 So my name is Andres Martinez. Thank you for coming. I am the editorial director here at the New America Foundation. I'm really looking forward to tonight. I think this is going to be a lot of fun. This is the latest installment in one of our That's Debatable sessions, where we kind of take our inside squabbles outside. We have arguments in the building. Then we think, aha, this would be a good debate. Let's take it public. And we've done some of these on are we winning the war in Afghanistan? We did one on our smartphones killing your brain. And so in this case, we're here to debate whether sports are bad for school. The motion before us tonight is to improve education, kick sports out of high school. The inspiration for this evening is our Emerson fellow Amanda Ripley's terrific book, The Smartest Kids in the World, and her October cover story in the Atlantic Magazine, which is available for your enjoyment. Amanda's and the cover story was entitled The Case Against High School Sports. So you know which team she's on this evening. Amanda's book looked at how kids in other countries are performing in school, in many cases outperforming kids in the US. And how countries like Poland and South Korea and Finland have turned around their education systems. It's a wonderful read in part because Amanda found American students spending a year in each one of those countries. And then again and again in her reporting, Amanda found that was struck by how in some of these other countries, sports was not emphasized in school the way it is in the US. She found this by talking to her American field agents in country in these various places, but also through a survey she did of foreign exchange students here in the US. So again, the spirits of things and arguably in violation of my role as neutral moderator, I pulled out my high school varsity soccer jacket from Mothballs. Congratulations, it still fits. Yeah, yeah, it's a bit bare sort of. I think it used to be big. And really I don't wear it around the office all the time. Really I don't, only on Fridays. So I was also going to kick things off by regaling you with tales of my soccer career, but colleagues here implored me not to give you that pleasure. But the one autobiographical thing I would say is I very much could relate to Amanda's finding that this is an aspect of American exceptionalism and education. I grew up in Mexico and the first year I studied in the States was 10th grade. And so I played in high school, but it was one of the things that struck me the most when I arrived in the States was the extent to which sports was so important in schools. It kind of, the amount of attention and resources and importance that was given to it was something that I had not experienced in Mexico and I think it's true in a lot of countries. I mean, stop and think about what a movie about American high school would be like if you didn't have sports. You know, it's inconceivable. And yet I can assure you, you could make movies about the high school experience in many countries without having a subplot about the school's sports team. So I wanna read to you a nugget from Amanda's terrific Atlantic article to get us to also help put this in context. Amanda writes, in 1961, the sociologist James Coleman observed that a visitor entering an American high school would likely be confronted, first of all, with a trophy case. His examination of the trophies would reveal a curious fact. The gold and silver cups with rare exception symbolize victory in athletic contests, not scholastic ones. Altogether, the trophy case would suggest to the innocent visitor that he was entering an athletic club, not an educational institution. So that also helps to sort of frame this. So we have a lot of ground to cover here. There are certainly compelling arguments to be made in favor and against sports in school and we have two very strong teams here to help us make these arguments. Arguing for the motion of kicking sports out of high school, we have Amanda Ripley, our Emerson Fellow and author of the smartest kids in the world, and Kevin Kerry, who's the director here of our education policy program at New America. Arguing against the motion, we have Kerry Donley, who's the former athletic director of the Alexandra City Public Schools and was also mayor of Alexandria, where I live, I should hasten to add, constituent. And Louisa Thomas, who's a sports rider for Grandland and also a fellow here at New America. Just in terms of a couple of words about how we're gonna proceed here tonight, we're gonna have seven minute opening arguments from each participant and then about 20, 25 minute free for all that I'm gonna moderate, I'm gonna follow up with questions and challenges of what people have said and debaters can ask questions of each other and then we're gonna have two minute closings from everybody. We have in the handout sheets a way to text where you stand. Fuzz has the handout sheet. I'm not even gonna read it because it's also on the screens but we'd love for you to, if you can, text which side of this debate you're on and ideally we would get a sampling at the outset and then also at the end and see which team was able to sway the most votes. So that's always interesting. So I think that covers the ground rules. Thank you for coming and without further ado, I'm going to ask Amanda Ripley to get us started arguing for the motion for seven minutes. And if you go over seven minutes, I'm gonna cut you off and crank the cool music. Well, thank you, Andres. So how many of you in the room played sports in high school? It seems about right. That's actually true to form, like representative of the country, which is weird. But anyway, this is not a subject that I intended to write about, which is sort of interesting. I mean, I wanted to know what it was like to be a kid in the smartest countries in the world. So I followed these exchange students for a year, Americans and they routinely got me focused on things that I would not have seen on my own. And one of the first things that they noticed in their foreign outposts in Finland, South Korea and Poland was that sports was just not part of school. Just not, kids played sports. They had pickup soccer games and the South Korean school had a dirt soccer field outside of it and kids would play pick up soccer every chance they got. There was an area where a group of girls would bring badminton rackets from home and play at lunch and pretend there was a net. So, and in Finland, of course, ice hockey is a very big deal and students would play hockey and other sports. But always in the rec center, in the town or through pickup games or through things organized by parents, it was not part of the mission of school to provide that structure for them. And I, like many of us, was so accustomed to sports being part of school that I didn't really question it until I started to see this difference. And I started to wonder, what is the cost of this decision that we've made? And it is a decision we made in the early 1900s in the United States as more and more immigrants and other people were coming into our system and we had universal schooling fairly early. It was a way to control students. I mean, they were playing sports already but often the sports were degenerating into brawls and other unseemly sites. And it was a way, there was a sort of movement of muscular Christianity. It was a way to ensure that young men in America were not gonna become soft