rick7425

What are the primary objectives of high school sports? I don't think enhancing the college scholarship opportunities of the annual handful of truly elite athletes would rate very high on that list, certainly not higher than the benefits intended for the broader masses of student-athletes. If I'm right about that, then I question whether the costs of year-round football to kids (the ones who want to participate in multiple sports but would be pressured to skip other sports for football) and schools (whose programs in other sports may suffer from having fewer potential participants) would be justified by a few instances of 3-star recruits becoming 5-star recruits.

Sorry, PH, I'm completely lost. It seemed to me that you were suggesting that there could be no constitutional issue with trying to establish geographic attendance zones for private schools. It also seemed to me that you were suggesting there actually was some sort of constitutional issue with having a large number of private schools in a small geographic area -- although I don't see how that deprives anyone of an opportunity for a secular education, which also seems to be one of your assertions. This really doesn't make much sense to me, especially if the result of my modest effort to decipher it is correct.

What does this mean???

Any moment we should be cutting away to Rod Serling....

BH, to understand the wisdom of a rule like this you have to get beyond the focus on "abuse" involving some individual student. Preventing abuse is not the sole objective of the TSSAA rules. TSSAA is an organization of schools. The rules are designed to provide a competitive balance between very different types of schools. You can call it competitive equity, a level playing field, whatever terminology suits you for this concept of fairness. The restriction of aid for varsity athletes to "need-based" aid promotes competitive equity between private schools that can't afford scholarships and those that can. I understand the reasoning behind the rule. I probably should have said "it is a bad rule". The kids still are forced to choose between accepting the scholarship and playing a sport. Come on, BH, the rule helps to achieve its objective. Just because in the process it requires some difficult choices doesn't make it a bad rule. If you do away with the rule, then the choice you describe doesn't have to be made, but you'll tilt the playing field -- is that a better rule? Besides, the kids aren't having to choose anything. Their parents are choosing. Parents who can afford the tuition (remember, this is not need-based aid we're talking about) and who have choices about which schools to send their kids to are sending them to this one on scholarship, knowing the consequences for their children when it comes to TSSAA varsity athletics. The parents apparently value the savings of a scholarship more than they value their child's chance to play varsity sports, or at least they did when they started out. It was their well-informed choice to make.

BH, to understand the wisdom of a rule like this you have to get beyond the focus on "abuse" involving some individual student. Preventing abuse is not the sole objective of the TSSAA rules. TSSAA is an organization of schools. The rules are designed to provide a competitive balance between very different types of schools. You can call it competitive equity, a level playing field, whatever terminology suits you for this concept of fairness. The restriction of aid for varsity athletes to "need-based" aid promotes competitive equity between private schools that can't afford scholarships and those that can.

I don't see anything bad about this rule or anything unfortunate about the consequences when the choice between a scholarship or participation in TSSAA sports was clear from the outset. Not every rule is written to serve the interests of the individual athlete. Some rules like these are written in furtherance of competition among teams or schools.

Seems you could be talking about the same type of athletic competition that occurs in travel soccer or baseball or AAU basketball. I think there is a difference between these types of athletic competition and the athletic competition that is conducted among schools. There are some missions served by school sports that are a different than just maximizing an individual student's opportunities for athletic success. These include the missions of insuring that school sports are kept in their proper perspective (secondary to and supportive of the primary academic mission of secondary education) and avoiding the potential for exploitation of kids in their education for the sake of athletics. In addition, sports competition is not just about the individual student-athlete. I believe that in the setting of school sports, there is value in some limitations that promote a level playing field among schools with widely differing resources, so that the benefits of competition and success can flow to a broader range of students and schools. So, when you are talking about educational athletics, as opposed to the various types of athletic competition independent of the school setting, I don't think your idea is necessarily a good one. It may be fine in a particular case, but rules are written to serve larger programmatic purposes, some of which I do not think your idea takes sufficiently into account.

