Nearly everyone I met in New York thought Mamaroneck was a terrific school because its parents were rich and its state scores high, even though its building was in bad shape and its policy of reserving AP only for students with top grades made no sense. Nearly everyone I met in Los Angeles thought Garfield was a terrible school because its parents were poor and its state scores low, even though it was doing much more to prepare average and below-average students for college than any other school I knew. It was like rating restaurants not by the quality of their food, but by the bank accounts of their customers.
I was covering Wall Street for The Washington Post at that time, and not liking the job much. My life was ruled by indexes—the Dow Jones, the Standard & Poor’s. I decided to create my own index to measure something I thought was more important—which schools were giving their students the most value. This would help me show why Garfield, in a neighborhood full of auto-body shops and fast-food joints, was at least as good a school as Mamaroneck, in a town of mansions and country clubs.
Test scores, the usual way of rating schools, are in nearly every case a measure of parental wealth and education, not good teaching. Every study shows that if your parents fill their house with books, include you in conversations and take you to plays and museums, you tend to score well on standardized tests even if your school is not the best. So, with the help of some astute AP teachers, I developed a scale called the Challenge Index, which used each school’s rate of participation in college-level tests like AP to indicate which schools were the most demanding and supportive of all students. I took the total number of AP tests (later adding International Baccalaureate and Cambridge tests) taken each year and divided by the number of graduating seniors, so that big schools would not have an advantage over small schools. AP, IB and Cambridge were important because they were challenging (students could get college credit for good scores) and incorruptible (outside experts wrote and graded the exams). Just taking the course and the test mattered more than the score because even struggling AP students learned a great deal.
NEWSWEEK ran the list for the first time in its March 30, 1998, issue. Each year that the magazine has published a new list, I have received thousands of e-mails, some complimentary, some angry, some confused. Educators in schools with large numbers of low-income students that, like Garfield, have succeeded in coaxing students into demanding courses say the list has given them recognition they never thought they would get, and fortified their efforts to get more students exercising their academic muscles for college. Many parents say the list has helped them find great schools in otherwise undistinguished places.
Some parents and educators in wealthier neighborhoods, on the other hand, say a list that puts their schools below schools they consider their socioeconomic inferiors simply cannot be valid. Recently two education experts, Andrew Rotherham and Sara Mead of the Education Sector think tank in Washington, D.C., said it was wrong for NEWSWEEK to label “best” schools with high dropout rates and low average test scores like many of the low-income schools on the list. As we note this year, several of the schools on our list did not make adequate yearly progress (AYP) under the No Child Left Behind law, though that, too, is mostly a measure of poverty, plus the failure of some not-so-poor schools to raise the achievement of their most disadvantaged students.
Readers are entitled to their own views of this rating system. The Challenge Index is journalism designed to serve readers, like the Dow Jones averages or baseball slugging percentages—not scholarship. The adjective “best” always reflects different values. Your best movie may have won the most awards; mine may have sold the most tickets. In this case, I want to recognize those schools with the teachers who add the most value, even in inner-city schools where no one has yet found a way to reduce dropouts or raise test scores significantly. That is a game that, so far, poor schools can’t win and rich schools can’t lose, reminding me of the days when everyone told me Garfield was a bad school and Mamaroneck a good school, when I knew the truth was very different.
title: “Steroid Abuse The Dangers Facing Teens” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-09” author: “Kenyetta Martinez”
But when the townspeople started looking for a way to pull those scores up, they took their inspiration from some of the most elite private schools in the country, and then gave it a populist twist. They opened a public charter school offering the International Baccalaureate program to any student interested in pursuing it, an approach that’s called IB for All.
Generally considered one of the most rigorous high-school curricula in the world, IB was designed after World War II for the children of diplomats who sought an internationally recognized diploma that would command respect around the world. To receive an IB diploma, high-school seniors must pass written college-level exams (each five hours long) in six core subjects, including at least one foreign language, covering the material they’ve learned over the past two years. To ensure fairness, the tests are scored by outside graders. In addition, the degree requires students to write a 4,000-word thesis and complete lessons in philosophy.
