Along with the start of the NFL season—a Superbowl rematch with New England facing Seattle—fall brings college and high school football, reminding everyone what really matters in education: athletics. The triumph of athletics over academics in high schools took a century and is now complete. The question is what to do about it.
For players, an NFL season marks the culmination of years of hard physical and mental labor starting in high school, endless workouts, memorizing dozens of plays, team meetings dissecting game films, practices, injuries, recoveries, ego-shattering losses, exhilarating wins, and feedback from coaches that in a class would be considered abusive.
Anyone who knows anything about high school marvels that the same kids who couldn’t pass pre-algebra somehow make split-second decisions on the field about which of 60 plays to call to counter an unexpected defensive alignment.
As a school board member, I found that even in college towns like mine, athletics are the heart of public schools. A school superintendent once helpfully explained that my kids weren’t part of our school district since he never saw them at football games, not even in marching band. Most school board members and school leaders had played varsity sports. Friday Night Lights, AKA football, along with relative newcomers like girls’ volleyball, serve as social events uniting school communities. Academic competitions don’t.
Those social impacts range off campus. Local papers, where they still exist, have high school sports pages, not academic pages. No one at my local coffee shop speculates about which kids make National Merit Scholar, as opposed to who makes all-state. Alumni return for homecoming games, not the math competitions. That difference in visibility and popularity affects what high school principals prioritize.
Until I raised a fuss while on the school board, an award-winning high school principal, himself an ex-jock, hired math teachers who didn’t know math, explaining “the kids can download it.” He would never hire an assistant offensive line coach who didn’t know how to protect the quarterback from a blitz, even though that, too, can be downloaded.
Public school personnel practices cement athletic priorities. Often, athletic directors get to hire their people first. I recall many classroom “teachers” hired primarily to coach, never coaches hired primarily as classroom teachers. This may have changed somewhat, but at least as of 2012, nationally, most male principals were former athletic coaches. The skew toward coaches was true across the country, not just the South, where I live. In contrast, in my experience, gifted and talented program teachers rarely get promoted into leadership. That reflects public education history.
We should encourage the academic side of the house to copy what our athletic side gets right.
In 1918, the National Education Association, then an administrator group rather than a teachers’ union, along with what was the U.S. Office of Education issued “The Cardinal Principals of Secondary Education.” The report portrayed rigorous academics as unnecessary for most jobs and beyond the capabilities of most students. Its authors thus emphasized athletics to get students committed to school, reducing dropouts.
Simultaneously, progressive reformers sought to professionalize educational leadership. Back when “professional” meant male, that required attracting more men to principal and superintendent posts. As education historian Kate Rousmaniere details in The Principal’s Office, the new field of athletic coaching gave men direct paths into leadership. Rousmaniere writes: “Athletic coaching—communication, authority, disciplinary training of students, and public relations—aligned with the emerging professional identity of the new principal and, in a happy coincidence, provided the masculine image that appealed to both the public and to school reformers.”
The long-term results played out during the pandemic, when some public schools turned their academic programs upside down to limit the spread of the virus while continuing full-contact practices and games.
In an odd way, a century of the athletic tail wagging the academic dog now makes sense. Sports do bond kids to their schools. As Education Week reported, varsity athletes had 20% fewer absences and were a third less likely to be chronically absent than their peers. Even in their off-seasons, athletes attend more, perhaps because they belong to a community whose teammates and coaches keep tabs on them. Coaches coach the same kids for two or three years, enabling strong relationships and guiding student growth over time, while for classroom teachers, it’s usually one and done.
Employers have long told me they preferred hiring graduates who played team sports. That’s one reason for Title IX, assuring girls roughly the same career opportunities as boys. Sports teach working hard, adapting to criticism, and bouncing back after disappointments. Academic classes used to do that. In our current era of grade inflation, low status for teachers (unlike coaches), and the widespread assumption that many kids experience oppression or trauma making learning difficult, academics no longer consistently serve those purposes.
Sports also have an advantage over academics since an athletic team is a coalition of the willing—no one must play to graduate. Increasingly, school choice enables parents to pick “academically intensive” charter schools like BASIS, which prioritize academics. To compete, traditional public high schools can offer internal options like strong Advanced Placement programs. They might promote a few more scholars into leadership. As suggested by researchers like William G. Ouchi, we can do more to small-down large schools to strengthen relationships. Generally, we should encourage the academic side of the house to copy what our athletic side gets right.
But those are thoughts for another day. Enjoy the game!