with all this schooling. So it is something that has become a big part of our system early on in a way that has not in most countries around the world. So I don't wanna repeat a lot of what's in the story except to say that I did, as Andreas mentioned, survey hundreds of exchange students to see what they thought. And nine out of 10 of them said that American kids cared more about sports than their peers back home. And a majority of American exchange students who had lived abroad agreed with that. And there is shockingly little research into the trade-offs that this arrangement requires. But the few examples that I was able to find were pretty surprising. So I went to a little town in Texas called Primont, which is an hour and a half south of Corpus Christi. And in this little town, which is a majority low-income Latino high school, they had been failing academically and financially for years. And the state was gonna shut down the whole district. And so they were really, really up against it. And they brought in a superintendent to try to save the place. And the superintendent noticed that he could save $150,000 if he temporarily suspended sports. Now, this is a gentleman who'd worked in schools in Texas for decades. So he knew that this was a pretty radical idea and that there would be hell to pay for suspending football in Texas. But he, in addition to saving the money, wanted to send a signal to kids at Primont and to families and to teachers about what really mattered at that school and what would really matter for these kids' life chances. So I wanted to go visit there a year after they suspended sports to see what that had been like. And what I found was that the people who were most upset about this decision were, as you might expect, the kids, the students, the student athletes in particular, who felt really robbed of an American rite of passage. At the same time, those same kids a year later did say that they had never been so focused on their schoolwork. You take the Nathan, who was the quarterback of the Primont football team. He suddenly had about 15 hours that he didn't have before each week to work on schoolwork. He ended up participating in a club football, flag football team on the weekends. He did, of course, miss football. But he did say that he was very focused. And there were other changes that happened at that school, but the pass rate for that fall went up dramatically. They saw a lot more student engagement. And there was a sense that the fall was about one thing, as opposed to all previous years everyone could remember. The fall was about school, which was a big change, a big shift. And there are pros and cons with that, right? But it was interesting to see what it looked like in real life. And then before I finish here and hand things over to the other side, I want to quickly read a couple letters that I've gotten since the story came out that really spoke to me. One is from a California principal who said, as a principal on my third year at a comprehensive high school, I've spent more hours on athletics than on curriculum or teacher evaluation or et cetera. I wonder what et cetera is. I value sports and what they offer to kids. I coached for a number of years. But we're definitely out of balance when parents tell us that our job is to get their children an athletic scholarship. And then from another point of view, this is a former high school football player from Pennsylvania. When I look back at my own experiences, playing football was the one decision I would have changed. Even with a very enjoyable career, playing over six years, grades seven to 12, that time and effort should have been focused on my academic future. I now suffer memory loss and post-concussion issues. And with today's research, I believe I've had dozens of concussions. And then finally, from a teacher in Massachusetts, it angers me that we seem to believe that sports is the only venue for teaching teamwork, grit, determination, and toughness as if one could not find those qualities in a debate team, a youth symphony, or a chemistry lab. And I wanna end with that because that is the message that was most poignant to me from visiting these other countries. These kids in Finland and Korea and Poland, they were learning about loss and about teamwork and about failure and about grit. Make no mistake, but they weren't learning it on the field. They were learning it in school. I think I'll hand it over. Thank you, Amanda. One thing I'm learning, I learned in those seven minutes is that this jacket is really warm. I didn't remember that. And you had to bring up concussions. That's not all sports entail concussions. Also, I was remiss in mentioning that we do have a Twitter hashtag for tonight. Ed in sports, just EDN sports, if you wanna tweet about this. So now we go to the team that is arguing against the motion. Who would like to go first? Kerry, thank you. Hey everybody. As Andres said, my name's Kerry Donnelly. I'm the former mayor of Alexandria, and I spent three years as the athletic director of T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria as well. But as a politician, I can't even introduce myself in seven minutes. So I do wanna try to make some points about this argument and then we'll get on with the give and take. We live in America in a very competitive society. Our economy is based on competition. Our political structures are based on competition. Our educational structures are competitive. And yes, even our entertainment is competitive. He's an American idol. America got talent. I mean, it's all competition. And I think the physical aspects of sports aside, sports does teach the necessary traits for us to be successful in our society. Self-discipline, leadership, perseverance, teamwork, and yes, the spirit of competition. These are all traits that are needed for success. And I can't think of a job setting or a workplace where competition is not important, where teamwork is not important. I can't think of a job situation where adversity does not require perseverance and sports teaches those kinds of traits. I think there are certain benefits, there are certainly benefits of a physical nature to athletics, overall health. But I think the true benefits are really the life lessons that translate into success as adults. Very few athletes go on to compete in college and even fewer go on to compete at the professional level. But the lessons of discipline of teamwork will be part of the lives of hundreds of thousands of youngsters who compete in athletics. I know when I first began as the athletic director of TC Williams, we had five students that went on to play at the next level. Not a very big number. But we took those who sought to compete at college and we made it a life lesson. We taught them how to fill out an athletic resume and send it to coaches, just like you would when you're looking for a job. These are skills that a lot of these students had never seen. And when I left, 45 students were going on to play at the high school level or at the collegiate level. And that was a benefit. We turned it into a life lesson. In fact, 82% of female business executives in the United States played a sport. And the overwhelming majority of those women cite that being part of athletics, those life lessons they learned contributed to their success in the business world. Nowhere are these benefits more profound, I think, than for young women. And that's with the advent of Title IX. The benefits of athletics to young women are really well documented. The findings in many studies of girls who participate in athletics show that they're more likely to attend college, less likely to become pregnant as a teenager, and less likely to abuse drugs. Girls who participate in athletics, 7% show a lower obesity rate later in life in the 30s and 40s. 29% are less likely to smoke. 