Growth of IB schools around the world has been steady over the past 40 years, but it’s been fastest in the United States, where it is now in 758 schools. The pace has been particularly brisk since 2000, when more U.S. schools began using it to spur higher achievement. Because IB requires high-school students to do college-level work, many schools continue to restrict access to their most capable students. Others offer IB for All, but have school admissions standards that winnow out weak students. Hyannis’s Sturgis Charter is one of only two IB for All schools that are open to all students. It fills its classes via public lottery. “We don’t screen out students with low grades or test scores or those who write poorly,” says Eric Hieser, executive director of the school. “If they want to challenge themselves, we tell them to give it a go.” Not every student at Sturgis earns the full IB diploma, but Hieser argues that it’s still a major accomplishment to pass an IB class. “Everyone here develops the kind of mind and skills that will ensure their success in college,” he says.
Senior Taylor Finkelstein, 18, is a case in point. The second youngest of five children, she thought of herself as “just a nice, quiet girl who never raised her hand. I never pushed myself.” When IB was introduced at the start of her sophomore year, she felt intimidated. But the combination of small classes and challenging work helped her gain confidence. This spring, she amazed herself by sitting for exams in science, English, history and art. “I thought they’d be really hard,” she says. “But when I sat down to take them, I felt really prepared. I’ve become more of a student than I ever thought I could be.”
Despite its successes, IB is not without its detractors. Some critics complain about the cost. IB charges every school $8,000 a year as a base fee, no matter its size. There are extra costs for the exams and teacher training. In a few places, like Upper St. Clair, Pa., there is unease by some conservatives about the global—rather than strictly American—focus of the program. Supporters note that IB gets funding from the conservative Bush administration. Despite that assurance, the conservative majority of Upper St. Clair’s school boardvoted last year to end its IB program, setting off a local firestorm. Parents who support the program filed suit and got politically active. Last Tuesday, school-board elections were held, and a new pro-IB majority was voted in.
That’s the kind of passion driving IB’s popularity. Brad Richardson, the regional director of IB in North America, says that in the last few years, IB name recognition has increased substantially. With it will come more growth, he says. “We may now be at the tipping point.”
title: “Steroid Abuse The Dangers Facing Teens” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-17” author: “Vivian Caffrey”
NEWSWEEK published national lists based on the same formula in 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005 and 2006. In the Washington Post, I have reported the Challenge Index ratings for every public school in the Washington area every year since 1998. I think 1.000 is a modest standard. A school can reach that level if only half of its students take one AP, IB or Cambridge test in their junior year and one in their senior year. But this year only about 5 percent of all U.S. public high schools managed to reach that standard and be placed on the NEWSWEEK list.
At the top of the Web site list we invite all qualifying schools we may have missed to e-mail us their data so that we can put them on the list. There is no national database that has the number of AP, IB and Cambridge tests and number of June graduates for each public high school, so we have had to build our own. We are happy to capture the few schools we missed by using the publicity generated by publication of a new list.
In the past, schools have usually reported their passing rates on AP or IB as a sign of how well their programs were doing. When I say passing rate, I mean the percentage of students who scored 3, 4 or 5 on the 5-point AP test or 4, 5, 6 or 7 on the 7-point IB test. (The Cambridge tests, although similar to AP and IB, are used in very few schools, and rarely appear in school assessments.) Passing AP or IB scores are the rough equivalent of a C or C-plus in a college course and make the student eligible for credit at most colleges.
I decided not to count passing rates in the way schools had done in the past because I found that most American high schools kept those rates artificially high by allowing only top students to take the courses. In some other instances, they opened the courses to all but encouraged only the best students to take the tests.
AP and IB are important because they give average students a chance to experience the trauma of heavy college reading lists and long, analytical college examinations. Studies by U.S. Department of Education senior researcher Clifford Adelman in 1999 and 2005 showed that the best predictors of college graduation were not good high-school grades or test scores, but whether or not a student had an intense academic experience in high school. Such experiences were produced by taking higher-level math and English courses and struggling with the demands of college-level courses like AP or IB. Two recent studies looked at more than 150,000 students in California and Texas and found if they had passing scores on AP exams they were more likely to do well academically in college.
