American athletics have an equity problem

We are all familiar with inequality in our school systems, or we should be. Somehow, despite this knowledge, physical education has remained stubbornly immune from change or even real critical analysis, because we do not give credence to the idea that students' prior knowledge and experience augments physical development just as much as academic development.

As a result, lucky kids get athletics. The rest get P.E.

We can see this by examining two hypothetical (but unremarkable and therefore realistic) high school students.

Call our first student Kate. She's an athlete. She grew up playing a few different sports - nothing serious, but some rec league soccer, tumbling and gymnastics. She spent her summers playing outside in her neighborhood with friends (some older and some younger), chasing each other in games of tag, racing laps in a backyard swimming pool, jumping fences. She learned these games and pastimes from the older kids, and passed them down to the younger ones.

When Kate gets to high school, she decides to continue playing soccer, so her parents call the school and find out how to sign up for the team. They learn which forms they need to fill out for her physical exam, when tryouts start, and how to contact the coach. Kate plays on the freshman team and then the junior varsity her first two years, working on fundamentals and competing against opponents with diverse skill sets, allowing her own game to grow and take shape accordingly. She and her teammates have disagreements and arguments, but inevitably they sit down as a group with the coach and talk through them. Only once was a player asked to leave the team, and that was because she repeatedly bullied the other girls online. By the end of those two years, Kate's team is a cohesive unit.

Kate takes a P.E. class those first two years but doesn't give it much thought. The standards for grades are so low that she'd rather save her energy for her afternoon practices. She only has to do seven pushups to get full credit for their calisthenics unit -- a number that doesn't even constitute a warmup for her. She always changes into her P.E. uniform, because her mom does her laundry every Sunday, and since that accounts for half her grade, she doesn't have to apply herself in many other ways. Sitting on her number to take roll doesn't bother her, since she has learned patience growing up the way she did, and she doesn't understand why some kids in her class can't sit still long enough for the teacher to take attendance. The class plays some games, but most kids don't take them seriously, so Kate doesn't either. She doesn't mind passing the ball a certain number of times before she shoots, or any of the other silly rules that she'd never have to follow in an actual soccer game. Even with those kinds of rules, the kids who aren't good at sports mostly sit on the sidelines on their phones despite the teacher's insistence that they'll be graded negatively for their lack of participation. By the end of each semester, the teacher grows so frustrated with the other kids that he gives Kate extra credit just for showing up to class on time and following directions. She reliably gets an A in P.E. without ever breaking a sweat.

Over the next two years, most of Kate's J.V. soccer team moves up to varsity. They generally lack raw talent but make up for it with chemistry and work ethic. The level of play is initially faster than Kate is used to but she acclimates to it and actually has even more fun since everyone around her is trying as hard as they can. The team wins more than they lose, and Kate graduates with a group of friends she'll keep in touch with for years.

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Call our second student Julia. She's not an athlete, at least not in the traditional sense. She grew up in a small apartment complex with siblings and some extended family. The street outside the apartment was always busy with traffic, so she spent most of her time as a child in front of her phone, television and computer. Her parents worked a lot so she was home most of the day while an older cousin babysat. Sometimes she played creative games with her younger brother and sister, but that could never go on for long in such a small space, so they would inevitably go back to T.V. or YouTube.

Julia was pretty good at sports in elementary school. She played with the boys at lunch and recess and enjoyed it. When she got to middle school, she stopped, because recess was no longer part of the academic day. Since she had to go home right after school to take care of her siblings, she couldn't play on the school sports teams.

When Julia gets to high school she imagines she would like to play soccer but doesn't know how to start. Walking home after school one day, she sees girls in matching uniforms working out, so she figures she missed her opportunity. In P.E. class, Julia is amazed at how much better some girls are than her at almost every sport. First the class plays basketball, a sport Julia's never really liked. She tries to play with a few other girls who share her apprehension, and just have fun shooting the ball around as a group; the teacher scolds them and forces them to be on a team with some of the kids who are much better, "because everyone needs to cooperate and work together." Julia would rather cooperate with the kids who are at her level. Instead, she always feels like she's in the way of the kids who enjoy basketball, and it's slightly scary when they run around her at full speed.

The other students also know complicated rules to games Julia thought she understood. When the teacher blows his whistle and stops a soccer game because Julia is offside, Julia is embarrassed and stays in the middle of the field the rest of the game, just to be safe. When the more knowledgeable girls pass Julia the ball, she knows it's only so they can follow the teacher's rule about passing to other kids before they can shoot. Julia passes the ball back quickly and feels embarrassed that the other kids are forced to include her.

Over the course of the semester, Julia slowly begins doing less and less -- her grade in the class drops, but nothing seems to come of it, so she doesn't worry too much. Sometimes she forgets her P.E. uniform at home, but it's hard for her to keep up with all the laundry for her brother and sister along with herself. She feels like she has more important issues to worry about than the color of her t-shirt during P.E. Her grade drops even more.

Soon Julia gives up altogether. She stops dressing in her P.E. uniform and uses the period to catch up on work from other classes, or talk to her friends, who are also failing. She refuses to sit on her number painted on asphalt to take attendance because it's embarrassing to have dirty jeans for the rest of the day. The teacher makes sarcastic remarks about how she can't even do basic things like follow directions, so Julia eventually just stops coming to class. She fails P.E. and makes up the grade in the summer, when she is with a bunch of other kids who failed, and the teacher gives them a passing grade just for showing up.

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Neither of these examples is extreme. In my teaching, I've seen each kid -- plus or minus a few details, of course -- dozens of times. Which kid had a better physical experience growing up, Kate or Julia? Undoubtedly it's Kate -- and even then, P.E. had nothing to do with it.

So what makes for a positive physical experience? Playing with kids of a variety of ages allowed Kate to be both a student and a teacher; unstructured exploration allowed her to develop her own interests; Kate was allowed to choose her physical outlet in high school (soccer) based on preference and competence; teams were open to kids at a variety of developmental stages, but baseline expectations were present (the online bully didn't get to ruin the experience of everyone else); competitive opportunities were scaled and appropriate for her skill level.

Almost none of the above is present in a traditional physical education class at a comprehensive high school. In trying to be inclusive -- by grouping kids into large classes regardless of unique interests, experience or ability -- we ironically make equity almost impossible. By lowering standards to the point where seemingly every kid could pass, the result is that almost no students care. The inequality we see here of course plays out on a larger scale in many other ways in these kids' lives. It's not unique to P.E. That said, why is P.E. so miserable for so many kids? Even Kate, in the above example, gets next to nothing out of it, and instead gets her athletic development from after-school sports.

The contention of American Strength Class is that the things that make sports so valuable for character development are missing from physical education. In the essays, interviews and videos that follow, we will break this down so we can rebuild P.E. into a valuable class for all students, regardless of the athletic background they bring to their first day of high school.