“I would often go a whole semester without a single parent contacting me to express concern about how their child was doing in one of my courses. But I can’t remember coaching a single basketball game where I didn’t get a call afterward from some parent telling me what I had done wrong or wondering how their child’s athletic performance could be improved.”
That statement, by Art, an old friend of mine who put in years as small-town high school teacher and coach, is both a damning indictment of U.S. culture and a partial explanation for the poor performance of our educational system.
It also illustrates an economic principle called “revealed preference.”
Revealed preference is simply the idea that an observer can tell what people’s priorities or preferences are by noting how they spend scarce resources, such as time and money.
When parents pay little attention to what their children learn in the classroom, but get bent out of shape about basketball coaching strategies, it tells us a great deal about our relative priorities.
To many U.S. families, excellence in sports comes before mastering academic subjects such as languages, math and science. A recent report pointed out that Minnesota high schools frequently spend $200 to as much as $500 per student on sports programs. These sums do not include costs of physical education classes or the capital costs of gyms and playing fields.
I understand sports are good for physical and emotional development. Also, I highly approve of the U.S. system of local control of education. If the elected board of a small rural school district wants to spend $500 per student, not per participating athlete, on sports programs, that is an outcome of a democratic process that I value.
But it also reveals something about our preferences, as parents and voters. And it says much about our culture.
Total per-student costs for secondary education in the Upper Midwest ranges from the $2,000 range for austere rural districts in the Dakotas to more than $6,000 in urban and suburban districts. Spending $200 to $500 on sports may seldom exceed 10 percent of total secondary-school spending, but it’s considerable at a time when we as a nation are both concerned about educational costs and about educational performance.
That level of spending also stands out when we compare academic offerings to sports and social programs.
Some close friends, both born in Europe, live in Brookings, S.D. There’s no foreign language instruction in Brookings public schools, some of the best-funded in that state. But sports fields and gyms are lavish compared to what they knew in Europe.
Our friends see a direct connection between a U.S. middle class that values sports achievements and doesn’t value speaking a second language or mastering math and science.
I think they’re right.
Defenders of U.S. educational spending priorities can argue that some European nations spend relatively as much on sports as we do. But spending goes through private clubs or though municipal programs.
That’s precisely the point.
We want our schools to perform social services and provide cultural amenities that aren’t seen as an appropriate function of the public education system in any other country.
We task our schools with improving nutrition, caring for the physically and emotionally challenged, weaning teens from drugs, teaching them how to drive and providing small towns with live athletic games.
Such programs may be justifiable public goods. Our schools may indeed be an efficient system for delivering the services.
But the education-local sports-social service complex has grown up without much explicit public debate about whether it is efficient or not. Our practice certainly is out of step with other wealthy countries. Are we sure that our way is the best way?
These issues can be settled by good comparative research and broad-based public debate. We aren’t funding the research or having the debate.
So if we talk about educational spending, particularly if we compare it to other nations or earlier eras in our own country, we must realize that we are comparing apples and oranges.
A small step would be for states to develop a format for local school budgets that would clearly separate core academic, sports and social service functions. This would help citizens, voters, taxpayers and parents better understand the priorities in our educational spending.
I doubt it would change our underlying cultural priorities. One can read a great deal about the shortcomings of U.S. education and proposals for reform. But until the relative proportions of phone calls to teacher coaches like my friend change substantially to reflect greater parent interest in academic achievement, we will see little improvement in educational system performance.
© 2002 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.