To send a student off to college without having had an AP or IB course and test is like insisting that a child learn to ride a bike without ever taking off the training wheels. It is dumb, and in my view a form of educational malpractice. But most American high schools still do it, and I don’t think such schools should be rewarded because they have artificially high AP or IB passing rates achieved by making certain just their best students take the tests.
NEWSWEEK and The Washington Post, however, have added a new statistic developed by the College Board that indicates how well students are doing on the exams at each school while still recognizing the importance of increasing student participation. It is the equity and excellence rate, the percentage of all graduating seniors, including those who never got near an AP course, who had at least one score of 3 or above on at least one AP test sometime in high school. The average equity and excellence rate in 2006 for all schools, including those that lacked AP programs, was 14.8 percent. In the 2007 NEWSWEEK list, we give the equity and excellence percentage for those schools that have the necessary data. We ask IB schools to calculate their IB, or combined AP-IB, equity and excellence rate, using a 4 on the 7-point IB test as the equivalent of a 3 on the AP.
We divide by June graduates as a convenient measure of the relative size of each school. That way a big school like Coral Reef High in Miami, which gave 3,273 AP or IB tests and graduated 634 seniors in 2006 for a rating of 5.162 this year, will not have an advantage over Eastern Sierra Academy in rural Bridgeport, Calif., which gave only 26 AP tests but also graduated only five seniors for a rating of 5.200. On the 2007 NEWSWEEK list they are right next to each other at numbers 19 and 20.
We count all tests taken at the school, and not just those taken by seniors.
Indeed it is, and if I could quantify all those other things in a meaningful way, I would give it a try. But teacher quality, extracurricular activities and other important factors are too subjective for a ranked list. Participation in challenging courses, on the other hand, can be counted, and the results expose a significant failing in most high schools—notice that so far only about 5 percent of the public high schools in the United States qualify for the NEWSWEEK list. I think that this is the most useful quantitative measure of a high school, and one of its strengths is the narrowness of the criteria. Everyone can understand the simple arithmetic that produces a school’s Challenge Index rating and discuss it intelligently, as opposed to ranked lists like U.S. News & World Report’s “America’s Best Colleges,” which has too many factors for me to comprehend.
As for the words “top” and “best”, they are always based on criteria chosen by the listmaker. My list of best film directors may depend on Academy Award nominations. Yours may be based on ticket sales. I have been very clear about what I am measuring in these schools. You may not like my criteria, but I have not found anyone who understands how high schools work and does not think AP or IB test participation is important. I often ask people to tell me what quantitative measure of high schools they think is more important than this one. Such discussions can be interesting and productive.
For instance, Andy Rotherham and Sarah Mead of the think tank Education Sector argue that some of the schools on the NEWSWEEK list have low average test scores and high dropout rates and do not belong on any best high schools list. My response is that these are all schools with lots of low-income students and great teachers who have found ways to get them involved in college-level courses. We have as yet no proven way for educators in low-income schools to improve significantly their average tests scores or graduation rates. Until we do, I don’t see any point in making them play a game that, no matter how energetic or smart they are, they can’t win.
We do not include any magnet or charter high school that draws such a high concentration of top students that its average SAT or ACT score significantly exceeds the highest average for any normal-enrollment school in the country. This year, that meant such schools had to have an average SAT score below 1,300 on the reading and math sections, or an average ACT score below 27, to be included on the list.
The schools you name are terrific places with some of the highest average test scores in the country, but it would be deceptive for us to put them on this list. The Challenge Index is designed to honor schools that have done the best job in persuading average students to take college-level courses and tests. It does not work with schools that have no, or almost no, average students. The idea is to create a list that measures how good schools are in challenging all students, and not just how high their students’ test scores are. The high-performing schools we have excluded from the list all have great teachers, but research indicates that high SAT and ACT averages are much more an indication of the affluence of the students’ parents.
Using average SAT or ACT scores is a change from the previous system we used, which excluded schools that admitted more than half of their student based on grades and test scores. That system penalized some inner-city magnet schools that had high Challenge Index ratings but whose average SAT or ACT scores were below those of some normal enrollment suburban schools, so we switched to a system that we consider fairer and clearer.
