“Have sports teams brought down America’s schools?” a post on the New Yorker blog asked Friday.
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I agree that our infatuation with high school sports is getting out of hand. Our little gladiators now are expected to develop themselves year-round—to lift weights in the offseason and play on travel squads through the summer. This can crowd out other extracurriculars: It can make it hard for an athlete to play an instrument, or give acting a try, or volunteer. Or, in the summer, to daydream.
She pointed to the mediocre performance of U.S. students on international tests, pointing out that in 2009, U.S. students ranked 31st in math and 17th in reading out of 74 countries in exams conducted by the Programme for International Student Assessment. When new PISA results are announced in December, “American high-school students will once again display their limited skills in math and reading,” Kolbert predicted.
less than 10 percent of the students were low-income, the composite reading literacy score was 551—second highest in the world to Shanghai-China. In schools with between 10 percent and 25 percent low-income students, the composite was 527—fifth in the world. But in schools with 75 percent or more low-income students, the composite was 446—45th globally out of 66 nations with composite reading scores.
, and again will be outscored “by students in places like South Korea, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland, Singapore, New Zealand, Canada, Switzerland, and Japan.”
