A friend of mine used to eat his scrambled eggs with grape jelly. One day, unable to hide my disgust, I asked him why he did that. He answered that he had always eaten them that way because his parents ate them that way. When I persuaded him to try his scrambled eggs minus the jelly, he found that he liked the way they tasted, and he admitted they were probably healthier without high-fructose corn syrup. This made me wonder what other things we have paired without really giving any thought to how much healthier they might be separated. Just like my friend whose limited history made him think scrambled eggs and jelly were a natural combination, our limited experience makes us cling to pairings such as public schools and sports.
School spending has been a big topic recently. According to the 2013 Digest of Education Statistics, school spending has consistently been between 43 percent and 45 percent of the local tax burden nationwide for the past 20 years. But, since the local budget seems to be the one place where an individual still has a voice, education spending is often targeted for cuts. Interestingly, when budget-cutting proposals are marched out, the idea of cutting sports is seldom included.
My own state, Vermont, is struggling with school spending and seems determined that the best solution is consolidation, something that runs counter to the idea of local control of schools. I haven’t heard anyone in Vermont talk about the hundreds of thousands of dollars that could be cut from school budgets by removing sports from schools. Athletics transportation alone can run into tens of thousands of dollars for a small school, and when you add in the athletic director and coaches’ salaries, officiating fees, facility maintenance and equipment costs, the figure for sports is the equivalent of several teacher salaries.
Vermont is not alone in ignoring the burden sports puts on our public schools. A few years ago, Texas was faced with shedding $10 billion from its education budget. Officials considered everything from laying off teachers, to increasing class sizes, to cutting aid to at-risk students. The budget-cutting scissors never cast a shadow on a Texas high school football field. Staff cuts and larger class sizes affect all students. Cutting school sports would affect only a minority.
The national average for participation in high school sports is about 40 percent. About 8 percent of those go on to play college sports, and out of those, about 2 percent play professional sports. Our public schools aren’t preparing kids for careers as athletes, so why does so much taxpayer money get directed toward sports instead of preparing them for the life they will actually live?
About the only thing harder to come up with than education funding is political courage. Politicians in most states would never propose something that would surely be unpopular with a vocal minority of taxpayers. Anyone who has spent time at youth sports events might understand why even the bravest politician might not want to do battle with sports parents. And since we really have become a country where majority rule has been replaced by squeaky-wheel rule, it is more expedient for politicians to propose solutions that negatively affect the majority of students than to propose solutions that affect the vocal parents of students who participate in school sports.
I need to state here that I am not anti-sports. Not only did I participate in sports in school, I have also coached sports for 17 of my 25 years of teaching. But after listening to a lot of political fighting over which bad solution will harm our students the least, it seems to me that it is time that we took a lesson from the rest of the world and replaced our scholastic sports model with a club model where the cost is incurred by users. In most of Europe, school sports are little more than intramural level. The more serious training and competition occur in clubs, which meet before or after the school day. Japan, whose love of baseball is a legendary, does have school teams, but they don’t interfere with school. Their high school baseball tournament takes place during summer vacation.
I know we don’t like to admit that other countries might do things better than we do, and I have heard the arguments for the system we have. When I bring up my idea to people, I generally hear the same justifications:
School sports teach kids a healthy lifestyle: According to the Centers for Disease Control, the United States has an adult obesity rate of 34.9 percent. If we really wanted to teach kids a healthy lifestyle, we could take a portion of the money we are spending on interscholastic sports and put it toward actual nutrition and fitness training. Give them a lifelong lesson in fitness. School sports aren’t doing that. Remember Jimmy the running back from high school? He now weighs 300 pounds and drinks a six-pack for dinner.
Playing school sports teaches discipline: Do you really think our students are more disciplined than Japanese students? Get out of town! No, I mean it. Get out of town and go to Japan and see what discipline looks like. You will never hear a Japanese student use his baseball game as an excuse for not doing his homework.
Playing school sports builds character: I think it is safe to say that one thing we can find in our college and professional athletes is character; it’s just not always good character. Look at the national reaction Derek Jeter got during the last year of his career. Was that because he was the best player to ever play the game? No. He was a great player, but great players have come and gone without the fanfare that was poured out even by fans of the Yankees’ archenemies. Derek Jeter was a rare kind of athlete today, the one you would like your own kid to emulate.
I know that there are other arguments. Some might even sound convincing, at first. But if what we really want to do is improve our kids’ education system and give taxpayers some relief, then I am afraid we need to identify school sports for what it really is: education’s high-fructose corn syrup. Of course, I am enough of a realist to know that this solution has about as much chance of being adopted as I have of being invited to the Koch brothers’ next unicorn roast, but with the fate of our children and our future on the line, doesn’t it at least deserve to be part of the conversation?
Skip Chalker is a high school teacher. He lives in Hartford.