Do you think a separation of school and sports will help the American education system?

[!*! animal crazy !*!]

I say it will, big time. There are too many teachers getting hired because they are ex-jocks who will coach. Too many students are getting away with bad behavior because they play on a team. You often find that many schools are losing control because sports stars are favored more than regular students. This is even the case in college.Americans have no idea how much of a distraction sports are in school. There is an ingrained culture of school sports, Friday Night Football and all that, but it needs to stop.Do you ever look at test scores by school district? If you ever look at them, you will see that most of these ghetto schools have stellar scores up to the 5th grade. By middle school, scores across the board generally drop in every school district. It's the worst in the ghetto, poor districts. It goes down because that's when students start getting involved in sports, and the favoritism begins.Sports should be independently run OUTSIDE of school during its own time. If you want to play sports, you'll have to play in an independent league. You know what, the quality of competition will probably be a lot better, so what do you have to lose?

 

[tee2]

This may depend on where you live, but for most students, sports ARE just exactly what you recommend, an after-school activity. I never had a teacher who was an ex-jock who wanted to coach in school. And some of our jocks were also some of our best students. I do understand that there are isolated schools which recruit athletes just like colleges, and where winning sports championships is very important to the school, but at the vast majority, it is an activity just like choir or theater. Students who are athletically-inclined would never have a chance to play if they were limited to independent leagues unless they came from families with money. As a college professor, I can also tell you that for some inner-city kids, knowing that they would have more of a chance of getting a college sports scholarship and then visible to the pros was an incentive for some students to work harder in school. I've never been a jock, nor do I have any special love for sports or athletes, but I don't think that in most places eliminating sports in the schools would improve those schools in any way. Perhaps some schools need more limits on how they may conduct sports, but for most, it is a non-problem which would take too much energy to "solve".