History and evidence show school sports help students win: blaming school sports for

academic inattention and bloated budgets is a popular move, but the evidence shows
sports have positive effects for students

Authors: Daniel H. Bowen and Collin Hitt

Date: May 2016

From: Phi Delta Kappan(Vol. 97, Issue 8)

Publisher: Sage Publications, Inc.

Document Type: Article

Length: 2,762 words
Lexile Measure: 1350L

Full Text:

Just over half of all high school students in the United States report being involved in
school-sponsored sports (Koebler, 2011). It's a curious phenomenon unique to the U.S.
public education system. At a basic level, sports and academics don't seem to belong
together. Yet it's rare to find a public high school in the U.S. that doesn't have an
interscholastic athletics program.

School-sponsored sports became a trademark of U.S. public education during the

Progressive Era. A keystone moment for this development was in New York City in 1903
with the establishment of its Public Schools Athletic League. Before this development,
youth athletic competition was predominantly studentgoverned; school-sponsored
competitions typically were exclusive to boarding schools (Pruter, 2013). Forming a large,
urban, public school sports league symbolized not only a significant development for
organized youth athletics but also that sports had become a valuable component of K-12
education.

As compulsory school attendance took hold, public schools had to cater to a greater variety
of educational needs, and administrators increasingly felt compelled to create
opportunities that were usually reserved for students from more privileged backgrounds
(Pruter, 2013). The motivation for integrating sports into schools was primarily rooted in
the philosophy of humanistic education that traces back to the Renaissance and was
inspired by the ancient Greeks (Cubberley, 1920). An assertion from this more holistic view
of education is that sports competition essentially can play a vital role in adolescent
character development. However, there was also a much more pragmatic inspiration for
this: Poor and working-class adolescents now had more after-school leisure time, and
sports were perceived as a good way to keep adolescents occupied (Pruter, 2013).

School-sponsored sports came to a halt with the advent of the Great Depression in
response to budget cuts. Youth sports did not disappear altogether, but the primary
provider shifted from schools to recreational associations. Pop Warner Youth Football and
Little League Baseball, for example, sprang up during this period to address the interest in
youth sports. However, since these leagues were not fully, publicly subsidized,
less-advantaged children disproportionately lost opportunities to participate (Pruter, 2013).

Sports return

Yet high school sports came back stronger than ever after World War II. As a result of the
post-World War II urban migration trends, rural colleges dropping many of their sports
programs, and the decline of local, amateur sports teams, high school athletic programs
became the pride of small towns across America. One of the most commonly cited and
portrayed examples is Indiana high school basketball, which "helped local farm
communities find redemption and uplift during a time when their way of life and economy
were in decline" (Pruter, 2013, p. 317).

Student participation in school sports has surged over the past half century. The number of
secondary student-athletes has nearly doubled since the 1970s (NFHS, 2015). The greatest
contributor to this increase was Title IX, which required schools to expand opportunities for
female student-athletes. From 1972, the year Title IX was passed, to 1978, the number of
high school girls playing school-sponsored sports increased nearly seven-fold to over 2
million from 300,000 (NFHS, 2015).

These historical developments collectively suggest that school-sponsored sports started

and grew because Americans believed that:

* Adolescents have an inherent, organic passion for athletics;

* Sports increase student engagement in school communities; and

* Underserved populations would not have access to certain valuable extracurricular

activities unless schools provided them.

Despite the perceived benefits and high levels of support from students and parents,
interscholastic athletics constantly come under attack. In times of budgetary constraints,
funds for extracurricular activities are typically the first on the chopping block, and sports
tend to receive a disproportionate share of negative attention for proposed cuts. For
instance, in fall 2015, in response to a projected budgetary shortfall, Virginia's Fairfax
County made national headlines when it proposed eliminating high school sports (Balingit,
2015).

While difficult decisions and cuts are an inevitable consequence of education budgetary
constraints, arguments made against preserving school-sponsored sports typically rely on
anecdotal evidence or stereotypes that are often intuitively appealing but rarely backed by
sound empirical evidence. What does the evidence say about some of the most common
arguments about school sports?

#1. Sports participation has no role in academic development; in fact, sports might
undermine academics.

Legendary sociologist James Coleman was one of the first sports critics to raise this concern
in the 1960s after embedding himself in the suburban high schools of Chicago. Coleman
lamented that academics played second fiddle to athletic achievements among
adolescents, especially with boys (Coleman, 1961). The students he surveyed were far more
likely to say they would rather be a "star athlete" than a "smart" student who gets "good
grades." Coleman concluded that schools had become "adolescent societies" and would
remain so until academics could be made as popular as sports.

