Two U.S. congressmen apparently have decided that we need to use the carrot-and-stick approach to solving the problem of college athletics and academics. Unfortunately, they want to give the carrot to high school administrators and the stick to prep athletes.
Reps. Tom McMillen of Maryland and Ed Towns of New York have introduced legislation that would encourage secondary schools to require students participating in extracurricular activities to maintain a 2.0, or C, grade-point average in a core curriculum by providing extra federal funds to those schools that do.
In other words, if you want the additional cash, there better not be any kids with 1.9 averages competing on the basketball team or playing flute in the band.
This is more or less a federal version of the no-pass, no-play legislation that has been the subject of much talk and little action in Illinois state government circles in recent years. The arguments pro and con are also similar.
Advocates say we have to demand more of our children academically and use the possible loss of things that are fun to get them to perform better in the classroom. Opponents say that if you take sports away from a kid, even temporarily, he may drop out of the educational system for good.
The McMillen-Towns bill, entitled the Student Incentive Act of 1990, grew out of concerns about the appallingly low rate at which athletes graduate from many colleges. McMillen, a former pro basketball player, recently was quoted in the Washington Post as saying, ”I do believe the root cause for all this lies in secondary schools.”
Frank Nardi, Bloom`s basketball coach and athletic director, believes that McMillen may not fully understand the reality of education in this country. Some children arrive at high school so woefully prepared academically that they are as likely to do C work in core courses as the Pistons` Bill Laimbeer is to get the key to the city at Chicago Stadium.
”They come up with these programs that say we want to have a 2.0 and everyone is equal and there should be no problem,” Nardi said. ”In reality, it`s not true. You get kids coming into high school with all different levels of academic achievement. You have to work with them. I think this is asking for additional problems than what you have already.
”If a kid comes into high school with a reading problem, how can that kid go into freshman year algebra, biology, language? If he has a reading problem, he`s not going to get a 2.0. He`s just not.”
The point is that Rep. McMillen`s root cause really starts in elementary school. Far too many students enter high school lacking basic educational skills, which puts them 10 points down with two minutes to play. Winning is possible, but not likely.
Because of that, Nardi is no big fan of Proposition 48, either. Prop 48 forces athletes who don`t meet minimum standards in core courses and college board scores to sit out their freshman seasons.
”Forty-eight only talks about high school; it doesn`t talk about elementary school,” he said. ”The whole issue of education is not simply a high school or college issue.”
As a coach and educator, Larry Hawkins has spent his adult life trying to convince various movers and shakers of that exact point. So many of them haven`t been able to see the problem past the college level that Hawkins sees a victory of sorts in McMillen`s words.
But although he didn`t want to comment specifically about the Student Incentive Act until he had read it, Hawkins generally frowns on the no-pass, no-play philosophy.
No-pass, no-play uses academic performance as a means to separate a kid from athletics, which may be the only thing keeping him in school. As president of the Institute for Athletics and Education, Hawkins takes the opposite approach: Use a kid`s love of sports as a lever to get him interested in academics.
He fears that if you cut an athlete loose from sports even for a few weeks, you risk losing him forever. Now, he says, there`s at least the chance for a coach to maintain contact and possibly turn the student around.
”I don`t lose them because they don`t have the 2.0,” said Hawkins, who coaches volleyball at Hyde Park. ”I still have a chance at them, and about the middle of their junior years, I may start to get through . . . if I still have them.
”We have to upgrade what happens to kids rather than say you have to get a 2.0. Otherwise we`re cutting out the best part of high school and elementary sport: the kid on the edge about to jump off, and he turns around 180 degrees and becomes a team member and graduates and goes on to do great things. We don`t need to throw them away. We need to bring them in.”
Should the Student Incentive Act become law, schools would be free to ignore it, but the extra federal funds might be hard for some cash-strapped districts to pass up. It`s often the poorest districts that have the poorest students, so some administrators might be facing a tough choice.
The problem with the Student Incentive Act is that it parachutes into the middle of an educational crisis and starts shooting. If the federal government is going to make the description ”student-athlete” something other than a contradiction in terms, it would be better off directing its firepower at the elementary schools.
