Most kids won't become pro sports stars; obviously the only proper public response to this terrible problem is to force all potential pro athletes to acquire standardized academic skills in public school, to guarantee that all those wayside wannabes can still make some basic kind of living after they flunk out (with their algebra skills? - never mind, that's another rant.)

Betraying Student Athletes
The national effort to raise educational standards — especially for the inner-city poor — is besieged by advocates of mediocrity and the bad old status quo. A vivid example of that can be found in the growing number of dubious "prep schools" where barely literate athletes earn bogus grades, often by taking no real courses to speak of. The athletes can then move on to universities that care nothing about them and value winning teams above all else.

This deception exploits the athletes . . the prep school scam cries out for action from the National Collegiate Athletic Association and from the state legislatures and education departments that have turned a blind eye to this growing educational fraud.

So it's NOT educational fraud by colleges and universities that recruit professional athletes to pretend to be college students, nor by the NCAA as gatekeeper for this fraudulent minor league system masquerading as a college education essential for success in sports?

I don't mind being the one to ask: WHO betrayed these kids with educational fraud, again??

Public programs apparently failed in every way to teach and reach these elite, physically gifted, highly trained but academically dysfunctional athletes. (So why send them to college? It can't be for the academics.) Not only did a decade of fulltime "school" fail them before high school counseling and tutoring failed them, but myriad tax-funded, government-operated programs and tax-advantaged charitable programs (on top of "school") may have failed them, programs meant to help impoverished families manage better lives and values for their children than their own parents and neighbors passed to them.

Isn't it a game foul, if not fraud, to pile on?

Despite years of institutional failure (our failure, not theirs) these defrauded kinesthetic talents are not dead in the street or in jail; they're being wooed by academe and business alike, ready for prime time, poised to succeed, recruited for good-paying careers with built-in professional guidance and merit-based advancement opportunities -- kinda like enlisting in the military except less risk and sexier perks.

But School doesn't want them to have all that, no, they can't leave the K-12 table until they finish their moldering vegetables. It's for their own good! (Is it really their nutrition or their table manners we worry most about, and does it matter what all we've failed to teach them, once they're ready to move out and dine without us?)

It's all so repressive. Notice this attitude toward
precocious sports sounds like the traditional view of how schools and society should treat precocious sexuality in girl students - keep 'em under lock and key, busy jumping through endless hoops, dependent on you and far from evil influence in the real world, pray for their souls and chaperone all contacts with anyone wooing them toward independence and adult responsibilities -- if they flout the rules, resist our structure, embarass us too much, then cut 'em off, kick 'em out, and keep 'em down with all the odds society can set and bet against them.

And that's metaphorically mild. I was tempted to evoke Munchausen's by proxy, to cast school self-justifiers as lunatic Kathy Bates "rescuing" the handsome, healthy James Caan by hobbling him with a sledgehammer (what was the name of that movie?) in some warped, self-absorbed, "in loco parentis" power trip, crippling poor kids with all manner of supposedly educational afflictions while we have them helpless under our control so they cannot leave us, in a desperate and delusional cry for relevance, demanding to be seen as loving and long-suffering, above all, not to be abandoned and forgotten.

Whose side is School Consciousness on these days (only its own, like the Borg?) and has School lost its soul and its mind along with its mission?

At some point, did providing so much publicly funded "help" in mandatory education clinics become an end in itself, needed or not, wanted or not, the heavy hand of moral superiority -- do we as society really believe force-feeding in the name of "education" can protect kids and prepare them for good jobs and lives? Can you call anything teaching, coaching or development when it's inflicted and extorted, when it hurts, harms, cripples? Sounds like fraud to me --

The national newspaper of record, in one of the great liberal cities of the world, either has a Great Big Blind Spot in its world view, or else it's a Big Fat Liar.