More recently, journalist Amanda Ripley (2013) has made a strident case against high
school sports. As she points out, U.S. high schoolers test far lower in reading and math
than students from Finland or Singapore, where participation in sports is not connected to
school.

However, if athletics were harmful to academic pursuits, then athletes would perform
worse than other students in school as well as later in life. But the most careful analyses to
date suggest that student-athletes perform better than their peers. Specifically, researchers
have found that student-athletes are significantly more likely to go to college (Shifrer et al.,
2015), score higher on standardized achievement tests (Lipscomb, 2007), earn higher
wages (Barron, Ewing, & Waddell, 2000), and are more likely to report having positive
relationships with school personnel (Broh, 2002). Furthermore, the relationship between
participation in athletics and school outcomes has remained fairly consistent over three
decades as evinced in the findings from nationally representative datasets (Shifrer et al.,
2015).

These studies have limitations. A significant challenge with rigorously assessing the effects
of school sports is that it can be difficult to disentangle the extent to which participation
produces academic benefits versus the possibility that student-athletes are just naturally
higher-achieving students. If we were assessing the effect of a reading program on student
outcomes, the best research design would be a randomized, controlled trial. However,
randomly assigning students to participate in sports would be neither feasible nor ethical.
So researchers must depend on natural experiments or real-world "shocks" that introduce
lottery-like randomness into sports participation. The implementation of Title IX provided
one such shock.

Title IX was passed in 1972 and required schools to give females the same opportunities to
participate in school-sponsored sports that males had. However, because certain states
had different student-athlete participation rates before implementation, the effect of the
policy on female student-athletes varied substantially across state lines. Therefore, Title IX
was a jolt to the provision of school-sponsored sports opportunities, which could be
exploited to examine whether changes in providing school-sponsored sports subsequently
affected academically relevant student outcomes. A 10 percentage-point growth in female
sports participation resulted in a one percentage-point increase in their college attendance
rate, which also carried over into a significant increase in labor force participation
(Stevenson, 2010).

Why do student-athletes appear to do better in school? One hypothesis is that sports instill
values that are important for success in school. But even if this is the case, it does not
necessarily mean schools need to offer sports. Students might just as easily benefit from
club sports without schools footing the costs. Does something special occur when schools
offer sports rather than when they are provided by nonschool organizations (such as
clubs)? The evidence seems to suggest that it does.

#2. Adopting European-style sports club programs would enable adolescents to participate
in sports while eliminating any negative influences that school-sponsored athletics have on
academics.

In Europe, organized youth sports take place completely outside of school. For instance,
Ripley does not contend that sports are inherently bad for students. Rather, she makes the
case that integrating them into schools is likely to compromise the school's academic
mission (Ripley, 2013). This argument has picked up steam as more youth have participated
in nonschool club sports and organizations, such as the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) and
soccer club teams (Cook, 2012).

There is appeal behind the argument that isolating sports from schools will improve the
focus on academics. However, an alternative argument could be made for school sports.
Coaches are in a unique position to hold student-athletes accountable for their academic
progress in ways that club coaches cannot. For example, schools can leverage academic
eligibility rules that require students to meet certain minimal academic requirements in
order to be eligible to play interscholastic sports.

Once again, we examine empirical evidence to assess these claims. Throughout the 1970s,
states started adopting and strengthening what are referred to as No Pass, No Play
policies. These rules require students to maintain a certain grade point average or to pass a
specified number of courses to be permitted to continue playing sports. However, no pass,
no play rules differ from district to district and state to state. This means that athletes from
different towns face different pressures to perform well in the classroom. The exact
stringency of these requirements has provided variation in the expectations placed on
student-athletes across the country. The variations in no pass, no play rules approximates
a natural experiment.

States that implemented tougher no pass, no play rules saw greater improvements in
student-athlete academic results. According to one study, raising no pass, no play eligibility
requirements led to significant increases in graduation rates, particularly with males
(Vidal-Fernandez, 2011). Through these academic eligibility requirements, educators have
effectively leveraged opportunities to participate in sports to motivate students at risk of
dropping out of high school to stay in school. These types of motivational tools are not
available to athletic coaches outside of school settings.

#3. Eliminating school-sponsored sports will increase student participation in other

extracurricular activities.