BigShow1 and PHargis, as I said before, my opinion is based on my own limited experience. I don't profess to be an expert in what constitutes the best model for delivering educational services at the elementary or secondary level. I have observed that school systems generally seem to favor smaller elementary schools, which suggests to me that there is something considered there that goes beyond just the number of children that may be in an individual classroom. In my early school years, I attended neighborhood schools. As I was transitioning from junior high to high school grades, my public school system was in a state of transition as a result of a federal court busing order. The first comprehensive school of the school system also was opening. Some neighborhood schools were shutting down. My personal observation was that when we lost the neighborhood schools, we lost something of the sense of community that accompanied the neighborhood schools. No longer did we see our teachers at the neighborhood cleaners or drug stores. No longer were we consistently in school with classmates who we had known outside of school for years. I think that loss of a sense of community contributed to the erosion of behavior standards inside the school building. I also think it contributed to a loss of parental support for the efforts of the teachers. I never personally attended a comprehensive high school. My oldest daughter did. I do not view it as a positive experience. She was plenty intelligent, but she needed to be pushed -- not only at home, but also at school. I did not get the sense that she was receiving the personal interest from teachers that I recall being more common in the smaller schools that I attended, where the teachers got to know students throughout the building. I also observed the daughter of a close friend get "lost in the shuffle," so to speak, at my oldest daughter's school. Consequently, I made the decision to send my next child to high school at a private school. It wasn't because I didn't think quality educational services could be had at the public school, but rather because I worried that my next child was someone who would get "lost in the shuffle" if I put him in an environment where that was allowed. My opinion was that in a smaller school setting, where teachers really get a chance to see the same kids all day long and get a chance to really know them, it was more likely that the teachers generally would take more of a personal interest in him. I was pleased with the results. By the way, my younger son is now about to graduate from the University of Tennessee with honors. A large institution indeed. But there is a dramatic difference in what makes good educational sense for a 13 or 14 year old as opposed to an 18 year old who has had a chance to mature and figure out what it takes to be successful. So that's my personal experience, upon which my opinions about large comprehensive schools are based.

stbulldog, my own limited experience (in my own upbringing and in the raising of my children) leads me to the same conclusion as you. I believe the smaller neighborhood schools provide a better educational experience for students at the secondary level. I recognize that it is difficult and perhaps impossible in some places to have neighborhood schools when housing patterns can lead to the result that those schools are racially segregated. I also know that there are theories about trying to provide students with a broader range of opportunities, recognizing that the college track is not the track for all. But I haven't seen anything in the large comprehensive school setting that makes me think that it represents, overall, an improvement in secondary education.

Teacher pay in Tennessee comes in two parts, the state minimum portion of the salary and the local supplement. The state minimum is based on the teacher's degree and years of experience. It is consistent across the board in part because the Tennessee constitution mandates equal educational opportunity, and variations in the state-mandated portion of the salary from one locality to another arguably would be contrary to that constitutional mandate. The local supplement is set by local boards of education. Local school boards typically will set local supplements based on degree and years of experience as well. They do so as a matter of convenience, not because they are required to by law. In addition, for the last several years state law has allowed local school systems to adopt differential pay systems. While the Tennessee Education Association lobbies at the state level, it is the local "teachers union" that may have some influence on salaries for teachers in a particular local school system, by negotiating with the local school board over the local supplement portion of the teachers' salary. In a school system where a majority of the teachers choose to be members of the local teacher's union, that union has the power to engage in collective bargaining with the school board. In a school system where the local board of education treats its teachers as valued employees, the teachers union probably won't enjoy majority support, and therefore won't have the power to engage in collective bargaining -- the school board can set the local supplement portion of teachers' salaries as it sees fit. Even where there is collective bargaining, ultimately the school board doesn't have to agree to anything, and state law effectively prohibits teachers from engaging in a strike to get their economic demands met. The local teachers union does not have the power to set the salaries. The "teachers union" has become a convenient whipping boy for what ails public education, but in reality the responsibility for this government operation lies with the public officials who are elected or appointed to run it.

BigShow1, you and I probably can't agree on the constitutional issues. While I tend to think that the original intent of the framers ordinarily should control, as a society we have to admit that some things have changed since then (such as the abolition of slavery, granting women the right to vote, etc.). The way that the constitutional provisions like the equal protection clause are read must change to some degree with those changes. Fifty-five years ago in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court decided that the "separate but equal" doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson was wrong and that separate was not equal when it came to race. I don't think even the most ardent originalist on the Supreme Court, Justice Scalia, would argue that Brown v. Board of Education was wrongly decided. As for the whole recruiting issue, we're probably not going to agree on that either. It has a little something to do with my philosophy about what high school sports should be about. While winning is important in any endeavor where the score is kept, sports are played in the schools (as opposed to independent leagues like AAU basketball and travel soccer) in order to support the educational missions of those schools. I think the educational missions, not the sports, should lead the way. I also think that terrible and long-lasting harm can be done to a child if that child is lured to a school where he is an academic or social misfit for the sake of sports success. While I would hope that his parents usually would not let that happen, we all have seen too many situations where parents get too caught up in their child's athletic exploits. In my way of thinking, success in high school sports on the scoreboard or the won-lost record is just not important enough to rationalize the damage that can be done to a child by recruiting for the sake of sports.