We do, however, acknowledge this year on our Public Elites list the 19 schools that did not make the list because their average SAT or ACT scores were too high.
You make a very important point. These are all exceptional schools. Every one is in the top 5 percent of 27,000 American high schools measured this way. They have all shown remarkable AP and IB strength. I am mildly ashamed of my reason for ranking, but I do it anyway. I want people to pay attention to this issue, because I think it is vitally important for the improvement of American high schools. Like most journalists, I learned long ago that we are tribal primates with a deep commitment to pecking orders. We cannot resist looking at ranked lists. It doesn’t matter what it is—-SUVs, ice-cream stores, football teams, fertilizer dispensers. We want to see who is on top and who is not. So I rank to get attention, with the hope that people will argue about the list and in the process think about the issues it raises.
If I thought that those districts who pay for the test and require that students take it were somehow cheating, and giving themselves an unfair advantage that made their programs look stronger than they were, I would add that asterisk or discount them in some way. But I think the opposite is true. Districts who spend money to increase the likelihood that their students take AP or IB tests are adding value to the education of their students. Taking the test is good. It gives students a necessary taste of what college demands. It is bad that many students in AP courses avoid taking the tests just because they prefer to spend May of their senior year sunning themselves on the beach or buying their prom garb. (Since AP and IB tests must be graded by human beings, the results arrive long after June report cards, so they do not count as part of the class grade and most schools allow students to skip the AP test if they wish. IB is organized differently, and few IB students miss those exams.)
If paying test fees persuades students, indeed forces them, to take the test, that is good, just as it is good if a school spends money to hire more AP teachers or makes it difficult for students to drop out of AP without a good reason. I was happy to see that when suburban Fairfax County, Va., began to pay the test fees and require that the tests be taken, many other districts in the Washington area followed suit.
I would like to. NEWSWEEK has tried to count what are often called dual-enrollment exams, those given in high-school courses supervised by local colleges. But it proved to be too difficult. The problem is that we want to make sure that the dual-enrollment final exams are comparable to the AP, IB and Cambridge exams that define the index. We tried to set a standard—we would only count dual-enrollment final exams that were at least two hours long and had some free-response questions that required thought and analysis, just as the AP, IB and Cambridge exams do. And we wanted to be sure that the exams were written and scored by people who were not employed by the high school so that, like AP, IB and Cambridge exams, they could not be dumbed down to make the school or the teacher look good. Some high schools provided us with the necessary information, but most could not. It was too difficult for them to persuade the colleges managing the exams to help them, or they did not have the staff to gather the data we required. We did not want to be counting extra exams only for those schools that could afford extra staff, so we decided to stay with AP, IB and Cambridge, while we thought about better ways to count dual enrollment.
The more schools I have examined, the more I have come to believe in the power of high-school cultures, which are different in different parts of the country for reasons that often have little to do with the usual keys to high-school performance—the incomes and educations of the parents.
In 2005, California, New York, Texas and Florida led the nation, in that order, in number of schools on the list. That was no surprise. But it was more difficult to explain why much less populous Virginia and Maryland came right after those megastates in the number of challenging high schools, and why Iowa, with some of the highest test scores in the country, had only three high schools that met the criteria. Six states had no schools on the list at all.
My tentative explanation is that some areas have had the good fortune to get school boards and superintendents who see that they serve their students better by opening up AP and IB to everyone. Once a few districts in a state do that, others follow. And once a state has success with AP or IB, its neighboring states begin to wonder why they aren’t doing the same.
My children attended both public and private high schools, and I share your interest in rating both varieties. The public schools are very quick to give NEWSWEEK and The Washington Post the data we need. They are, after all, tax-supported institutions. The private schools, sadly, have resisted this and most other attempts to quantify what they are doing so that parents could compare one private school to another. The National Association of Independent Schools has even warned its members against cooperating with reporters like me who might be trying to help what they call consumer-conscious parents like you. They say that parents should reject such numerical comparisons and instead visit each private school to soak up its ambiance. I am all for visits, but I think those private schools are essentially saying that parents like you and me are too stupid to read a list in a magazine or newspaper and reach our own sensible conclusions about its worth.