Extracurricular activities across the board come under fire when districts consider budget
cuts. Parents and teachers will argue that schools should oversee the provision of
extracurricular activities but that there is a hierarchy of activities. When this happens,
certain extracurricular activities are held up as superior to others because they are viewed
as aligning better with the objectives of K-12 education. This view is reflected in John
Gerdy's (2014) argument that K-12 schools replace sports with band:
The fact that a school's culture might shift toward​
being more academically focused without the distractions​
generated by a football program should be no​
surprise. A subtle but extremely insidious impact of​
football programs on the culture of an institution, one​
that is rarely acknowledged, relates to what can be​
described as an underlying culture of anti-intellectualism​
that often permeates a football program (p. 154).​

In many instances, this type of argument is motivated by self-preservation. If cuts are

inevitable, then an arts advocate has good reason to argue that his program is superior to
other extracurricular activities. Yet we currently lack rigorous evidence to support or refute
the claim that removing sports from schools would bolster support for other
extracurricular activities that, in turn, would improve student outcomes.

The first major issue with this type of argument is that, as demonstrated earlier, it relies on
"dumb jock" stereotypes that are not grounded in empirical evidence. Another problem is
that it presumes the enthusiasm for sports results from supply rather than demand.
School-sponsored sports are by far the most popular extracurricular activities because
students are eager to play and parents are so supportive of these activities (Eccles &
Barber, 1999). Education stakeholders might wish that chess club, debate team, and band
were as popular as sports, but participation in extracurricular activities is unlikely to remain
at their current levels if school-sponsored sports were eliminated. Parents and students
would likely be less engaged with their school communities, and many students would lose
the opportunity to play sports altogether.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, the fervor for school-sponsored sports can get out of hand. For instance, the
fanaticism that has been documented with traditions such as high school football in Texas
can illustrate many of the undesirable aspects of an unhealthy affection for interscholastic
athletics (Bissinger, 1990). However, as cooler, less-colorful examinations demonstrate,
these depictions are more the exception than the norm. Anything can be overemphasized.
Even reading and math achievement test scores can become an unhealthy obsession.
Recent years have provided examples of drill-and-kill teaching, teachers gaming
standardized test scores, and narrowing the curriculum (Nichols & Berliner, 2005). All good
things should be pursued in moderation.

When considering whether schools should offer sports, remember that interscholastic
athletics developed because schools wanted to provide a more holistic education and
children lacked other places to play team sports. Schools saw sports as a useful way to
keep students out of trouble, and eventually sports became a venue for communities to
come together, promoting social capital (Bowen & Greene, 2012).

The debate over school sports is filled with passionate anecdotes, but we have consulted
the research. We examined many of the more popular theories about the role of sports in
education.

Student-athletes generally do better in school than other students--not worse. Opening

high school sports to girls in the 1970s led to a significant and meaningful improvement in
female college-going and workforce participation. Tougher academic eligibility
requirements that schools place on athletes have decreased dropout rates among at-risk
students.

Schools that cut sports will likely lose the benefits that school-sponsored sports bestow.
Removing these activities from K-12 education would likely have negative effects on
historically underserved school communities. As was the case with the Great Depression,
less-privileged families would be less able to afford the expense of having their children
participate in organized sports due to the cost of travel and registration fees of club
organizations.

We do not contend that school-sponsored athletics are perfect and should be preserved
exactly as they are, even in the face of financial constraints. In tough financial times,
everything should be scrutinized. Sports are no exception. But when we look at the larger
body of evidence, we find that sports are a tradition in U.S. education that has genuinely
benefitted students and their school communities.
DANIEL H. BOWEN ([email protected]; @danielhbowen) is an assistant professor in the
Department of Educational Administration and Human Resource Development at Texas
A&M University, College Station, Texas. COLLIN HITT is a doctoral academy fellow and a
Department of Education Reform research fellow in the College of Education and Health
Professions at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Ark.

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Source Citation (MLA 9th Edition)

Bowen, Daniel H., and Collin Hitt. "History and evidence show school sports help students
win: blaming school sports for academic inattention and bloated budgets is a popular
move, but the evidence shows sports have positive effects for students." Phi Delta Kappan,
vol. 97, no. 8, May 2016, p. 8. Gale In Context: Biography,
link.gale.com/apps/doc/A458871052/GPS?u=mlin_s_cpmsnhs&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=e39
63934. Accessed 28 Feb. 2024.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A458871052