During the two weeks of the NCAA’s Men’s Basketball Tournament– affectionately known as “March Madness”– 64 teams play for the national championship. Four different TV networks will share the responsibility to broadcast every game, and also share an expected 1.13 billion dollars in national TV ad revenue (second only to the NFL playoffs). Of course, the ad revenue is big because the viewership is big. Over 14 million households tuned in to last year’s championship game.
Major college sports programs are a huge part of the entertainment business, and they drive other huge businesses in media, apparel, and marketing. If the University of Louisville’s men’s basketball program were a private company, the 41 million dollars it brought in last year would make it Kentucky’s 10th largest.
So what’s the Issues in Education connection? Simply stated, that what we as a society pay attention to matters.
Only about three out of every 10,000 high school basketball players (boy or girl) will ever play even one game as a professional, but over a million students are spending several hours in team practices, plus developing skills at home and studying the sport’s history, strategies, statistics, and celebrities.
Of course, it’s not only in basketball that we’ve told our children—through our actions and attention—that what we value is a person’s performance on the court (or field, or stage, or whatever venue might apply). We make connections by sharing our own stories of extra-curricular adventures. We come out to cheer and otherwise support their involvement. We publish stories that celebrate their success. Students work hard, strive to improve, and often achieve a high level of satisfaction from their efforts. They, as we, generally look back favorably on the time spent and lessons learned.
Oh, that we could say the same about their academic efforts.
We tell students that hard work in the classroom will pay off down the road. We tell them that if they do well in school they can get a good job and have a good life. We tell them that our national well-being is dependent on maintaining a highly-skilled workforce. And then we turn on the game and cheer a team that graduates less than half of its student athletes.
Two recently published books are based on research studies looking at academic performance in the U.S. and its comparison to other nations. One focuses primarily on the economic implications of the trends and found that strong growth in academic performance preceded strong economic growth, and the inverse was also true. Further, that growth across all dimensions of student demographics was important and that the U.S. was stagnating from its highest-achieving students down through its lowest. The other book looked at the U.S. education system through the eyes of high school exchange students who spent a year in some of the countries that have been consistently out-performing the U.S. on international tests. Nearly three quarters reported that the courses were harder in their host country than back in the U.S. and that their foreign student classmates took school much more seriously than their friends at home.
To summarize: one book says academic achievement matters, the other that students in other countries actually believe academic achievement matters.
If we’re going to improve the results from our education system, we need to show students that we believe it matters, too.
Which brings me to “March’s Real Madness.”
Schools across the country are getting ready to begin assessing students on tests students don’t care about. Regardless, we’ll issue reports, set goals, and develop policies and budgets in order to do better next year. But students still won’t care. Why should they? These tests measure only slim aspects of a student’s interests and abilities.
We saturate students with instant gratification and expect them to care about how education might pay off “down the road.” We hold out the empty promise of a “good life” when they can’t see any evidence that even a “good job” is realistic. We try to paint a picture of national well-being when they are surrounded and confounded by national dysfunction.
We must find ways to engage students in learning by making it relevant to their lives, to demonstrate that learning is important to people who are important to them, and to create opportunities for them to feel the same joy and satisfaction from their academic efforts that we celebrate in their extra-curriculars.
To keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, now that’s madness.
Each month a representative of our local schools will offer thoughts in Issues in Education. This month’s contributor is Peter James, Great Expectations School.
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