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This is an absurd argument (Stop spending money on sports and rather spend it on real education) rather, we should spend less money on things like policing the rest of the world/inflating the defense sector's wallets and channel THAT money into education/infrastructure/healthcare/many other things
The financial impact of high school sports aren't the issue. The real issue is their impact on high school culture. School sports, especially the big, spectator friendly, fast-twitch muscle oriented sports of football, basketball, and baseball, send a big message to the student body:
Athletic achievement is something that should be celebrated by all students, to the degree that it should be celebrated by the peers of the students on the field/court. As if a kid on the bleachers life has been improved because a fellow student succeeded in putting a ball through a metal ring.
Academic achievement is never glorified in this way. It is viewed as something that the student and their parents (and perhaps the more conscientious teachers/faculty) celebrate. Not until junior/senior year, when it becomes clear that certain students are going to universities with big, well-known, prestigious names, is there even a remote group admiration of academically achieving students.
Sports were a great thing for me. They helped me focus, taught me humility, and also how to internalize criticism into improvement. My participation in sports did jack shit to help the students who were forced to attend pep rallies, or sucked into the cultural celebration of not dropping the football despite taking a devastating hit as I passed the 1st down marker.
Sports are good, but I agree: get them the fuck out of academic institutions. They have no place there.
The author notes about herself, "When I was growing up in New Jersey, not far from where Jenny now lives, I played soccer from age 7 to 17. I was relieved to find a place where girls were not expected to sit quietly or look pretty, and I still love the game. Like most other Americans, I can rattle off the many benefits of high-school sports: exercise, lessons in sportsmanship and perseverance, school spirit, and just…
The author notes about herself, "When I was growing up in New Jersey, not far from where Jenny now lives, I played soccer from age 7 to 17. I was relieved to find a place where girls were not expected to sit quietly or look pretty, and I still love the game. Like most other Americans, I can rattle off the many benefits of high-school sports: exercise, lessons in sportsmanship and perseverance, school spirit, and just…
Of course, it took an act of Congress to even get lip service to equality and while expenditures per individual athlete may be similar between cheerleading and football, there are often 60 or more players dressed out for a high school game and only a fraction of that hollering "Two Bits."
But lest I be misunderstood, scholastically sponsored sports remains the elephant in the room.
The reason for pay to play is maintaining eligibility for scholastically sponsored competitions which require amateur status, e.g. the NCAA. Elsewhere in the world - and in the US for individual sports such as tennis and golf - the professionalization of young elite athletes and the subsidizing of their development is treated as a normal part of the sports business.
In the footballing world, players are developed for the same reasons YC funds startups - the outliers pay for all the failures. For selling clubs, selling on a player Wesley Schneider provided a substantial return on Ajax's entire youth development expenditures during the years he was with the club.
In contrast, the expenditure of a high school on development of a blue chip quarter-back recruit to an SEC football powerhouse is exactly zero. Likewise five years later for the college program should that same player sign on with the NFL.
[edit] The punch line is that when talking about scholastically sponsored sports in the US, the conversation always gravitates to pointy football, and its unique status often clouds our thinking. For example, we tend to think of athletic scholarships for NCAA sports as if football's 85 full grants in aid at the division I level was in keeping with other sports. A NCAA DI women's soccer team has 12 - spread among 24 or so active players plus redshirts. Scholarships tend to be partial, and thus college sports tend to continue the pay to play model [It's less promising for your boy, there are almost as many NCAA football scholarships in Alabama as for all of men's DI soccer, and DI college coaches tend to use those scholarships to recruit players from outside the country]
Does that mean it is bad? No, I don't think so. Last year, the high school I coached at had to raise about $30,000 for it's football program. The school or district didn't pay for it, the program had to raise it itself.
Also, most of the players were low-income, high risk students. Football gave them a reason to go to school and a way to go to college.
On average, just our team has helped 7-10 players each year go to college when they probably wouldn't have done so without football.
Could their be a better system? Of course, but right now, high schools sports are a net positive, I think.
The obsession with math education in East Asian countries is not without its cost. These countries all have a terrible gender gap in educational attainment and economic earnings. Women get marginalized before they even graduate high school. Given that female per capita earnings in the US are higher than all countries except Norway and Luxembourg, I can't help but think our system is doing something right. I am not su…
I call b___s___ on that, having lived in one of those countries, and invite you to produce statistics backing up your statement. The East Asian country I know best, Taiwan, has had more female than male participation in higher education for at least a generation, and generally has equal pay for equal work and plenty of female access to professional occupations. The same is surely true of Singapore, a country many of my friends live in. I cannot attribute any remaining gender inequality in that country or other countries to an emphasis on strong mathematics education--to the contrary, helping elementary pupils get a good background in mathematics probably helps women cope with the tough issue that they deal with, having to do more to reproduce the next generation than men have to do.
Sports were treated as "just another club," and while their budget was obviously larger than other clubs (some larger than others), I don't think they were anything near the stories we hear about the southern states who can't afford text books but have football stadiums that rival some colleges.
Schools need a healthy balance between education and personal development, and I think that sports go a long way towards personal development, whether they be team sports or individual sports.