America’s new disease has reached its peak all too quickly. Obesity, according to the World Health Organization, has reached “epidemic proportions.” Diabetes afflicts some 7% of the American population and has been pegged at an annual cost of $132 billion and rising. In all too typical narcissistic fashion, a 2004 documentary on the matter was nominated for an Academy Award. (More amusingly, it grossed more outside of the United States.) McDonald’s has scrapped its largest offering and is now printing nutrition labels on its packaging. All said, health is now en vogue – economically, politically, and culturally.
The biggest push focuses on children, where the count of the obese have tripled over the past 20 years and is now more than 17%. Health classes, and their glossy textbooks, march through chapters on depression, drug use – and sedentary lifestyles. More importantly, nutritional standards are increasing to limit what is available in the cafeterias and vending machines. Beyond this, of course, political groupthink has a tendency to go too far. One can imagine the satisfaction of accomplishment in the name of good that accompanied the Board of Education for my Maryland district’s approval of a measure requiring a full year of physical education for its students.
Until then, the policy had required one half-year of gym and another of health, making for one credit. The extra-half year is applicable for students in the graduating class of 2010. That there were no half-credit courses offered at the time of approval – or for the now freshman students’ sophomore year – marks only the beginning of this problem.
The move should rightfully be attacked on several fronts. The first of which is the diminished options available to students. Some parents have begun to lobby for an opt-out, with special relevance to athletes. After all, as a student notes, “you can’t tell me that somebody who does three sports a year needs another gym class.” The second argument is the value to students: colleges should not be all that interested in a student’s ability to show up to class on time in uniform – this, not state-of-the-art recreational centers, is the undeniable norm in most school districts, where neglect intensified because of the minimal (half or one-year) time requirements. School systems are attempting to have the best of both worlds, posturing themselves as strong and proactive on social concerns, while limiting the extent to which they have to invest resources. If students were required for four, not one, years districts would have to show some degree of results and meaningful use of their pupils’ time.
A gym class then, is not as valuable as the opportunity to take more rigorous and potentially differentiating classes. (Arts teachers, especially, are nonplussed at the thought of losing students to a gym class.) Not that the policy needs any more mockery, but a new study has found that sleep can help kids stay slim. The third option caps the height of thoughtless policy: a National Bureau of Economics Research report has found that “PE time has no detectable impact on youth BMI or the probability that a student is overweight.” It should be clear that obesity is a problem, but is it the school’s to address – especially when they are not willing to invest the resources to make such a program successful. It again forces an acknowledgment of schools’ central problem: their stifling ambiguity of purpose and mandatory courses indifferent to individual needs.
The debate provokes the same sort of question that Joe Nathan raised in his 1999 book on charter schools: school reform is at times nothing more than a “con job” meant to distract from the ultimate social issues of poverty. The same is the case here – the ultimate issues here being the lack of universal healthcare, affordable and easy access to nutritional foods, and sedentary lifestyles. I would argue that schools would be far more effective in increasing the nutritional value of their lunch offerings and, perhaps, publishing their students’ body-mass index on each child’s report card, as one Texas senator proposed in 2005. Autonomous schools are central to my paper’s proposals – they would be free to focus on this issue, given complete control over policy and funding, as much or as little as they preferred. (Perhaps a television tax shouldn’t be dismissed after all.)
It’s not hard to see where the policy started: After all, the NBER notes, high school enrollment in PE has fallen from 42% to 28% between 1991 and 2003. Would it be too much wishful thinking on the capacity of man to hope that there was much more to the Board’s decision than messy false causations? No matter: some arguments can’t be lost.
from Kansas – American education.
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