Saturday April 29, 2023

ANALYSIS: Sports, Education, and Parents' Rights

ANALYSIS: Sports, Education, and Parents’ Rights

by Martin Davis

The author’s son (43) was a successful athlete because parents, coaches, and trainers pulled together to help a young man willing to work hard for what he valued. Parents’ rights advocates have much to learn from this approach.

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When not coaching football or softball, teaching middle school students, or writing and editing F2S, I enjoy high-quality whiskey and robust discussion with my friend Shaun Kenney at Rebellion. Frequently, those conversations turn to education.

(Nota Bene: Shaun and I are pleased to announce a new podcast we are launching that will feature local news, some jovial bantering, and interviews with the most interesting and influential people in the F2S readership area - and possibly beyond. Our working title is New Dominion Podcast, and we look to start recording episodes this coming week. Stay tuned!)

Our recent conversation about whether public schools or the free market are the best solution for what ails K-12 education both unsettled and consumed me in the days after. And in wrestling with the ebb and flow of our talk, I found my thoughts turning away from the classroom and to the athletic field.

Americans’ obsession with sports points the way to better learning

When writing my first book - 30 Days with America’s High School Coaches - I laid out the significant ways that those who coach varsity sports improve the lives of students. From the Introduction:

When it comes to shaping America’s next generation, high school coaches may well be the most important people in our society. If that statement seems over-the-top, consider this: … students who engage in athletics not only tend to do better in school, but the lessons they learn from sports and their high school coaches stay with them long after they’ve left high school….student-athletes tend to have fewer mental health issues later in life, do better in their work careers, vote more regularly, and volunteer more than students who don’t play interscholastic sports. More interesting, these findings generally apply to students of all socio-economic statuses, races, and family backgrounds.

What followed were 30 profiles of how coaches do this.

In the year since publishing my book, I’ve come to think more about the role that parents have to play in their student-athlete’s success.

There is a lot of reporting and research about the negative impact parents have - and rightfully so. From distorted perceptions of their children’s athletic ability, to overbearing “coaching” from the sidelines and destroying their children’s love of games, parents are doing a lot wrong.

But in one way, parents do understand one thing very well. In order to get better, people have to commit and work hard. In youth sports, we can measure how much parents are committing by the amount they spend on elite travel sports.

And parents are investing a lot. This from the Aspen Institute’s Project Play:

The Aspen Institute estimated U.S. families spend $30 to $40 billion annually [Emphasis added] on their children’s sports activities. … That’s more than the annual revenues of any professional league.

Drive past any soccer, baseball and softball, or football field most any week night and you’ll see where that money is going. Travel sports teams, which are doing much more than simply creating opportunities to play.

The coaches who lead these teams are focused on teaching the game, the skills athletes need to master, and how to get their athletes to the “next level” - i.e., college sports.

Parents know that to be great at a sport, it’s important to practice year-round. (Travel soccer and wrestling go year-round, and the football and baseball seasons last at least 6 months.) They understand the value of a great teacher. And they adjust their schedules to run their children to practices that typically run four or five days a week. And then there are the games.

This youth sports industry has its share of critics - again, not without justification. (For the best critiques of travel, or “pay-to-play” sports programs, get to know the excellent work being done by the people at Play Like A Champion. You can also see my own writings about the problems with pay-to-play sports at the Christian Science Monitor - especially “All Play, No Fun: Pushing Back on the Pressures of Youth Sports.”)

But there is no doubting the impact that these programs are having on the development of young athletes. At least in terms of their physical development and understanding of the game, athletes who start early and get sound coaching have a decided advantage over those who start later.

As one who has coached high school football for a number of years, and most recently started coaching middle school softball, the difference between players in youth sports and those not is painfully obvious.

So what does any of this have to do with education?

In a word - everything.

Parents are passionate about sports; education, not so much

The uproar over the past three years about “parents rights” has conservative lawmakers across the country - and especially here in Virginia - crafting laws that empower parents to dictate curriculum, control what teachers can and can’t say in the classroom, and levying charges that schools are “indoctrinating” students over the will of parents.

Putting parents in charge, the feeling is, will solve our educational woes.

But this emphasis on parents’ rights is sorely misplaced in two key ways. First, we already know that too many parents are simply disengaged from their children’s educations.

Consider this study from Purdue University’s Family Impact Institute:

If this country is going to turn around poor school performance, one of the most significant problems that must be addressed is the high prevalence of disengaged parents. A lack of interest on the part of parents is associated with academic difficulties and low school achievement. Steinberg estimated that nearly 1 in 3 parents in this country is disengaged from their adolescent’s life and particularly their adolescent’s school.

With that many parents basically uninvolved with their children’s educations, crafting legislation that empowers parents to more-directly control public education is going to have minimal impact, because it’s unlikely to suddenly make one-third of parents suddenly care about their child’s education.

