Student Testing and Sports Analogies

From pennlive.com

Graduation exams necessary for PA's students to succeed
by Dan Rooney, Sunday March 29, 2009, 3:01 AM
Rooney believes state should have graduation tests

Our goal for the Pittsburgh Steelers is to compete at the highest level. We expect nothing less from our players and coaches, and believe they can achieve this if we provide the resources and support necessary. Our track record bears out the wisdom of this approach.

I write today about a subject infinitely more important than a football game, but one for which we as a state must make the same commitment the Steelers do on the gridiron. The subject is the education of our children, and specifically, the need to raise the standards required for students to successfully complete high school.

This is a personal passion of mine, as well as a deep concern as a businessperson. My daughter, Mary Duffy, teaches young children in Allegheny County's Woodland Hills School District.

Each year, she has several students labeled "difficult or challenging." My daughter gives these students all the attention she can, while also teaching the rest of the class -- itself a difficult and challenging task.

But Mary often tells the story of the payoff for her hard work when one of these difficult students walked into the room, put his arms around her, and said, "Miss Rooney, we love you."

No one has greater respect for our teachers than I. So, knowing many don't agree with Governor Rendell's plan for strengthening graduation assessments is not something I take lightly. I share teachers' concern that the six to eight hours a day they have with children isn't enough to ensure academic success and fully agree parents' responsibility and accountability for their child's education, is greater than the teachers'.

However, to teachers, parents and anyone else who feels we should not bolster our graduation standards in Pennsylvania, I say: We are not changing the standards for high school graduates; they have already been changed for us.

When my father founded the Steelers, professional football wasn't much more than a hobby. Players suited up during the fall, and held other jobs the rest of the year. Training camp was a time to get in shape and learn the playbook.

Back then, an education at the local school, with a diploma that satisfied the needs of local businesses, was sufficient to find a job and provide for your family.

Today, anybody showing up at camp not in tip-top shape with a thorough understanding of what is expected of him won't be on the roster for long. These standards weren't changed by the colleges sending their best players to the NFL, but by the ever increasing competition among the professional teams themselves, competing for ever greater stakes.

So it is with education. The modern world and job market require a high school diploma that says the holder is in tip-top academic shape, ready right now to compete with the best not just in his or her community, Pennsylvania, or the United States, but to compete with the best in the world.

We all see how our children today communicate, interact and engage one another with little regard to national boundaries or political maps. We are truly in a worldwide community, and this will expand only in regard to the economy.

Given this reality, our children who continue their education beyond high school must go into those classrooms prepared to gain the knowledge and training necessary for them to be the innovators that have always been the biggest part of the American spirit.

Our children who go directly into jobs must be immediately ready to compete within a global marketplace by possessing the skills, work ethic and determination that has made the American work force the pride of the world.

We must never shortchange our children with shallow expectations. Our children can and will meet any challenge if we give them the resources and support necessary.

This requires that we have strong, consistent graduation assessments throughout Pennsylvania, so colleges and employers know a student coming to them from a Pennsylvania high school is ready for what's next. Our students need this confidence, too.

That young boy, the difficult student who said, "Miss Rooney, we love you," didn't come to love my daughter as a teacher because she let him just get by, but because she believed in him and demanded he become the best he could be.

Our students will always bring the greatness of our nation to the world. We must always believe in them and their ability to be the best. Consistent, rigorous graduation assessments are a great way to start.

Dan Rooney is chairman and owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers. He is slated to be the next U.S. ambassador to Ireland.

COMMENTS (1)Post a comment
Posted by elvisc on 03/29/09 at 9:01AM

I'm going to write a column on how to run a football team. I really have no idea how, but I have watched a few games. So I hope the Patriot News will publish it.

As a former engineer/manager and current physics teacher, I am grateful for Mr. Rooney's concern about education. But part of our current problem is in giving too much weight to the ideas of people who have not actually been in the classroom and who have no apparent expertise in the field.

How about Mr. Rooney be required to field a team by randomly selecting 20 or 30 people off the street? He may set his standards high if he likes, but it will not change the fact that they will be his only team members, and they will have to meet those standards. This is why I hate sports (or even business) analogies to education.

There is no doubt that we need to make changes in the education system, but anyone involved in business and manufacturing knows that you can not inspect quality into a product at the end of the production line...that will simply lead to a lot of failures and rejects.

As an engineer and manager, I was critical of education, too. So I entered the field myself, partly to learn more about what's right and wrong with it. And I can assure readers that it is a far more difficult and complex job than it appears on the outside. In a business, many of these students would be fired in a minute, or not hired in the first place. That is not an option for teachers.

Until we offer some alternatives to the non-performing, disruptive, uninterested students (like a vocational path as they do in many European systems), we will be hurting our current system.

You can set standards as high as you like, but the fact is that there will still be many students who just don't give a damn about those standards. We need to do everything we can to help those students find a rewarding and positive path in life, but more and more testing and higher and higher standards will not get us there.