50% less likely to become pregnant. Young women who play sports are more likely to graduate from high school, have higher grades, have higher test scores than non-athletes. And I can speak as a parent as well. I'm the father of five daughters. For those of you who said, God bless you, thank you, I do need divine intervention. All were athletes, all were multi-sport athletes. One actually went on to compete at the collegiate level as a rower at Indiana University. And I can tell you that when they were in season, they were more focused on their schools, more conscious of their time, and actually got better grades. Those young ladies today, one's a teacher in Alexandria, one's an attorney, one's a doctor of physical therapy, one's still finding her way, and one is a junior at Virginia Tech. But all five have come back to be coaches at one level or another, either at the youth or high school level in Alexandria. And I can't think of five better role models than to come back and serve their communities. Some kids, and this is somewhat anecdotal, but some kids are in school because of sports. I know my time as the athletic director of T.C. Williams High School, there were a number of students that were there because they could play football, they could play basketball. I ran into one last Friday at a high school football game. His mom was a crack addict, and this kid probably would have been on that kind of road. But because sports kept him in high school, he graduated, and he's now at ITT Tech, becoming a computer technician. Ran into another high school basketball player who wouldn't have been able to go on to college because his family couldn't afford it, but he was able to get a degree from Gannon University, and he now works for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. Those are the anecdotes, but they're real and they touch people's lives. I know that a lot of the debate that you'll hear tonight will center around funding. I told you I'd be pushed on seven minutes, but it's gonna center on funding. But as long as we elect politicians who put giving a tax cut above investments in education, we're gonna continue to have this debate whether sports are there or not. As long as we continue to elect politicians, who will thrust upon us test standards and different kinds of measures, we will continue to have education by rote and not by instruction. 70% of the college graduates in the United States come from public colleges and universities, yet state legislatures across this country continue to slash funding for public support of education. Are the reforms yes or wrong? I believe that there should be a 2.0 GPA requirement to participate in high school athletics. I believe that some of the standards that you have right now in Virginia, for example, all you have to do is pass five courses. You can get five Ds to participate. That's not wrong, and a 2.0 GPA is not an onerous requirement. Thank you. Thank you, Kerry, and I'd like to mention, I appreciate the mention of our entertainment being competitive because I have a nine-year-old son who's acquired an unhealthy obsession with watching Survivor, which I'm not sure if it's a sport or not. But anyways, Kevin, Kerry now in favor of the motion. Thank you, and thanks to all of you for coming this evening. The first thing I thought when I was invited to participate in this panel was to reflect back on my own experience in sports. I played sports every semester. I was in high school. I wish I had thought to bring my letter jacket, but I think it's in my mom's house somewhere. I think it still fits. And it was nothing but a positive experience for me. And it actually taught me a lot of the things that Kerry just talked about. Formed great relationships with my teammates. In particular, I think taught me certain lessons about perseverance and kind of pushing past obstacles that frankly I didn't get so much in school. But at the same time, there were very few trade-offs between sports and academics at the high school I attended. The guy who was the captain of my team and also the prom king and also the class president also was the valedictorian. I had the highest grade point average in our high school went on to the Ivy League. So there was no push and pull between the values of athletics and the values of academics. And I'm afraid that's not true in too many of our schools today. And speaking as the director of our education policy program, one thing I feel like I can say is very clear from all the research around education is that we really have less time than we think we do. Every year, the demands that our economy puts on people, citizens, workers increases. What you need to know to be able to thrive and make a life and career for yourself, that bar is rising. Every year that you're in school, there's a lot that needs to happen for you to stay on a steady path toward finishing high school, getting into college, getting graduating from college and making your way in the world. And there are all kinds of points along the way where a lack of time or a lack of emphasis can really knock you off that path in a way that's very hard to get back. So when we, you know, in reading Amanda's excellent book, which I recommend to all of you, the thing that comes up is, to me, is less our sports bad. I don't think they are, maybe with some exceptions that we can talk about. But are they worth the relative level of money and time and attention that we're paying to them compared to the time and money and attention that we're paying to academics? And you look at these other countries that by all available measures are doing better than we are, even though they spend about the same amount of money or even in some cases less. It's very clear that while sports may help, some people graduate from college in other countries where sports are less emphasized, graduation rates are higher, and students do better by the measures that we have. So we have to ask ourselves, you know, you cited some statistics that I thought were very interesting that you hear a lot, which says that women in particular who participate in athletics do better academically. Well, there's two ways to think about that. One is athletics are a good thing and lead to better outcomes. But there's implicit in that comparison is all these people who were not in athletics and who weren't doing as well. Maybe they weren't doing as well because there was some positive effect on them that they were missing from athletics, but maybe they weren't doing as well because they didn't have the benefit of the resources that were diverted away from education toward sports. I do think this is a very, a conversation in which gender plays a really important role. There are obvious differences, I think, in the culture and resources and emphasis between girl sports and boy sports, women's sports and men's sports. And I don't think anyone would deny that, particularly over the last 20, 30 years, one of the very tangible aspects of the societal move toward increased, although by no means yet full, gender equality has been the