A few private schools have shared their data with me, but since the majority are resisting, any list of private schools would be too incomplete to be very useful.
No. Keep in mind, as I said before, that every school on the list is in the top 5 percent of all American high schools measured in this way. If you want to gauge a school’s progress, look at its rating, not its ranking. Many schools drop in rank each year because there is so much more competition to be on the list, but at the same time improve their ratio of tests to graduating seniors. That means they are getting better, and the rank is even less significant. Also, almost all schools on the list drop in rank in the updated Web-site version of the list a few weeks after the list first appears in NEWSWEEK, because we add schools that get their data to us after the deadline.
I realize it is my fault that people put too much emphasis on the ranks. If I didn’t rank, this would not happen. I was startled that people even remembered what their school’s rank was in previous years. The important thing is that your school is on the list, not where on the list it is. As for why I rank, when it creates so much trouble, see question 7.
There is a bit, but only a small bit, of truth in what you have heard. Many selective colleges are making it harder to get credit for taking AP and IB courses and tests in high schools, but their reasons for doing so are unclear. Former philosophy professor William Casement, who has analyzed this trend, says he thinks AP courses and tests are not as good as the introductory college courses and tests they were designed to substitute for, and that is why those colleges are pulling back. There is, unfortunately, almost no evidence to back up his theory. In fact, the colleges have done almost no research on the quality of their introductory courses, while the College Board has expert panels that regularly compare AP courses with college intro courses to make sure they are on the same level.
Some high-school educators think the colleges don’t like to give AP credit because it costs them revenue. There is no evidence to support that theory, either, but it is clear that selective college-admissions offices are very happy to see AP or IB courses on applicants’ transcripts.
As for high schools rejecting AP, there are exactly 12 who have done that. They are all private, all very expensive and represent 3/100ths of 1 percent of the nation’s high schools. Thousands of high schools, by contrast, are opening more AP or IB courses, which they say are the only national programs that provide a high and incorruptible standard for student learning.
Because AP and IB exams are written and scored by outside experts, it is impossible to water down an AP or IB course without exposing what you have done—unless of course you make sure very few of the students take the tests. That is why we count tests, not courses, for the index. And as for teacher creativity, AP and IB encourages it more than any other high-school program I know. The tests reward creative thinking and original analysis. Creative teachers who produce creative students find their AP and IB test scores are very high.
They are smart and hard-working educators who are entitled to their opinions. But so are those AP teachers who tell me the list helps them gain support for their students. Here is what Brian Rodriguez, who teaches AP American and European history at Encinal High School in Alameda, Calif., told me about the impact of AP on non-AP courses in a school with many low-income and minority students:
“AP teachers rarely teach only AP classes. They have many other responsibilities to their department, collaborative educational focus groups and as liaison to our middle schools. The AP techniques honed in years of teaching or gleaned from seminars are used in the regular classrooms (at a slower pace, but no less effectively). For instance, I am teaching a unit on Vietnam to my regular U.S. history class. I will use the PowerPoint lecture I developed for my AP class on that subject, teach the students to take notes, use the Socratic-method discussion techniques so effective in AP classes, and then teach writing methods and tips I use so effectively in my AP classes. In addition, I will teach these techniques to our new teachers at history department meetings, prepare a pamphlet on multiple-choice testing techniques that was distributed to all teachers at our school to prepare them for state standardized testing and then visit our local middle schools to make a presentation to the teachers there. In summary, AP teaching can be schoolwide, and raises all the ships in the harbor.”
title: “Steroid Abuse The Dangers Facing Teens” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-13” author: “Patricia Morris”
NEWSWEEK: Are there a lot of kids who change to homeschooling during the high-school years, or right before high school? Laura Derrick: There are a fair number, and we see it with kids who recognize that perhaps for them a traditional school is not necessarily the best thing. I’ve known teens who came to their parents with a well-thought-out essay and all kinds of research to back it up, about what they wanted to do and why their parents should go along with the plan, and really had to convince them that they weren’t just trying to drop out. And so we do see it, and there are kids who are just very directed, who have big ideas about what they want to be doing, what they need to be doing and sometimes feel like they’re wasting their time in a classroom.
