I hear this a lot(and sometimes people claim that high school football actually foots the bill for other sports), but I wonder if there are any hard stats on this. Also, would those other sports come out ahead or behind if football just got the same level of funding as they did?
Your entire argument is just your opinion without anything to back it up. You think there will be no public sports programs if they don’t operate through the schools, but there programs already exist in Little League, Pop Warner, and many other organizations. In many districts particular sports are not available through the schools and paid for with both public and private funds. Apparently you’ve never seen the plethora of private dance and gymnastics programs. When I was kid I participated in swimming, basketball, and ice hockey programs that were not school sponsored. I guarantee you that Texas high school programs will continue without a break if no longer managed by the schools/
You may like these programs yourself, but as already pointed out they have little or nothing to do with physical education because they are competitive sports programs, they are about winning, and concentrated to benefit star players. I think very little will change if the schools drop these programs. they will be taken over by other public and private organizations. If there is any significant change it will be to the funding where the sports programs must now justify their benefit to a limited group of qualifying participants. And in some cases, some programs will disappear, because they couldn’t be justified in the first place, which brings up this question in the first place.
According to this recent article, Muscogee County coaches earn much more on average than do their teachers:
" The Muscogee County’s eight head football coaches make an average of just over $62,000, well above the average salary for the district’s more than 4,000 full-time employees.
The average annual salary for the MCSD’s 4,442 full-time employees is $43,685. The median salary for the MCSD’s full-time employees is $41,705. The median household income in Muscogee County for 2018 was $45,389, according to the U.S. Census Bureau."
The American Association of School Administrators laments
Over the past 15 years the average percent of school district budgets allocated for administration has declined slightly, from 4.8 to 4.5 percent.
Supplies, food, custodial services more. Maybe instead of focusing on expenditures for programs that benefit students by fostering fitness and teamsmanship, look into cutting those that benefit parents who can’t be buggered packing a lunch or buying pencils and employees who complain their pay and benefits package is far to low for the 2/3 of a work year they put in.
Physical fitness but only for a few elite athletes? Is that your model?
At my kids HS in a Montreal suburb, there were no organized sports. The town had organized hockey and baseball (and I think they added soccer a couple decades ago). Anyone who showed up was welcome. The coaches were local volunteers (I coached baseball one year.) My son, now in his fifties, still plays hockey. I still think this is a healthy way to do things. If organized sports are in the HS, make them intramural and allow anyone in.
This is vile bullshit. You don’t believe that kids who need supplies and breakfast and lunch come from families who “can’t be buggered” to provide it. And the smear against teachers is also reprehensible. They are paid embarrassingly low wages for doing a very high pressure job and many of them pay out of pocket for school supplies.
Seriously, this kind of stuff is just propaganda.
I agree completely. Why do you think I said otherwise? I spent my entire childhood playing pick-up games of road hockey and whatever. We didn’t care about ability. Two of the goalies we played with, although just occasionally, made it to the NHL.
I have seen history teachers recruited because they are passionate about American history and inculcating in students a sense of how the past has influenced and continues to influence the present.
My high school recruited their history teachers based on what sports they could coach.
(Seriously, every single teacher in the history dept was hired primarily as a coach; they fact they had a teaching license and could read out of the textbook to the civics class was a bonus.)
Tickets were just a few bucks. And since it’s been over 26 years since I graduated I can’t honestly tell you who collected the money or what it was used for.
Since the community votes on the school board it seems to me that they already have their say.
–Formerly Acerbic but now Odesio thanks to mod assistance.
I don’t know how many hours the principal spent on sports. Do you? I’m also not sure how often the horrific behavior of athletes was or current is overlooked in Plano. When I was there, a long, long time ago, I can tell you I was severely punished for bad behavior and for every unsatisfactory rating I received for behavior on my 6 week report card.
As far as overlooking bad behavior, if we honored academics or the arts as much as we did sports I think we’d see the same problem. In fact, in recent years we’ve learned of the abuse that can happen in theater and orchestras thanks to the me too movement.
–Formerly Acerbic but now Odesio thanks to mod assistance.
The Truth about Teacher Pay
“By 2017, average public-education compensation exceeded private-sector levels by 22%, the highest compensation premium ever.”
I know what’s typical in high schools in the DFW area, and I can tell you that the amount of manpower, mental energy, and community capital that goes toward the sports program in a normal high school is pretty mind-boggling. It’s just been normalized. DMN quoted a Woodrow kid saying the other day that without extracurriculars, what was even the point of school? And he wasn’t talking about chess club.
There could be a place for a sports program. But as it is right now, it takes over everything. It becomes the end, not the means, and everything else fights over the scraps.
There’s
One big problem is that often teachers are hired, not because they can teach say english, but that they are a good basketball coach.
Then said teachers/coaches are the ones who just show videos or have easy assignments because they are using classroom time to work on their sport.
Yet I have seen teacher/ coaches making over $100k a year thru doing on the side coaching and running camps and events in the summer.
And they aren’t bad people for doing that. Coaches don’t get growth plans. Coaches get fired if the community thinks they could be better. They work insane hours, easily 60-70 hours a week in season. And it’s hard, grueling work.
When you get hired and fired for one set of tasks, and no consequences for poor performance on this other set, well, your boss has made your job description pretty clear.
High school football in East Texas is almost like watching semi-pro football. There’s a culture of football worship in Texas. Friday Night Lights is not an exaggeration; you as an East Texan are probably well aware of this.
Fair enough. I certainly think there’s plenty of room to discuss the role of sports in schools and how much time, effort, and money we put into it.
Again, get rid of playoffs and the whole thing would become . . .proportional. Its the playoff dreams that raise the stakes perpetually.
DFW does not consider itself East Texan! We are the Texan everyone else is relative to.
But really, its not just football. Baseball, softball, swim . . . All can get toxic.
I had a few coaches going through the PISD who taught non-athletic sports. I had a basketball coach for my 9th grade American history course, a football coach for Algebra, and a football coach for Earth Science in 8th grade. You really needed an understanding of earth sciences to grasp the fundamentals of football back then. But then I had one football coach who also taught PE and I didn’t think he was particularly good at either job. But, yeah, I can certainly see how some programs might put aside academic interests in order to appease the pigskin in the sky.