really mass participation of girls and then women in athletics, Title IX being a big part of that. I think most people see that as nothing but a very positive phenomenon. I'm not saying that in every case it's great and I'm not saying that there aren't girls too who are possibly harmed by this diversion of resources. On the boy side, on the other hand, when we think of all the things about high school athletics in particular that ought to really disturb us, there are almost always boys-related sports, certainly the big kind of high-mining glorified sports of boys football and boys basketball. Football in particular is a sport where really the ethical dimension of continuing to sponsor and encourage a sport that may have irreparable harm to people, I think is becoming more present in the conversation. Infrequently, but enough that it seems to come up over and over again a correlation between certain kinds of boys athletics and a culture that's far too hospitable to dehumanization of girls and sexual violence. These things are all, I think, stemmed from this level of emphasis athletics in our high schools that really is without precedent in other countries as Amanda's book really amply demonstrates. So I think you can very much imagine and you don't have to imagine it because you can see it in lots of other countries, a world where young men and women have access to all of the benefits of athletics, the teamwork, the discipline, but not in a way that distracts so much from the really, frankly, high stakes and vital mission of education that we are for very many students in this country failing on a year by year basis. And so with that in mind, I feel like this resolution would be a big step in the right direction. Thank you, Kevin. And now to close off the opening arguments, we have Louisa Thomas, a fellow here at New America who writes frequently on a variety of sports. Last February, I flew to Denver, Colorado and then drove to Aurora to go to a girl's high school swim meet. Wasn't just any girl's high school swim meet, it was senior night at Regis Jesuit and the place was packed. There were four bleachers, four rows of bleachers on one side and the two teams sat on the other side of the pool. It was an outdoor pool, concrete floor. The volume, I mean, probably because of the heat was just unbelievable. It was like being in an airport hanger with just teenage girls. And, but I had gone there for a reason because it was Missy Franklin's last home meet and I was curious about Missy Franklin. Missy Franklin, for those of you who don't know, is the great American Olympic champion from London and she had made the very unusual decision to forego millions of dollars in sponsorship in order to keep her college eligibility, her NCAA eligibility and swim at Cal where she is now. After she made that decision, she made another decision, which was actually even more extraordinary to me. She decided to keep swimming for her high school team. She wins these races by 20 seconds. I'm not kidding. I mean, she's just four lengths ahead. I mean, and I thought to myself, why is she doing this? You know, what does she have to gain? And why are her teammates encouraging her? I mean, yes, it's cool to say you swam with Missy Franklin, but there's gotta be something else going on. I mean, is it really fun to get beaten by 20 seconds? You know, is it really fun to get lapped four times? Is it really fun to know that you are never going to be an Olympic champion? You are never going to be Missy Franklin. So I figured instead of going to Denver or Aurora and talking to Missy Franklin, I would go and talk to her teammates and try and see something of what it was like to be on this team. And the funny thing about it, it was like the most normal night in the world. I mean, it was a row of 50 girls sitting there, playing with their hair, giving each other massages, eating gummy candies, cheering each other on. They did these coordinated cheers, chanting, and they were sitting there in their bathing suits, all body types, all kind of different, like a penoply of humanity right up there, totally comfortable, totally happy. Like this was like the best night of their life. And afterward, I talked to some of the seniors. I talked to seniors who were gonna go on to swim in college, I talked to seniors who were not. And over and over again, they were perfectly comfortable talking about Missy Franklin and how much she meant to them, but they really wanted to talk about what high school swimming meant to them. They just one after another said, the last one I talked to was this girl who was not gonna swim in college, who was on the varsity swim team and this clearly meant a lot to her, but she just said to me, I'll always be a swimmer. And there was something almost heartbreaking about that. There was something almost like naive about that because she was gonna go on and grow up and she was not gonna be a swimmer. But something about that experience meant so much to her. Kerry has talked about some of the statistics about what high school sports can mean for young women. There's an academic named Betsy Stevenson who's shown that a 10% increase in participation among women is correlated with better test scores, higher participation among females in the labor force, higher rates of attending college. There are also those statistics that show that that's true of guys as well. There are two academics at the University of Arkansas who looked at a data from schools in Ohio and showed that a 10% increase in participation is correlated with higher scores on standardized tests, higher graduation rates, and other kind of homework completion and across the board. I know that one of the things that Amanda talks about is that there are, you know, there's a significant body of study that show that sports really do help kids who participate in sports. And so I actually think that maybe one of the conversations we should be having is not whether or not we should be cutting back on sports but whether or not we should be increasing, focusing on increasing participation. And then maybe the conversation starts to change. You know, how do we allocate our resources so that more and more kids are able to play and maybe are able to benefit from some of these programs. And then maybe diverting so many resources to tackle football is not the answer. Maybe having pep rallies that focus on one sport at the cost of others is not the answer. But those are different questions. And I think that, you know, across the board, I look at my own high school experience and I see how much, you know, sports meant to me, how much they meant to my friends, even the ones who didn't like sports. It was a kind of organizing experience for them. You know, it was something that brought them into contact with all sorts of students they wouldn't have otherwise been friends with. It forced them to interact with them, forced them to cheer each other on. And certainly there were a lot of social divisions that were, you know, correlated with sports, but, you know, there are social divisions and there will be in any high school. I actually not only played high school sports, but I actually played tennis on a club team in Berlin. So I have a little of experience with the European club model as well. And I can say I joined it because I missed actually my high school sports experience. And our team practiced at 10 o'clock at night. So I'm not sure it was totally, you know, better