The second way that the current parents’ rights movement is not going to make things better is because it is encouraging the wrong type of involvement.

Just as in youth sports, not all parental activity is helpful.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation has long advocated for parents’ involvement in education and supported much research to show the very real connection between involved parents and their children’s academic success.

But it also recognizes when parents go too far:

Teach­ers may, on occa­sion, com­plain of ​“heli­copter par­ents” whose involve­ment — some­times called ​“hov­er­ing” — does more harm than good. One vet­er­an edu­ca­tor recent­ly told the sto­ry of an award-win­ning col­league who quit the pro­fes­sion because of the grow­ing influ­ence of ​“a group of usu­al­ly well-inten­tioned, but over-involved, over­pro­tec­tive and con­trol­ling par­ents who bub­ble-wrap their children.” 

What these par­ents fail to under­stand, he said, is that their good inten­tions ​“often back­fire,” imped­ing their children’s cop­ing skills and capac­i­ty to prob­lem-solve. Such over-involve­ment can actu­al­ly increase children’s anx­i­ety and reduce self-esteem. 

The colleague’s plea: ​“Please part­ner with us rather than per­se­cute us. That will always be in your children’s best interests.”

Today’s parents’ rights movement has moved too many parents from involvement to persecution. In just the past year in Virginia, we’ve seen the governor directly target teachers with a “tip line” designed to expose teachers using their power to “indoctrinate” students with “liberal” ideas. (The tip line was quietly closed when it became clear there was nothing much to report.)

We’ve also seen the secretary of education and the governor use NAEP data and SOL data to mercilessly attack schools as failures - even though, as I’ve previously demonstrated, these tests do not support that conclusion.

And in Spotsylvania we’ve watched as four parents’ rights board members gained control of the school system, installed a parents’ right superintendent, and has quickly destroyed what was once one of the up-and-coming school systems in the state.

None of this is bettering public education. In fact, it’s having precisely the opposite effect.

The take-away

Yes - parental involvement is key to a child’s success. Whether it be in school or in athletics. But parental support isn’t all good. As with most things in life, balance is the key.

In my years coaching, I’ve come to appreciate the parent who supports their athlete, who encourages them to do their best, and supports them by providing opportunities to excel outside of practice (private trainers, for example). They show up at games, they cheer their student-athlete on. And they come alongside the coaching staff to aid in ways the staff needs.

And I’ve come to recognize the overinvolved parent. The one who is coaching their kid from the stands. Who cannot accept that their child may not be as accomplished as they believe him or her to be. And who undercuts the kid’s coaching staff at every turn.

As a former coach once told me: “The worst part of game night for too many kids is the ride home with mom and dad afterwards.”

The same is true with education. In my years writing about K-12 education (and now teaching it), it is extremely rare to find the teacher who doesn’t want the parents involved.

Teachers understand that education doesn’t begin and end between the bells of the school day. Again, from the Purdue University study:

To improve student achievement, the last 15 years of school reform have focused on course curriculum, instructional methods, and teacher training. Yet Steinberg claims that these reforms have accomplished very little, because academic achievement is shaped more by children’s lives outside the school walls, particularly their parents, peers, and how they spend out-of-school time.

Yes, we need parents to be involved. But educators do not need parents who want to work against and undercut the teacher. It takes parents committed to education and understand its importance, and support the institutions and people charged with helping the children these parents motivate to succeed.

Just as in sports, however, the overinvolved parent ultimately does more harm than good.

Much of the parents’ rights movement today is about turning on public education and its educators. And all of us - the teachers, the students, and our society at large - are paying the price.

It takes parents and coaches and young athletes willing to work together to be successful in sports.

It also takes parents and teachers and students willing to work together to be successful in the classroom.

Traditional public schools stand ready to work with parents and deliver the high-quality education that every child needs. The free market will be no more successful than traditional public schools, and arguably considerably less so, in reaching this goal.

That’s because the key to educating children is the same as it is with raising successful athletes. Parents, students, and teachers/coaches working together to do what is best for the kid. The free market can’t affect that equation for the better any more or less than public schools.

In fact, the free market works against this kind of collaborative learning experience. Left to choose, kids of appropriately involved parents will succeed wherever they land - they have the support they need.

Children who lack that support will struggle in both traditional public schools as well as schools established by the free market. But schools unbound from the mandate of public education can deal with these tougher students by simply turning them out. How is that helping anyone?

And overinvolved parents are going to inflict damage, wherever their children attend.

Traditional schools are more than up to the task. Perhaps, as the Purdue study suggests, the key lay not in continuing to overburden and undermine public education, but strengthen families and their willingness to partner with others for the betterment of their children, and the society write large.