Coaches Raise Academic Decathlon Concerns

As Simi Valley High School’s academic decathletes prepare for the national competition in San Antonio this week, their coach is warning that the school may not have a team next year unless the national organization changes its ways.

Ken Hibbitts, who has coached Simi Valley’s team for six years, said he doesn’t plan to return and questions whether anyone will take over because of problems with expensive study guides and test errors.

Last year’s national champion, Moorpark High School, also may lose its coach. The job has simply become too frustrating, Michelle Bergman said.

“We love kids and we love this program,” the Moorpark coach said. “But it’s starting to deteriorate and become a money-making machine. When I started three years ago, it was a completely different contest.”

Hibbitts and Bergman are not alone. Dozens of California coaches from at least 10 counties have started a letter-writing campaign and signed petitions complaining that changes made by the U.S. Academic Decathlon are tarnishing the nation’s premier high school academic competition.

They say study guides are riddled with mistakes, cost too much and encourage memorization rather than critical thinking. Yet teams feel obligated to buy the guides because the tests are based on them.

Larry Jones, who quit after coaching Moorpark High’s national champion team, said the contest has deteriorated into a canned event that doesn’t promote learning and creativity.

“They’re just memorizing, memorizing all this garbage,” Jones said. “I can’t ask the kids to jump hoops all year long to have the finish line such a wishy-washy thing. It’s just not fair.”

In the past, teams received an outline indicating which areas to research. But in the 1998-99 school year, the national organization published two curriculum guides: art and music. This year, the organization published seven guides that covered all academic subjects and include most of the information in the tests.

National Executive Director James Alvino defended the guides as a way to level the playing field, saying schools with fewer resources are at a disadvantage without the published curriculum. He also said memorization is part of learning.

Still, in a newsletter to coaches, Alvino recently conceded “the number of errors this year has been completely unacceptable.”

Last month, Los Alamitos-based United States Academic Decathlon formed a task force to investigate the complaints. The task force met in March and wrote recommendations, which have not been released and will be discussed Friday by the national board of directors in San Antonio.

In an attempt to cool the crisis, Alvino said the organization may base 50% of the next year’s test on the guides and 50% on outside research. Alvino also said next year’s tests will include more critical thinking questions, and won’t be based on trivia.

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The United States Academic Decathlon began in California in 1981, and has grown to involve 35,000 students from high schools in 40 states. Students are required to participate in interviews, give speeches, write essays and take tests in science, economics, literature, social science, art, music and math.

Judy Combs, director of the California Academic Decathlon, said she and others are urging the national organization to reconsider publishing the curriculum guides. Combs, who served on the task force, met with several California coaches to listen to their concerns last week, and hopes a compromise can be worked out to keep California coaches in the contest.

Combs said she wants accurate, well-written tests that demand more from students than rote memorization. For instance, students were required in one test last year to say by what means of transportation Italian operatic composer Giuseppe Verdi got to work, Combs said. He walked.

“Some of these questions that are asked of these kids are insults,” she said. “I hate to see students work as hard as they do to memorize minutia.”

John Ellis, a member of last year’s national champion team from Moorpark High, said he thinks doing outside research is more exciting, interesting and challenging. “I think they went a little overboard,” he said. “I’m kind of glad I’m not doing it this year because of all the changes.”

Some coaches said students spend nearly as much time studying the corrections as the original material.

Coaches said they are put in the position of telling their students to mark the wrong answer on a test.

U.S. Academic Decathlon recalled the math guide and published a new one because of the inordinate number of mistakes, educators said.

Hibbitts and other coaches want U.S. Academic Decathlon to release the tests after the various rounds of competition so it can be determined whether there are mistakes.

“U.S.A.D. needs to focus on the needs of the students rather than on their personal needs,” Hibbits said.

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National organizers did not do that, but posted pages of guide corrections on their Web site, fixing dates, names, places and concepts. For instance, the social studies guide printed a sentence that stated: “In 1949 gold fever spread across the United States.” The organization posted the corrected year, 1849, on the Web site. And in a Super Quiz guide, the writer used a unit of measurement--”cubic ton”--that does not exist.

The social studies guide also incorrectly stated that NASA stands for National Aeronautics and Space Commission, rather than National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Coaches also accuse U.S. Academic Decathlon of reprinting material almost verbatim from original sources, such as a calculus textbook, an encyclopedia and a Web site of the St. Louis Art Museum.

“It’s question after question that was plagiarized,” Jones said. “It’s just atrocious. We try to teach our kids ethics.”

Purchasing the guides has also substantially increased the cost of participating in the decathlon, coaches say. This year the set of seven curriculum guides cost $495, the practice tests cost $295 and the online tests cost $195. Teams could also buy sets of art slides, novels, plays and flash cards.

When the contest began, the costs were minimal, coaches said. Now most teams spend between $800 to $1,000 to be competitive. Teams from some small schools, which raise their own money for the contest, may have to drop out because of the rise in costs, coaches said.

“We don’t think a nonprofit organization should be making money,” Jones said. “They can’t get rid of the study guides because that generates the revenues. They’re ripping kids off.”

The national organization made about $250,000 more in profits this year because of the guides, Alvino said. That money is going toward expanding the program and hiring more outside experts to write and proofread the exams and guides, he said. No staff or board member is benefiting from the increased revenues, he said.

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Alvino said the cost of the materials will be reduced by at least 10% next year.

He also conceded that some of the guides had pulled information from different sources. Although he said his attorneys told him it was legal to reprint the material, Alvino plans to require next year’s authors to write original guides and to prohibit plagiarizing.

Not all coaches believe the guides should be eliminated. Nathan Schauer, who has coached Lincoln High School’s team near downtown Los Angeles for 12 years, said the guides make it easier for new schools to get involved. They also make the contest more equitable, he believes, because all the schools have the same materials. If U.S. Academic Decathlon did not provide the curriculum guides, schools would go to outside companies to buy similar resources, Schauer said.

Alvino said he is trying to make some changes to improve the contest and prevent California from leaving.

“We recognize that we need better guides and better tests,” he said. “We have some distance to go to win back the trust and credibility of people who are dissatisfied with what we are doing.”