for, you know, sleeping and homework and everything. And it just, it was a lot of fun, but it didn't have the same kind of camaraderie. It didn't have the same kind of, you know, discussion of challenges. And it didn't have the same kind of effect on any of my teammates that I saw sports having on myself and my friends. You know, I do think that there are schools that are failing so badly that they require a total re-evaluation of how they're spending their resources, both in terms of time and money. And at some of those schools, it may make sense not to have sports, absolutely. But I think it's hard to make a kind of, a statement about sports and, you know, it's worth based on those extreme examples. I think more often, you know, it's a matter of priority. Thank you, Lisa. And to echo your naive swimmer, I will always be a soccer player. So now we're gonna have about 20, 25 minutes of a free-for-all discussion here. I'll ask you guys questions. You all have mics so you can answer, seat it. And, you know, feel free to suggest questions for other debaters and argue amongst yourselves. And I'll try to contain the chaos a little bit. I'm gonna start off with you, Amanda. You're at a bit of a disadvantage in that, you know, you have a written piece that I can also point to in addition to what was debated here tonight. And this is kind of picking up one of the threads Luisa's argument, which is maybe the answer is more sports, not less, or bringing more kids in. Because in your Atlantic piece, you do point out that the outcomes, by and large, are fairly positive for the kids who do participate in sports. And I think you said it was roughly 40% of the school population. So isn't, shouldn't we be striving to find more sports for more of the kids? Isn't that the answer? Clearly more exercise and more health and wellness for more kids would be great. And that is something that I think we could probably all agree on, that exercise is strongly correlated with learning. Many schools have cut back on recess. That is not what you see in places like Korea and Finland. You see in Finland, in elementary schools, there's 45 minutes of class and 15 minutes of recess. 45 minutes of class, 15 minutes of recess. And it could be 10 degrees out and those kids are going out for recess. Do you know what I'm saying? But is it just the exercise, or is it the teamwork and the leadership and the... An example of a good idea that would be impossible to implement, the cost of football, just as an example, is four times per athlete the cost of math instruction. So the cost of PE is a much more manageable cost because it's affecting more students. It's built into the school. And in fact, the kids who participate in athletics in school are disproportionately well off. So while I agree that there are some kids who are lured back into school or engaged in school through athletics, that is a small number of kids. And in fact, it is only 60%. 60% of high school seniors do not play sports. So this is a pretty big decision that we're making to funnel Marguerite Rosa, who's one of the very few researchers who actually looked at this. She went around to different schools trying to figure out how much they actually spent on sports. And it was an almost impossible number to find, first of all, because schools might have a number, but it's not an all-in number. It doesn't include the many, many, many, many tens of thousands of dollars that you just never think about. The cost of ensuring sports teams. The cost, $20,000 to maintain a grass field. The cost of paying for substitute teachers when your coach teacher goes to an away game. The cost of loss of learning to all the students who are left behind with that substitute teacher, which we know there's a lot of research on. And the cost of busing and putting up and lodging and eating and feeding, all of those kids is all being absorbed by schools. And maybe more to the point by principals who now have to manage 10 different athletic budgets who have more meetings with parents about athletics than about academics. Let's get Terry to address that because you used to actually run, think tanks, we do a lot of thinking, you actually used to run athletic departments for a very impressive school system. So what about this point about the cost and the opportunity cost involved in not investing those resources in other things? Well, first of all, I don't know that you can make a blanket statement that says, boy, here's what everybody, here's what we spent on football. It's all football. Because I can tell you at my school, football was not, was not the number one expenditure. Right, but do you know what it was per athlete? Do you know what the cost was? Let me finish. It was not the, and this is the high school, the famous remember the Titans football team. I mean, they made a movie about it, but it was not the number one sport in terms of expenditure, both in terms of coaching staff, coaching salaries, operating budget, travel, girls and boys rowing. Now, T.C. Williams has probably one of the top five rowing programs in the United States. And that's where we spent more dollars. As a matter of fact, when challenged to find funds, I cut the football program so that they could no longer go away to camp. You know, it was a $25,000 hit for that program. Football coach didn't like it, but that was a choice that I made. And so I would say that when it comes time to allocating my dollars, I'm living within a budget. I'm also mindful of the percentages that are spent girls versus boys. That's what I'm required to do under Title IX. And I'm also cognizant of what it is required for them to have a safe experience because the safety of the athlete is most important. I would also say that one of the other things that I think is very important because we have a tendency to institutionalize this a little bit, rather than having a lot of clubs out there and who knows who those coaches are because parents are hiring coaches or clubs are hiring coaches. I think it's a whole lot better to have a governmental organization that is in charge of the coaches. Not only in terms of coaching education, but doing things like background checks, having them on an employment contract gives you a lot more leverage over who's coaching your sons and daughters than somebody that a collection of parents is hiring. I think that's very, very important. I can speak from personal experience that having a coaching staff that I hired, personally hired, having coaching staffs that were required to take CPR to attend coaching clinics led to a better coach and a better experience for the student athletes. Kevin, I wanna shift gears a little bit and touch on an aspect that was alluded to a couple of times which is a community's involvement with its schools and the sort of social cohesion element. It's true that when I came to the States I was astonished at the level of effort, thought resources devoted to sports. I also think that that lends itself to having a community more engaged in the life of its schools. That there's school spirit not just within the school but in towns around schools. How, if we did away with sports and schools, how would we replicate that? I mean, I'm sure that Advanced Placement Day is gonna get the community all energized or the PISA scores. I mean, what would you substitute for that? Well, we don't know. I mean, I moved here to Washington from Indiana where I lived for six years. And while I was there, who's