Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Set academic standards at team level
From the RoundTable blog
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Todd Putney
Putney is a member of the Roanoke City Public School Board.
Recently, a plan was presented to the Roanoke City School Board for improving Roanoke City Public School athletics. Participation in athletics is right behind a student's grade point average and Scholastic Aptitude Test scores in criteria considered for college admission. Perhaps more important is the impact successful athletics have on a school. See the recent basketball success of the William Fleming Colonels.
The proposal shared at the May 28 school board meeting includes a series of five-year goals covering graduation rates for athletes, the number of sports offered, student participation, winning percentages and numbers of championships. It proposes a reorganization of the athletics program, and the best aspect of the proposal is that it includes resources for individual tutoring of student athletes who fall behind academically.
There is one item of the administration's proposal that troubles me greatly -- the requirement that athletes must achieve a 2.0 GPA in the semester preceding their sports season. To be clear, this means student athletes would be disqualified from athletic participation if they fail to meet the 2.0 GPA in the preceding semester even if their overall GPA exceeds 2.0. This would be implemented in the 2009-10 school year.
The idea of increasing academic standards for all students, including those participating in sports is a good one. However, having an inequitable, indiscriminate rule at the school division level that does not consider the specific student's circumstances and puts RCPS at a competitive disadvantage is a mistake. If such a rule is enacted, it should apply to all schools competing in the district or region.
A 2.0 rule will decrease participation in athletics and reduce graduation rates. To date, no one has determined how many athletes would be impacted by a divisionwide rule like this (troubling by itself), but one school believes 25 percent of its athletes would be denied participation in athletics. For RCPS high schools, that equates to more than 100 students per high school pushed out of sports. For many of these students, athletics are their primary motivation for attending school. These students will lose touch with their coaches and eventually drift away from school altogether.
There are other concerns related to a 2.0 GPA requirement:
1. Disparate impact on students who receive free or reduced price lunch.
2. Indiscriminate punishment of student athletes simply because they participate in sports. If a 2.0 GPA is so important, why isn't it a graduation requirement?
3. There are no data that show a 2.0 rule like this has any positive impacts.
4. Western Valley District travel time is long, with an average travel time of 2.5 hours for an event. Northwest Region school travel time is six to 10 hours. Factor in early arrivals, game and mealtime and students return well past midnight. This problem is unique to RCPS as a member of the WVD and Northwest Region.
5. A 2.0 GPA rule encourages student athletes to take easier courses and results in coaches/parents coercing teachers to be more lenient in grading athletes.
6. The NCAA rules already provide a strong incentive to achieve a 2.0 GPA.
7. Only one high school supports it, and most coaches at both high schools do not support it.
In the end, we all agree on the main issues. Improvement is needed and athletics and academics are interrelated. So, what should we do?
We should move forward with a plan that includes input at the school level, clear accountability for coaches and administrators and support systems that help students improve their grades and keep them engaged in school through sports.
In this environment, coaches would remain connected to the students and hold their athletes accountable for academic performance, including attendance, personal behavior, completion of assignments and participation in mandatory tutoring or Saturday school or even a certain GPA.
The coaches and teachers would consider all factors involved with the student athlete to help him or her succeed. We should focus first on the expectations of RCPS employees (coaches, teachers and administrators) before imposing rules on the students, who, after all, are the customers in all of this. So far, this issue has been reported as a sound bite and framed as a fight between academics and athletics. I fully support student athlete accountability for academic performance, but at the team level.
The focus should be on improving academics on the front-line level, not through an arbitrary division rule that acts as a sledgehammer to students. Team-level accountability is a necessary component of any athletics improvement plan.
