Education vs. sports

Around here, we’ve had a lot of sports controversy lately.

One school district fired a boys basketball coach, then hired another about a month later. Another school district fired both the boys and girls basketball coaches, and will be hiring new ones this week.

School board meetings for both these firings lasted far longer than normal. Executive sessions averaged 2 hours, topping out at 3.5 for one district.

Our paper had major stories on all of these firings/hirings which drew dozens (sometimes hundreds) of comments and hundreds (or thousands) of hits.

But when a teacher is fired/disciplined/hired, I don’t know about it until I get a pages-long personnel agenda. They approve them all in one lump consent item, rarely pulling specific pieces out to be discussed in executive sessions. While I would support giving press to all of the hirings and firings and retirements, I simply don’t have time or space to do so. People don’t cry out to hear about these, and the stories I do publish – normally about superintendent and principal changes – warrant few hits and even fewer comments.

This is a subject of much discussion in our newsroom. The sports guys, obviously, like covering these things because they rarely get controversy. Many of us on the news side wish the public didn’t want these stories so often and paid more attention to the people actually educating their children.

But, alas, sports are more high-profile than academics on a more regular basis. People discuss sports with much more passion than they discuss their children’s education, until something goes wrong. Then, they rail against educators, administrators and school board members for things they could have known all along if they had been paying proper attention.

What do you think? Why is there so much attention given to sports in schools and so little to educational matters?