THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 23, 1997 TAG: 9702200380
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: Dave Addis
LENGTH: 62 lines
Did you do as I did the other day? Did you bang your fist on the kitchen the table and shout, ``Way ta go! 'Bout time!'' when you read that Virginia Beach schools will require an athlete to have a solid 2-point-oh average or lose his spot on the squad?
If you did, are you willing to make another little confession? Didn't that tiny voice in the back of your head tell you that something is not quite right with this deal?
Robert Hagans, the School Board chairman, was hearing that voice when he confessed that the action troubled him. For some kids, he said, ``If they had a 1.8 average, that would be an accomplishment for them.''
He's right. Setting a C-or-bust standard is easy, but it's hardly fair. On an A-to-F grading scale, a C is supposed to be average. By definition, some kids will score better than that and some will score worse - even if each is putting out his best effort.
Are we saying, then, that being below average is cause for punishment?
A kid who has difficulties with school work, or problems at home, might struggle as hard as he can to achieve a 1.8 average. For that effort he will be punished by having his Reeboks impounded. Worse, statistics tell us that an inordinate percentage of these kids will be black.
Sitting across the aisle, you can bet, will be another student with a natural affinity for book learning, a guy who breezes to a 3.2 average with no effort at all. Even though he is a slacker, we will reward him.
I know this is true because I was that slacker. I did little more than show up my senior year of high school and held an easy B average. I don't remember reading anything more challenging than Schlitz labels and album-liner notes, or doing any math more difficult than flicking the scoring beads at a downtown pool hall.
My younger brother - not a gifted learner, but a kid with a lot of heart - had to sweat blood to make a C average. It was years before I realized how unfair this must have seemed to him.
So, what's to do? Throw up our hands and keep letting standards slip?
No. The Beach School Board's concerns are shared by anyone who has monitored public-school performance over the past 30 years, or has watched, appalled, as a kid at a part-time job struggles to figure how much change you deserve from a $5 bill for a $3.62 purchase.
And we are equally appalled by college and professional athletes who posture and prance and pout, and then prove, at the business end of a microphone, that they're incapable of connecting two thoughts in the English language.
Maybe there's a way to create a new measurement - perhaps a sliding scale based on a kid's grade-point average divided by his IQ - to make sure we're handing out the punishments and the rewards based on who's putting out the maximum effort.
That would make high school a lot more like the real world, where slackers tend to get flattened and where hard work, more often than not, is rewarded. You just can't learn that lesson too early in life.
Meantime, we ought to be asking whether we really want to make our community boat float higher in the water by taking a good, swift kick at the people who are clinging to the bottom rung of the ladder. MEMO: Dave Addis is the editor of Commentary. Reach him at 446-2726, or
addis(AT)worldnet.att.net.