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2012 - Educators: Thinking about cutting sports. You may want to think again. Education Next's Contributing Editor June Kronholz notes, "There's not a straight line between the crochet club and the Ivy League. But a growing body of research says there is a link between afterschool activities and graduating from high school, going to college, and becoming a responsible citizen." Click here for Academic Value of Non-Academics by June Kronholz, Education Next, Winter 2012, Vol. 12, No. 1. Kronholz sees value not only in sports, but in a wide array of extracurricular activities. She also refers to the concept of "grit", that quality of perseverance that you get from battling through adversity in athletics or in the school band. Athletes - and band members and actors - don't quit. They can't - unless they want to become ex-athletes, ex-band members, and former actors. Of course, lay people intuitively know about grit, and even refer to it informally as "sticking to it" or "battling through it." Well, lay people are correct. Kronholz cites University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Dukworth, who literally gives "grit scores" to recent graduates applying for their first teaching jobs. These grit scores factor in college activities such as athletics. The scores get higher for achievements such as Team MVP awards. According to Kronholz, Duckworth has observed that the applicants with the highest grit scores, "turned out to be the best teachers, based on the academic gains of their students. As an added bonus, the 'grittiest' scorers also were more likely to stay in their jobs rather than quit midyear." So, educators should keep sports for the students, but also for the future teachers. Sports - and other extracurriculars - make winners.
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2008 - NFHS Updates The Case For High School Activities. Sports and co-curricular activities develop better students and only costs one to three percent of a school's budget.
2008 - Click Here for Participants In Activity Programs Do Better In Classroom by Don Showalter, NFHS High School Today, September 2008, page 8 (reporting on correlation between sports and GPAs in Wellman, Iowa).
2008 - Click Here For One Class by Will Okun (guest blogging on the Nicholas Kristof On the Ground Blog), New York Times, March 27, 2008. This piece describes Chicago's creative Hoops High program that uses sports video production as a learning tool that decreases absenteeism in inner city schools and stimulates student interest. .
Click Here for The Effects Of Extracurricular Activities On The Academic Performance Of Junior High School Students, Kimiko Fujita.
Click Here for Physical Activity & Sport In The Lives Of Girls, President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports Report, 1997. Extract from page 24, "School administrators are often unaware of the positive interplay between high-school athletics and academic achievement as measured by grade point average, standardized achievement test scores, lowered risk for dropout and greater likelihood to attend college. On average, female athletes fare better academically than female nonathletes ... , Hence, from an interdisciplinary perspective, it is likely that athletic participation is part of a mutually reinforcing array of physical, psychological and social processes that enhance the overall educational experiences and commitments of many girls."
The Relationship Between Participation In High School Athletics and Academic Achievement by Nora O'Donnell. Ms. O'Donnell's research shows that 75% of high school athletes improve their grades while playing. Ms. O'Donnell offers excellent suggestions for further increases.
Survey Provides New Info On High School Athletics by Amanda Personett, The NFHS News, November/December 2006 page 1. An NFHS Survey finds 47% of students participate in high school sports, 65% of schools do not make students pay fees, the schools that charge fees tend to charge less than $100 per student, and sports costs less than two percent of a school's total budget. In short, you get a lot of bang for your buck in a high school sports program.
Is technology the ultimate solution to school sports budget problems? Could technological changes one day lead to schools being social centers, and extracurriculars being a major focal point of schools? Roger C. Schank and Kemi Jona made this argument in 1999 in Extracurriculars As The Curriculum: A Vision Of Education For the 21st Century by Schank, R.C. & Jona, K (December 1999) (White Paper commissioned for the Forum on Technology In Education: Envisioning The Future, Washington, D.C.). As of 2010, Schank and Jona looked way off. A decline in school budgets has led to extracurriculars being cut. However, a rise in on-line learning may still lead to a day where students learn from either the most effective teachers, through on-line courses, or through classroom lectures delivered by recognized masters with facilitation from the actual classroom teacher. Schank and Jona's thesis that a K-12 classroom teacher is not the recognized master of a topic is accurate. The question is whether K-12 students need on-line exposure to a recognized master in order to learn. The advent of the Kahn Academy website, where a non-master uses simple on-line teaching teaching techniques and achieves, in many cases, better results than K-12 and college and university professors may give rise to a push for the best teachers to go on-line and gain exposure to the greatest number of students. Schank and Jona may still be right. If they are, school costs will go down, and extracurricular budgets could someday go up again; however, schools would be very different. On the other hand, the rise of the AAU and other club sports, and the tensions that the NCAA is experiencing with the controversial pay to play issues, and the legal battles over licensing rights may one day lead us to separate sports from schools. Only time will tell, but with the economy being what it is and all the gobbledygook we hear in the news, you can get a taste of the Khan Academy yourself by clicking right here for the Khan Academy's session on unemployment. Judge for yourself whether it adds clarity.