Actually, there’s a lot of empirical research that has been done on the affect of involvement in extra-curriculars. Far from being a band-aid, it can actually be the lynchpin in keeping a kid in school and on a track for potential success. C students learn more than drop-outs, it’s as simple as that.
Fortunately, many teachers disagree with you. I have several friends who are inner-city teachers who recognize that kids dropping out of school and becoming gang-bangers is their problem. Not because they created it, but because they can do something about it.
It is true that in America we have a vision of education as the magic bullet for our problems, when in many ways it is the opposite–the classroom is a magnet for all of the problems of our society. But deciding that you only want to teach the motivated kids isn’t a rejection of social engineering, its a rejection of kids who are, in large part, products of their circumstances.
And this is where the whole grade inflation thing comes into play, for me. To me, from my experiences in high school and a brief foray into education in college, anything below a C was “Hey kid, get your shit together or you’re about to be failing!” And to me, “getting your shit together” shouldn’t include shooting freethrows or taking cuts at the plate, it should be staying after class for extra help, going to tutoring or studying on your own. Things that aren’t easy to do when you’re expected to be at practice or games most nights of the week.
Now, when you said that would (should) mean that half of the entire student body would be excluded, I agree, that’s too extreme. But again, that’s because lower than a C has become pretty bad (again, in my experience). If I thought Cs truly represented an average level of achievement – preparation for college or trade school or the military or just a successful career path in general – then sure, only keep kids out when they’re failing. I believe that’s what the I(llinois)HSA does, just requires you to pass all your classes.
I have a question: Why are sports connected to the schools at all?
Over here school is school and if you want to participate in a sport that is a completely separate thing. The only association with a school might be if the team rented the gym for training or something. I don’t get why grades should determine whether the child is allowed to participate in sports. Sure, parents might decide that their child needs to keep up their schoolwork in order to stay on the team, but I really don’t understand this mixing of academics and after-school activities.
Well, if you are looking for a bunch of kids to get a team together, a school is a natural congregation of them to start from. It also instills a sense of school spirit or pride to be identified with the school that you spend most days involved with.
Good grades are required because of the basic idea that if a kid is getting bad grades, then he needs to spend his extra time studying to get his grades higher, not spend his extra time working on his 3-point shot.
I get that. But I just find it very strange that everything is so focused on the school. When I was a kid I went to an elementary school in the neighbourhood with some of the people I’d gone to kindergarten with. Some of the same people were also on my soccer team, but there were kids from other schools as well, same with the theatre group I belonged to. When I changed schools, junior high and high schools, I already knew some of the others from after-school activities. That way it increases your social circle which is always good.
The whole school spirit thing is just completely foreign to me. I highly doubt I’d have fonder memories of my junior high school if the same people who bullied me at school were part of my after-school activities, and if you have a good experience at school I’d think you’d still feel connected to it even you only spend the actual school day there. It’s still a significant portion of your life.
I realize that a kid whose grades are slipping might need to focus more on homework than sports. But I believe that should primarily be a parental decision. And some kids will never get good grades regardless, and I think it would be a real shame to forbid them from playing sports just because they’re not strong academically. If the kid really is trying, but unable to achieve I’d think it might be damaging to take away something he/she actually masters. Sports can teach valuable skills and values such as co-operation, a work ethic, importance of exercise and so on. (Hey, look I got back to the actual topic of the thread. )
Based on your post, I’m presuming you aren’t in the United States. My understanding is that beginning in the 1900’s as universal schooling gained currency and hit critical mass, schools started to be looked at by wannabe reformers as the natural laboratory for what to do with members of the lower class. They instituted vocational training (shop class, home ec), sports (physical fitness), replaced classical history and latin/ greek (traditional in prep school environments) with American history, literature classes and composition which would be thought to be more interesting to students who were not preparing for college, but still would be stimulating and worthwhile.
The end result is that in the United States, the school has moved to a central focus for the American family and in our social focus. It has become the go-to organization for fixing social problems because that is how the current model of high school was originally conceived.
The best book on this topic is Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform. It is available on amazon and is often standard in Education curricula in the United States.
Kids who are failing should not be able to play sports. Extracurriculars can and do interfere with kids’ academics, since they practice every day after school and sometimes have games that are long car rides away. However, some kids only bother to achieve in school because they need to have passing grade in order to play sports, so the incentive effect can be very good for them.
It all depends on the coach. At our school, the football coach really cares about grades. The kids come around with little cards. The teachers have to put the current average on it, and they know they will be booted if they have too many D’s and F’s. The team has on it a lot of the kids who have academic issues and it helps them stay on task. You can see their grades fall off once the season is over.
