How Sports Attacks Public Education

"It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men." - Frederick Douglass

On Thursday, I was proud to take part in a student walkout at the
University of Maryland in defense of public education. It was just one
link in a National Day of Action that saw protests in more than 32
states across the country. I am not a student, and haven't been since
those innocent days when Monica Lewinsky mattered, but I was asked to
come speak at a post walkout teach-in about the way sports is used to
attack public education. It might sound like a bizarre topic, but it's
the world that students see every day.

At the University of Maryland, as tuition has been hiked and classes
cut, football coach Ralph Friedgen makes a base salary of 1.75 million
bucks, which would be outrageous even if the team weren't two-steps
past terrible. Friedgen also gets perks like a $50,000 bonus if none of
his players are arrested during the course of the season.

Ground zero of the student protest movement is the University of
California at Berkeley. Over at Berkeley, students are facing 32%
tuition hikes, while the school pays football coach Jeff Tedford 2.8
million dollars a year and is finishing more than 400 million in
renovations on the football stadium. This is what students see:
boosters and alumni come first, while they've been instructed to cheer
their teams, pay their loans, and mind their business.

The counterargument is that college athletic departments fund
themselves and actually put money back into a school's general fund.
This is simply not true. The October Knight Commission report of
college presidents stated that the 25 top football schools had revenues
on average of $3.9 million in 2008. The other 94 ran deficits averaging
$9.9 million. When athletic departments run deficits, it's not like the
football coach takes a pay cut. In other words, if the team is doing
well, the entire school benefits. If the football team suffers, the
entire school suffers. This, to put it mildly, is financial lunacy. A
school would statistically be better off if it took its endowment to
Vegas and just bet it all on black.

If state colleges are hurting, your typical urban public school is in a
world of pain with budgets slashed to the bone. Politicians act like
these are problems beyond their control like the weather. ("50% chance
of sun and a 40% chance of losing music programs.")

In truth, they are the result of a comprehensive attack on public
education that has seen the system starved. One way this has been
implemented is through stadium construction, the grand substitute for
anything resembling an urban policy in this country. Over the last
generation, we've seen 30 billion in public funds spent on stadiums.
They were presented as photogenic solutions to deindustrialization,
declining tax bases, and suburban flight. The results are now in and
they don't look good for the home teams. University of Maryland sports
economists Dennis Coates and University of Alberta Brad R. Humphreys
studied stadium funding over 30 years and failed to find one solitary
example of a sports franchise lifting or even stabilizing a local
economy. They concluded the opposite: "a reduction in real per capita
income over the entire metropolitan area....Our conclusion, and that of
nearly all academic economists studying this issue, is that
professional sports generally have little, if any, positive effect on a
city's economy." These projects achieve so little because the jobs
created are low wage, service sector, seasonal employment. Instead of
being solutions of urban decay, the stadiums have been tools of
organized theft: sporting shock doctrines for our ailing cities.

With crumbling schools, higher tuitions, and an Education Secretary in
Arne Duncan who seems more obsessed with providing extra money for
schools that break their teachers unions, it's no wonder that the anger
is starting to boil over. It can also bubble up in unpredictable ways.
On Wednesday night, after the University of Maryland men's basketball
team beat hated arch-rival Duke, students were arrested after pouring
into the streets surrounding the campus. In years past, these sporting
riots have been testosterone run amok, frat parties of burning
mattresses and excessive inebriation. This year it was different, with
police needing to use pepper spray and horses to quell the 1,500
students who filled Route 1. In response, students chanted, "Defense!
Defense!" At the Thursday teach in, I said to the students that I
didn't think there was anything particularly political or interesting
about a college sports riot. One person shot his hand up and said, "It
wasn't a riot until the cops showed up." Everyone proceeded to applaud.
I was surprised at first that these politically minded students would
be defending a post-game melee, but no longer. The anger is real and it
isn't going anywhere. While schools are paying football coaches
millions and revamping stadiums, students are choosing between dropping
out or living with decades of debt. One thing is certain: it aint a
game.