What are some of the issues they face? I know for a lot of kids, high school is kind of their social life, that period of their life where they’re finding their boyfriend or girlfriend and hanging out with buddies and stuff. Right. And that’s very important. I mean, there is a long period of growth and maturation that happens during that time that is partly fueled by those social interactions, and teens really do need those; it’s not just something that’s nice to have. We see what happens when they’re deprived of that. For most homeschoolers, that’s not an issue. I know that’s the perception from outside the homeschooling universe, and homeschoolers actually laugh about it, because most of us, we call ourselves carschoolers because we’re in the car so much. There are, unfortunately, some parents who do isolate their kids more than is probably good for the kids. Those kind of parents come in every walk of life and across the board, unfortunately, and some of them do exist in the homeschooling world, too. But the vast majority of families really do get out and do a lot. So I don’t see that as being a problem that’s really related to homeschooling so much as it is to parenting.
What do you see as the main challenges or benefits for a child choosing to homeschool during high school? The stakes get higher when kids are in high school. There’s a sense of urgency, because they’re going to have to make some decisions about going on to work or college or marriage, or whatever it is that they’re moving on to after high school, and particularly if they’re going on to college, preparing for that becomes a bigger issue. We don’t have guidance counselors who come to our house to help us through that process, so there is a lot of that kind of stuff that parents and teens have to figure out for themselves, or turn to other homeschoolers who’ve been there and done that for advice. Just figuring out how to do those more difficult courses, how to make sure that you have what a college is going to want to see on the transcript and those kinds of things, they’re challenging. But you know, there are a lot of options, and kids seem to find many, many ways to get there and do it successfully.
Is there an organization that monitors homeschooled kids to make sure that they’re getting a proper education? That depends entirely on the state. Some states regulate homeschooling very strictly, and other states don’t regulate it at all. The range in between is pretty broad, but I would say the bulk of the states have minimal regulations that have to do with notifying the state or the school district that you’re in that you’re homeschooling. Sometimes they include some form of evaluation or testing that’s required, but often those states don’t require you to report it, they just require you to do it. But we’ve found that most kids in high school and their parents feel a sense of urgency and pressure, because parents don’t want to be responsible for those kids forever and supporting them forever, so there’s even more incentive to really get them going and get them prepared to be on their own.
What are some things that a high-school kid that chooses to be homeschooled might miss out on from the traditional high-school experience? Some team sports are much more difficult, and certainly that’s an issue for some kids. I would say sometimes, as kids are shy, it can be hard to make friends initially. Kids who don’t have a good friendship base in their own neighborhood or in their church or in their youth group or something already might have a period of time where they’re having to work harder at finding those friendships and social opportunities.
There are certainly things that they miss out on that are negative. They can usually avoid things like high-stakes testing, if that’s problematic for them, and they can avoid a lot of the peer-pressure issues. Peer pressure does exist everywhere, but there’s a lot less pressure to conform or be part of this group or that group or the other group [when the student is at home].
And what about the prom or graduation? A lot of places have proms, and a lot of places that don’t have proms have dances and things through homeschooling groups. Most of them are starting to have graduations now too if they have teens old enough. They’re really neat, actually, they invite the whole community and the parents award the diplomas and usually give a speech, and the graduate gets to give a little speech, and then they have a party and a dance afterward.
Is there anything else that you want to say about homeschooling during the high-school years? I would say that what I’ve found, and I travel a lot, I speak at conferences, I’ve met homeschoolers in groups and individually all across the country, and what I see among the high schoolers is that they tend to be a lot more relaxed. I think that there’s something about it that really just takes a lot of the pressure off for these kids. And it never ceases to amaze me how enjoyable the teens that I meet are to be around.
title: “Steroid Abuse The Dangers Facing Teens” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-29” author: “Floyd Denson”
NEWSWEEK: You have spoken out critically against Title IX. I assume you are not against women being able to play sports, so what is it that you are opposed to? Jessica Gavora: I am not against Title IX, I am only against what it has become through its implementation. The law has been hijacked and has put government into the role of coercing schools to make it look like men and women are participating in athletics at the same rate. Doing a proportionality test forces schools to manipulate their rosters to make the gender ratios match that of the student body. And this is hard for lots of schools to do. Men and women don’t turn out to play sports at the same rate. They don’t show the same interest in sports, not to mention that these colleges and universities are increasingly female so schools end up having to make that gender ratio match. They end up cutting their men’s teams and limiting the size of the teams that do exist to make it look like men and women are equally participating in sports.
