To: The Dallas Morning News Viewpoints section 
Date:  August 19, 2011
Subject: Sports vs. education
Result: censored



We spend $78,000,000 for a new football stadium in Denton; the head football coach at Texas A & M gets a $400,000 raise, to over $2,000,000 – which had to occur with Governor Perry's direct knowledge and blessing at his old school that he remains intimately involved with; you've got all the other stadiums and maintenance and coaches and teams of assistant coaches and support personnel; the scholarships; the travel and insurance costs; the testing for performance-enhancing drugs to make sure nobody is misbehaving – not to mention the devastating injuries, and the resulting medical costs, which far surpass the damages done by illegal drugs that we're never going to win the expensive war against. All of these costs apply both to college and high schools, and for their sake, we fire teachers and cut out all kinds of other programs.

And yet, how much do you ever hear about this? Next to nothing. Every couple of months somebody will say something like the above, in a letter to the editor or something, and then that's it for another couple of months. But on the whole, almost absolutely, no television or newspaper journalist speaks or asks about it. No teachers groups mention it. No school boards, no parents, no kids – no tea partiers. It's like everybody just accepts that the main purpose of education is to support expensive Sports programs, and if we can teach somebody something along the way, so much the better.

As a taxpayer, I am happy to pay for basic physical fitness for our children, to teach them healthy habits for their lives.  That includes calisthenics – yoga or whatever – pickup games of football, basketball and soccer between members of one's p.e. class – or you can have more formal competitions between the different p.e. classes in the school, the way I did in junior high.  Or, to me it's fine to have contests between teams for different schools, as long as it's the participants paying the bills.  Again referring to my own experience, growing up in Richardson, we had little-league teams in all the sports, and played teams from different schools in the city, where we paid for our own uniforms and equipment, there were volunteer coaches who coached just because they loved it and it was fun, and then everybody provided their own transportation to the field for games on Saturdays.  It was all nice and cheap, and nobody else had to pay the bills for my fun.

All the things that are said to be achieved by high school and college sports, such as teaching teamwork, can be accomplished in other ways.  How about this – teams of volunteers to do helpful things for people?  But in these days of drastic cuts and pain, we should not be paying the high costs of interscholastic sports, which have nothing to do with our mandate to educate our children.

Of course, this point of view is not something that the Dallas Morning News would want to push or encourage, or even allow much discussion of it at all in its pages.  TV stations want to keep it quiet.  For both of them, interscholastic sports are a significant source of income – including, for TV, the broadcasting of games.  And then Jerry Jones and Mark Cuban wouldn't like it either.  The high school and college sports programs are what feed their teams, with training and development that costs them nothing, but makes them large amounts of money.

All I know is that it's the taxpayers who are paying the bills for all this fun and revenue.