seen Hoosiers, the movie? Hoosiers, anyone? Hoosiers is based on the very, very famous state high school basketball tournament in Indiana where every high school in the state, no matter how big or how small, would all come together in one tournament. And in Hoosiers, it's the true story of the Mylon High School back in the 1950s that came and beat the big city team with the help of Gene Hackman. And this is really foundational sort of... We should have a Gene Hackman kind of cultural mythology in Indiana. So when I was there, they changed it from being every high school plays in one tournament to divisions. They went to four divisions, a senior division based on size. This was far and away, far and away the most high profile, controversial, high school related story that happened in the six years I was there. This isn't a state that at the time ranked 45th nationally in the percent of adults with a college degree. This was in a state where some of those big high schools that had very, very competitive boys basketball teams were graduating less than half of their high school students during the year. A state that was really, really grappling with the effects of deindustrialization, factories shutting down and really nothing to replace it. You get the thing everybody was very upset about. That and the fact that Bobby Knight got fired while I was there too, was that they were going from one class of high school basketball tournament to four classes. So yeah, the communities would all rally around. It was a tremendous source of kind of local identity for those high school teams. And if you've seen the movie Hoosiers, this kind of whole scene where everyone gets in a car and they drive off to the game, or if you like to watch Friday Night Lights, Friday Night Lights, anyone? Love Friday Night Lights, great show. It becomes sort of the thing that defines the community. But in an odd kind of way, right? Everyone gets together for, the only time everyone gets together is just to watch those five boys, or those 10 boys, boys. Or in the case of football, more than that. I don't know why you can't rally around. I mean, it's funny, but why can't you rally around the students who weren't born with certain kinds of athletic gifts, but in fact, we're standouts academically. I mean, one of the, we talk a lot about sort of... You do have debate teams. Yeah, well, but I mean, not everyone is getting in their car to drive to the debate team. We talk a lot about the health benefits of athletics, which I think are very real. But in a very, very competitive, public sports environment, which to some extent is being put on for the entertainment of the community, as opposed to necessarily the benefit of the students, what that means is that all of those benefits accrue to students who were on average born with more athletic gifts. So if you think that high school sports is good for people, I think we have to admit that we are bestowing those gifts and all the benefits on people who for a variety of reasons, were simply born more in a better capacity to enjoy them. Missy Franklin gets to go to Cal. Missy Franklin is six feet tall and has arms that are like this wide, right? So she gets to go to Cal. I'm not sure that sort of that principle, good for her, she seems like a wonderful person. That article that you wrote is really quite interesting about it, but I'm not sure that we ought to enshrine that as a principle that drives our kind of entire educational and sort of health system. Well, we're not saying school. I think you can, I think you can have it both ways. Because, you know, and I think this is really the problem with us, quite frankly, the adults and what we value, what we reflect on our society in our communities. For example, you know, when I was the mayor of Alexandria, we had a tremendous accomplishment by the science bull team at T.C. Williams High School. T.C. Williams, by the way, is a school that is probably about 60% African American, about 20%, white balance being Hispanic. Over half the students run free or reduced lunch. So it's not a sort of a well-to-do school. It's challenged from a socio-economic perspective. But in the science bull competition, the science team from T.C. Williams beat T.J., Thomas Jefferson, which is a school in Fairfax County that draws kids from all over the most prosperous and populous county in Virginia. Well, the science bull team went to the White House. We're recognized by President Clinton, but we in Alexandria also recognized them, had them come down to City Hall, had them come down to meet with the mayor, made sure that their story was told as well. But again, it takes us, the adults, we have to recognize those accomplishments and not just leave it to sort of a whim. But I guess, are we gonna get to the day when we're gonna fill the bleachers to watch academic contests and have pep rallies? I mean, I think that's one of the things that Amanda alluded to, the recognition is good. Quite frankly, at my high school, and again, I know if this is somewhat of an anecdote, we don't have pep rallies. Because we don't take the time out of the academic day. Louise, I wanna ask, I wanna press you a little bit on what I see as a bit of a paradox, which is we've established that U.S. schools devote a disproportionate amount of energy and time to sports, at least compared, a disproportionate as a charged term, but relative to the rest of the world. And yet, and you very movingly talked about how athletics are great for these students, particularly girls, and yet we live in a society with the highest obesity rates in the world. That seems paradoxical, that on the one hand, we try to inculcate this in schools, we expose all these kids to sports and yet we have these higher obesity rates. Why is that? Well, one thing I will say is I'm not in disagreement with Amanda that our... Yes, you are tonight. That our athletic systems and our academic system need reevaluation and need to change in some ways. I just don't think that the answer is diminishing athletics. I think a PE program would be great. I don't think that that means that we shouldn't have sports. I think we should have, like I said, I think we should have more sports. I mean, if 60% of students are not getting, are not playing sports, then maybe that's related to the higher obesity rate. If sports are something that are promoted more widely, then perhaps the kind of health benefits and the sort of sense that as part of an active life will take hold more quickly. So those are some of the ways in which I think that actually increasing participation and making sports a more integrated part of school life might actually help actually somewhat paradoxically diminish some of the negative aspects of schools kind of claiming too much of an outsized portion of resources and... Amanda, what do you make of that paradox? High participation, I mean, high emphasis on sports. Is it just that we're labeling 60% of the kids as non-athletes and so in a weird way they're doing less exercise than students in Finland? It's not a glorification that we do. It's not a glorification of exercise or of fun or of, you know, team sportsmanship. It's a glorification of winning. Let's call it like it is. And I have met kids all over this country who are left out of that equation. Kids who care deeply about other things. Kids who are curious about the world. Kids who read philosophy. Kids who just feel no place at their school. But is it really about winning? I'm not sure that's what I mean. I think it is. I think that's what fills the stadiums. That's what fills the stadiums. There are a lot of great coaches around the country that teach kids about, you know, how to lose. But that's what the glory is, right? When we're talking about glorification, right? But I also, I disagree, because I mean, like I said, when I went to see Missy Franklin, I wanted, she is an Olympic gold medalist. She is, and no one else there is. Every single person there loses. The reason, I mean, the reason you were there is because she won an Olympic medalist. But the reason I was there because I wanted to see the people who knew that they were going to lose. If you had to get in the pool and you knew that you were going to lose, you had no chance. Well, kids do that all the time, all over the country. And I think what's interesting is to look at a place like Spelman University. This is a great case study. Spelman is a place where 4% of the students were engaged in elite inter-scholastic sports, right? 