Do you advocate getting rid of Title IX? I do think we still need title IX. I think that everybody in our educational institutions deserves protection against sex discrimination. I think that’s an important part of equality in this country. But we need to change the way we are judging schools. They need to be able to offer sports on the basis of student interest. That’s why we applauded the student interest survey, [which surveyed the student body based on interest in athletics, allowing for representative sports teams] because right now we have this very arbitrary numerical formula that we are applying and it’s hurting athletes. Not just male athletes, but female athletes on small roster squads. Women who play smaller roster sports don’t get the same opportunity.
What do you think needs to be changed in Title IX to make it work better? This is the real sticking point right now; it’s the only area that needs improvement. Title IX speaks to lots of things, equal facilities, practice times and all these other comparisons for complying with the law that are perfectly fine. It’s this participation question. How do we decide what’s fair when we’re segregating our athletics by sex? This is the only controversial question with Title IX as far as I’m concerned and it needs to be settled with an interest survey. Women today are aware of their options, they’re very athletic; they know what they want to do. They should be able to say what they want to do. We don’t apply this same test, [which requires the gender ratio of athletics to match the gender ratio of the student body] to any other area of education. We don’t apply it to engineering, and I would probably say it’s more important that we have more female engineers than female equestrians.
What do the people on the other side of the issue argue? The people on the other side of this believe that it isn’t the role of the university to accommodate the interests of women; they believe it’s the role of the university to create interest. They believe it is the role of the university to educate women on how athletic they are.
What do female athletes say? I know that I’ve heard from lots of female athletes who are starting to say that this law has outlived its purpose. They don’t understand what this law means because they’re seeing it limit the opportunities of the men they travel and train with and who make them better athletes. And they think it’s insane. There’s a big generational divide here. Some of the women who are of the “if you build it they will com”’ mentality are older women and they lived at a time and went to college at a time when women were being given the short end of the stick in a major way. But these women today have had a very different experience and they don’t agree with what this law is doing to their male colleagues.
Is it a financial issue? Are schools trying to allocate funding and cutting teams because they can’t afford them all? It is not a financial issue. The formula for compliance, the proportionality does not say that schools have to spend an equal amount of money on the boys and the girls. It’s a body count quota. It says 55 percent of your athletes have to be women if 55 percent of your student body is women. So we see schools practice what they call “roster management,” which means they limit the size of the men’s team. They turn away male walk-ons who don’t cost them money, who don’t travel with them and who just want to play. They turn them away because of the body count quota. Time after time we see schools eliminate a team and alumni come forward and say they will pay for the team and the school will say no because they can’t have the male bodies on their rosters.
What about the big-money sports, like college football teams, that have 80 players when they only really need 30. Do you think they are taking up spaces for smaller men’s sports? Some people like to say it’s all football, because schools are spending all their money on football teams, but that’s not what this is about. Those football players aren’t taking any opportunities away from females. The money they spend on football is not the reason they can only have 15 guys on their baseball team, when if they took their walk-ons they could have 50. Women don’t come out and play for the team without scholarships the way men do. Women have a lot more things they want to do. Look at the gender balance for every extracurricular activity and they’re all dominated by women, except sports. Women have more diverse interests; men are more maniacally interested in sports. Some people say that’s gender heresy but I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
This mostly applies to college sports, but how is it relevant to high schools? This proportionality has so far been pretty much confined to colleges and universities and it would really be a tragedy if it were applied to high schools. Like I said, look at who’s doing what extracurricular activity in high schools and then tell me we need to force equality of participation in sports. You’re going to hurt a lot of boys because a lot of girls are busy after school doing other things, so I think it would be terrible if we expanded this to high schools.