BigShow1, I will respond to the last part first just because it is the simplest. If the only issue were the right of parents to choose whether their child will play football for this coach or that one, you would be right. But recruiting, by its very nature, goes beyond just the parents making decisions and gets into coaches and others trying to influence those decisions -- and not necessarily with the child's best interest as the foremost consideration. As for the issues involving the constitution, you're probably going to find yourself in disagreement with the Tennessee Supreme Court, the United States Supreme Court, and federal judges in a lot of places. Does the federal government belong in education? Maybe not. That's a matter of educational philosophy. but they are in it, with Title I, the IDEA, and a host of other programs (some funded and some not). And once the federal government is in a program, then the federal constitutional requirement of equal protection of the laws is an issue. At the state level, the Tennessee Constitution includes a guarantee of equal educational opportunity (the basis upon which the entire funding mechanism was changed for public education as a consequence of the Small Schools litigation). In addition, the Tennessee Constitution grants to the state legislature the exclusive authority to determine the makeup and structure of public education in Tennessee. This means that state constitutional provisions calling for equal protection of the laws, as well as the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (which applies to the states), must be considered when you are dealing with public education in Tennessee. Merely saying that anyone can choose any school doesn't necessarily mean that educational opportunity is equal. Transportation is indeed an element of insuring that the opportunity is indeed equal. That is part of the reason why there no longer are traditional neighborhood schools in many metropolitan school districts and why federal courts have used busing orders to insure desegregation of the schools. If you put your choice system in place, and you wind up with de facto segregation, I don't think the fact that inner city kids from poor homes without a means of transportation had "equal opportunity" to enroll in the good schools, if they could figure out some way to get to them, is going to get that school system out of litigation for violating the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Again, just my opinion.

BigShow1, I think that some of your efforts to draw analogies between public education and the private sector fail because of some realities you are disregarding. Public education is funded with taxpayer dollars, so you can't decide you are just going to leave out those who can't afford transportation or whatever else it takes to avail themselves of equal access to the good schools. When the government decided that it was going to be in the education business, then constitutional principles became a part of the public education process (some who favor a lot of government intervention into the field of health insurance might want to consider this). One of those principles is the Fourteenth Amendment requirement of equal protection of the laws. Fifty-five years ago, the United States Supreme Court declared that separate is not equal. You can't just disregard these principles and take a sort of survival-of-the-fittest approach to education in the public sector. Of course, the shortcomings that these principles cause are among the reasons for the growth of independent schools. As far as the idea that Walmart Super Centers and schools are comparable, I respectfully disagree. The first is a retail store, the second a service business. When it comes to service, I think of restaurants; and I will take a small local restaurant where they know me and consequently give me great service over the larger chain restaurant any day. I don't profess to be an expert on matters of education philosophy, but I grew up in the Metro school system in the days of neighborhood schools, before the advent of the large "comprehensive" high schools. I think neighborhood schools, where the teachers and parents saw each other at the grocery store; where the teachers and administrators knew all of the students by name; and where there was true community support for the schools, were better places for learning than the larger schools we have now. Just my opinion. Of course, since this is largely a board for posting matters related to athletics, there remains that issue you raised of having high school coaches recruiting 13-year-old children for sports just like the colleges recruit now. Some folks (me included) might think that would be a really bad idea. That gets into the purposes of high school sports, the risks of exploitation of young children, things like that.

What is the more effective educational model -- large schools with students from a large geographic area, or smaller neighborhood schools? What happens when there aren't enough spots at the "good" schools for the kids who want to go there? What happens when poor families can't send their children to the "good" schools because they can't transport them there? What if unlimited choice in the public schools leads to de facto segregation? And what do you do about the substantial number of people, both parents and educators, who believe that the type of athletic recruiting that happens at the college level is not appropriate when you're talking about 13-year-old children? Just a few questions that come to mind.