OTOH, at the school I worked at prior to this, the coaches would do anything for their players, including grade pressuring on teachers and getting kids out of punishments. One track and soccer star spit at a teacher. The normal punishment for that is in-school suspension. However, any kind of suspension would have caused the kid to miss his next athletic event, so the coach got the principal to have the kid serve a couple of morning detentions (15 minutes long) instead. I find that appalling.
But surely we can agree that this depends a lot on the prevailing circumstances of the school. I’ve taught classes at schools in the suburbs where what you say is absolutely true. But I’ve sat in on classes in the inner-city where it’s not true at all, and the situation is closer to how the administrators of the school in question describe them.
Shouldn’t we defer to their judgment of the situation?
It really depends on the ethics of the administrator and the climate of the school. Some administrators just want their school’s teams to win, and will pressure teachers to bend the rules for certain kids, or will outright favor athletes in how they are treated. I have seen it happen. I don’t see it happening for the president of the Art Squad or the yearbook, even though those kids are also participating in extracurriculars. And this was in a solidly middle class, suburban school. It was all about the sports.
It also depends on the priorties of the coaches and the parents. Overall, though, if a kid is failing in school, and the coaches really want them to play, the team should have tutors who work with the kids. A lot of times, these kids find time for sports but mysteriously don’t have a spare second for homework. Part of the deal should be that you have to be passing-- then help the kid make it happen with sports as the carrot and getting booted as the stick. There are tutors at my school who help kids for free, but kids don’t want to show up. That should be a dealbreaker for a kid who’s failing but wants to play sports.
We had a guy like that on my football team in HS. He was First Team All State and got a full ride to a great school. Only problem, he was dumb as a sack of rocks. I used to tutor him and a couple of other guys on the team, and this guy, it pains me to say, taught me what dumb meant. I felt really sorry for him. He was a really nice guy and NO ONE worked harder. He knew sports was his ticket and just had to get Cs and he’d be fine. He barely managed that at the HS (which was not difficult at all), be flunked out from his free ride inside a year. And you just know they were doing everything they could to help him. I mean, I went to Marquette when they won the NCAA with Al McGuire, and I learned first hand that elite athletes are coddled beyond belief.
The point is, at least sports made this kid get what he could out of school. Not much, but more than he would have if he didn’t have that incentive.
Okay, completly OT, but why is it that when we refer to kids working at school, it’s “studying”? I think that the amount of homework assigned has surpassed the amount of studying done at this point. Why can’t we refer to it as homework, or just work? I know it’s different in college, but still…it sounds rather patronizing to me.
My wife teaches at the university level, and gets athletes who try to use their status to pass classes which they barely attend. She doesn’t go for that, eligibility be damned.
Wouldn’t a better solution be to help these students in middle school? It was mentioned in the article, but I would think that would be the preferred solution.
I agree although I would point out that if the kid is athletic enough that it also engenders it’s own subculture of hero-worship and lack of personal responsibility for one’s own actions.
See: NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, etc et al.
Amen. This type of stuff whether it be maintenance of grades or behavior starts at home and is the responsibility of the parent(s), not the schools.
Public education isn’t responsible for raising your child to be mindful of achievement…YOU are, and if you don’t care, work too many jobs to be around or are simply indifferent in assuming that the schools are responsible for teaching your child proper behaviors then they likely WILL fail at academic achievement.
I rely on my children’s school system for only a few basic things: educating my child, providing safe transport to the school for said education, and getting them back home to me safely. That’s IT. It would seem that there are unreasonable expectations on what schooling is supposed to mean.
That’s an important part of it. But there’s more. Public schools are obviously underfunded. They depend on their most popular sporting events to bring in money for the school.
I was never pressured to change a grade for an athlete. (They may not have bothered to ask since I was very stubborn about that sort of thing.) But I really liked working with the football coach one year in particular. He pushed and I pulled. Every single football player in my fundamental class passed and did so honestly. That was one happy coach at McCabe’s Pub! Those were good times.
Let them know from the very start that high school is different. They are still too young to drop out. And most will live up to higher expectations if they come with a little bit more freedom and respect. There is no reason to lower expectations any farther. The kids are being insulted as it is.
With that said, I did tend to be a little bit more “nurturing” with my ninth graders. Psychologically they really belonged in middle school. High school was supposed to be grades 10-12. I don’t know what happened to that plan, but it seems to have gone by the wayside everywhere.
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