4%. And out of the incoming freshman class of 500-some students, this is a historically African-American college, out of the incoming class of 500 freshmen, half of them had diabetes, obesity, some kind of chronic condition that could be ameliorated through exercise. And one day, finally, the president of Spelman was at a basketball game. And she was looking around at how they are spending a million dollars a year on 4% of the students for this competition, which is not about exercise and health and wellness, but is about elite competition. And she decided that this was crazy and that she would flip it. And so she shut down their participation in inter-scholastic sports. And she devoted, shifted the million dollars to everybody participating. So they refurbished the gym, they started having races, like race for the cure kind of races on campus, walk, run, races, things they could do to try to democratize sports and make it really about more kids participating so that it was something they could benefit from their whole lives. It's only been six months since that took effect so we don't know yet what the impact of that was. But you can imagine that this sends a message to the students, including the athletes who were not pleased, as you can imagine, about what that school is about and what their life chances are about when half of the kids are coming in with diabetes or obesity or some other kind of chronic condition. So I think that's where, all over this country, every day newspapers come out with sports sections entirely devoted to high school sports, all over this country. You do not see that kind of cultural capital going to other things that we all know will serve kids, all kinds of kids, for decades to come in this kind of economy. So it is a symptom, really. But I don't know what the academics, go ahead. But I don't think it's in either or them. For example, in many respects, it's what a community values and how they invest their dollars. You brought up $20,000 to maintain a field. Well, in my way of thinking, it makes a whole lot more sense to take a million dollars, make it a turf field that you can use 12 months out of the year, 12 to 18 hours a day, that's available for the community, not just the high school, not just the team, but adult sports, youth sports, boys, girls, their multi-purpose field. And that's an investment that you make so that all can use it. It's not just an either or situation. In my experience, it is an either or. It is a fixed pie, not only of resources, but of attention. People need to know, kids pick up on signals about what matters. And it is not sort of everything matters equally. It is clear to kids what really matters in school and where the social capital comes from. And kids pick up on that and kids find out too late that it's not true. That throughout their lives, the person will not serve. But again, I think you got to look at it from a much broader perspective, community perspective, where the community makes a decision to invest. I'm all for that. The community should do that, but not the principal. Kevin, what about the social cohesion argument? I mean, when you said you had a positive experience playing sports in school, presumably you played alongside kids who came from very different backgrounds. You might not have had much else in common with them. The experience of being on the same team, how would you, why in God's name would you want to remove that from schools? Well, I played sports with kids who came from more or less identical social backgrounds because that's the way education is set up in the United States and more so over time, where we have a very, very segregated public education system, not just racially. Not in T.C. Williams. Well, but T.C. Williams is an unusual high school. I mean, if living in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area can give you a warped perspective on a lot of things, but including... No, I think that's a part we could all agree on. Resolve, resolve, this is a very strange place and will warp your mind. But including sort of racial ethnic diversity. So 50%, 25%, 15% of any category is very unusual. So my high school was 98% white. But beyond that, these were kids that you might not have gotten along with. You might have liked different kinds of music. And this was the one place where you all had to be in it together and you had to learn to work together. I mean, no, not for me, no, not really. I mean, they were my friends from class. Well, that's a truth. I mean, I just, I don't know what to tell you. But that wasn't, I mean, that wasn't really the case. You know, it was, and it was... So no, in my sense, that wasn't the case. I would just point out again, I think my role is to be the education policy walk in this discussion. So just pulling back a little bit. This is mostly discussion about high school, high school sports, I think. If you look at American young children, elementary school students, they actually do pretty well compared to their peers around the world. If you look at our middle school students, they don't do as well. If you look at our high school students, it's high school students that compare very poorly compared to their international peers. It's the high school scores that drive journalists like Amanda to go around and look at all these other countries. Not our elementary school scores. And in fact, if you look at where we've improved educationally in this country over the last 20 years, we actually are doing much, much better. It's really an underreported story. How much more successful our elementary school are now than they were even 20 years ago, much less 30 years ago, in helping students learn English and math. And yet all of those gains that we've made disappear when we get to high school. High school is the problem that we have not solved in our pre-K through 12 education system. And if there's one thing that I think is communicated very well in Amanda's book and is supported by the research, it is a lack of seriousness about the educational stakes involved. We do not set standards high enough for our students or for the teachers who are responsible for teaching them. We do not hold high schools accountable for the quality of the education they provide in a meaningful enough way. And that's why far too many students drop out of high school. That's why other students who graduate from high school and go on to college in