it found no rules had been broken at Chapel Hill.
UNC now says 120 reforms put in place ensure there are no academic transgressions.
But Willingham said fake classes were just a symptom of the bigger problem of enrolling good athletes who didn't have the reading skills to succeed at college.
"Isn't it all cheating if I'm sitting at a table with a kid who can't read or write at college level and pulling a paper out of them? Is this really legitimate? No," Willingham told CNN. "I wouldn't do that today with a college student; I only did it with athletics, because it's necessary."
It all depends on the university.
If the men were recruited to play at an Ivy League school, Stanford or the University of California system, they had to be able to do well academically. Not so with other university systems...I understand. Maybe I'm wrong.
There are no STUPID quarterbacks.
Same could be said of many people...even some of our precious FReeper brethren...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.