The law is our daddy, the school is our mama and a controlled economy can save us all? That's not what the Times said about overseas outsourcing, apparently a less fearsome economic threat than private schools of last resort : "(It) may not be as bad as you think. In fact, it probably isn't bad at all. . .the problem . . . is the discouragement caused by the doomsayers themselves. We have nothing to fear but the fear of competing itself."

Whatever the Times may believe on any given day, what do WE believe? Is education fraud created also by prejudice, poverty, TV, gangs, drugs, urban decay, political graft and opportunism, media excess, textbook Bowdlerization, union rules, high stakes competition, organized gambling, video games, street cultures clashing with school cultures?

Have we no thought of how to fix any of it, except ways to keep the young-adult star athlete down, shut him out of the
demanding career for which he's uniquely qualified, on the judgment of what's good for them as pronounced by self-serving and underachieving schoolfolk and fat-cat regulators throwing their weight around for the NCAA as if it were some Supreme Court of School-- aren't THESE are the failures and education frauds, glaringly unfit themselves as poets and philosophers, paid reasonably well to work in a corrupt system that pretends to be about learning and intellect but mainly serves to help them rig the game against their own competition, brazening it through to keep their own paydays and perks on schedule (even engaging in credential fraud themselves if need be, as in the Miami-Dade schoolteacher scandal) --

No, they say, it's just that darn entrepreneurial excess of private programs (willing to sweep up the pieces of what public school breaks and leaves lying around. . .)
Talk about the bad old status quo.

IAnd it's not just schoolkids we want to "fix the game" for:

"The career path for most umpires, in other words, is a hard road to nowhere. . .
What minor league umpires need is a reason to pursue the profession other than their love of the game."

These are clear-eyed adults working to support families, presumably after earning regular school credits and developing all the professional skills they need, plus maturity and dedication if not downright "nobility" -- and yet their career path (like mine and yours, like most careers?) still suffers from not enough room at the top; most professional sports umpires labor in the trenches as poorly paid, obscure wannabes with no hope of being a star.

But "education fraud" purveyed by a few proprietary privates clearly isn't causing this sports career plight, so regulating even all private schooling couldn't solve it.

Instead, the columnist proposes we declare that individuals paid for sports work are interchangeable cogs to be shuffled randomly and paid by schedule regardless of individual initiative, effort or performance (like schoolteachers, because THAT'S worked so well??)

Seems dim to me, but I admit it's better than pretending one's academic credits relate to one's professional sports ability -- so could this conceit work for schooling student athletes? (Might as well prepare them the same way we plan to manage them as pros.) We could rotate them through classes, games and playing positions on a regular schedule, using just their jersey numbers rather than name, to be sure there's nothing about them as individuals that gets interjected. Seems fair.

Regardless of who they are or how they do, no student or coach would suffer (or profit) from any differences in circumstance, goals, effort, abilities, results, treatment, rewards. This even solves the cutthroat recruiting problem for schools, colleges and pros rather neatly, by removing all incentive for it to matter which players you "sign" - they'll be "assigned" instead, and every school and team will get an equally small piece of each one.

This concept could transform school, work and society. If we rotate teachers and student athletes like umpires, what about rotating players in entertainment careers? We'd lose the thrill of championships and the Oscars but we can prevent box office risk, cancellation of tv shows, the wealth of Weinsteins and Walt Disney heirs, maybe neutralize the pesky fickleness of fans.

Wonder if this would work with doctors, lawyers, professors, bloggers and columnists, spouses? hmmm . . . we've experimented with student mothers, switching school eligibilty rules and even their babies around as we think best, for their own good of course . . .oh. But then we'd need to give a fair turn to those bogus private schools and rotate students INTO them on schedule, however undeserving they might be. Well, fair is fair.

And every senator would get a fair and equal turn as president, just divide the four-year, 200-week presidential season so each senator gets two weeks at the top with no campaigning or voting needed, and we'd all get two weeks of blessed off-season each year, with no game-playing allowed -- why didn't we think of this before??

We can calculate fairness and equalize all outcomes downward to some numerically defensible standard.

School algebra might just play into the future of America after all.