many places, 30 to 40% are immediately thrown into remedial classes because they haven't actually learned basic math and reading schools. This is the educational crisis that we have in this country. Now, I'm not saying that high school sports caused it, but if we know that we are spending more money and more time on essentially non-educational purposes than nearly every other country in the world, that strikes me as an enormous, untaken opportunity to divert those, as Amanda said, finite resources of time and money toward frankly more important purposes. Okay, very quickly we're gonna have a round of closing arguments. You have up to two minutes. We're gonna start with Louisa. You can do it. I'll just do it for my chair. That's okay. I mean, one thing I will say is that there are, again, I wanna reiterate, I think there are major problems with our high schools. And I think that looking at the role that sports play is an important one and looking at how we apportion resources within sports itself is a very important question. I do think that we are different from other countries in a lot of important ways. I mean, there are studies that show state by state education results. Education results differ by state and what might work in one state, what might work in Texas is not, maybe not what we should be doing in Massachusetts. I mean, I think that school by school, there are different solutions for different problems. We're talking about this holistically and maybe that's a mistake. I also think that we are a nation of joiners. I mean, this is like toquefills, kind of like original insight. This is a country in which people are drawn to teams. They're drawn, communities build themselves. I think in other countries, there's a greater sense of inherited identity. And one of the functions that sports plays is this kind of social cohesion. I mean, we talked a little bit about social cohesion, but I think that it's a mistake to understate how important that can be. And, you know, just because there is a kind of misprioritization doesn't mean that we need to, you know, throw the baby out of the bathwater. Amanda? Yeah, I think that the question is, if sports were not central to the mission of American high schools, what would be? And let me give you an example about seriousness. In Finland, there's a high school exit exam that lasts 50 hours, five-oh. It goes over three weeks. It involves several days of pure writing answering questions like, why has there been no lasting peace in the Middle East? That is what rigorous academic mastery looks like. In Seoul, South Korea, when the students take their high school exit exam, the stock market opens an hour late so that there's less traffic for the students to get to the testing centers. So the most powerful people in that country are pausing and sending a message to those kids about how important it is what they're doing. The only comparable I can think of in the United States is Super Bowl, right? Where the streets are like empty and the whole country gets together behind this. So I agree, we wouldn't wanna lose these cultural bonds in this community. Could we find a way to take 10% of it and replace it or take that same enthusiasm, that same mindset and replace it with something that has to do with learning how to think critically, learning how to learn, learning how to make an argument. Because the kids, I don't know about you, the kids I know who were like killing it in the debate team who were total nerds in high school, those kids are killing it as adults, okay? And so we need to send that message to kids while they can still do something about it. Cary? I don't think athletics is really the cause for the concern at high school. I think that it's a lack of overall public investment. I think it is a misplaced measurement where oftentimes our students are required to meet a testing threshold. We can't think critically because they're not taught to think critically. In many respects, and this is a political decision, in many respects, our teachers aren't teaching by rote. They're teaching by repetition and they're not teaching our children to think critically. They're not given the kind of resources that are necessary to have them compete in a global society. And in many respects, I think it depends on what kind of investment you're willing to make. I can speak from the city of Alexandria where 85% of every public education dollar is locally spent and we spend about seven times what we're required to by the state of Virginia. Every student who comes to T.C. Williams and every student who comes to our middle schools is given a laptop so that they can compete in today's information age. That's the kind of choice that we made as a community and that is the kind of choices I think we should be making broadly about how we educate our kids and not look at merely let's take something away. Let's advocate for more public investment. Let's advocate for smarter public investment. Let's get away from teaching to the test and getting to teaching to critical thinking because that is I think the ultimate way for us to improve the performance of our high schools. Thank you, Kevin. There's a scene kind of late in Amanda's article in The Atlantic where she's talking to one of the students at that little high school in Texas that got rid of sports and it's a young woman who says, who's upset by what was happening and she said, you know, I'm probably not quoting it exactly right, but she says, you know, these, we only have these opportunities now for high school. We don't, they won't come back again to do this. There are a lot of opportunities that you have then in high school and that don't come back again. And most of them are academic opportunities. It is a, the path toward a prosperous life in this country is a perilous one for an awful lot of students, particularly low income students, students of color and disadvantaged students. We need to, this is not, I think in the end, a debate about whether sports are good or bad. It's a debate about whether, how important sports are relative to other things. And we ought not to rely on the sort of life wisdom of teenagers to decide exactly what is most important for them at that point in their lives. Sports are exciting, they're glamorous, they're valued by the community and the culture. They have a lot of positive aspects to them, but the rest of your life is a whole lot longer than what happens to you in a few years in your late teens. And the academic decisions that we make will be much more important for those students and I think we need to make the right ones on their behalf. Thank you, Kevin. And thanks to all four of you. This was, as I had anticipated, terrific. I was tempted to just keep on going for a couple more hours, but in deference to your time, we can continue talking about this amongst ourselves. Please stick around to have some more refreshments. Let's keep the conversation going. Thanks to everybody for coming. Thank you. Oh, and now that's fine. Please, if you can, go ahead and text your vote again. What we're looking for is changes of opinion. We want the winner, we want the winner. And we will send out emails with some findings on the results. It's gonna be a huge trophy. Maybe in a few minutes, we're gonna also gauge it. For those of you who work for me, we'll be here. Here's your instructions. Thank you so much for coming. Have a beverage. It was fun. It was a lot of fun. Thank you. It was fun.