A Get-Fit Plan for Physical Education

Last spring, a million California public-school students in the fifth, seventh and ninth grades took a mandated state test. They failed it miserably. But unlike the often-hysterical run-up to the Stanford 9 tests, few had even known in advance that these tests were on the educational agenda. No one had helped kids prepare for the test; no one had made sure teachers were adequately trained before administering the test, and no one had pressured school officials to cough up more resources to make sure their kids passed. Parents, in fact, will not even receive a copy of their children’s results. This is because the tests did not measure math, reading or writing skills but rather the ability of a child to physically navigate life’s most basic challenges.

The tests measured physical fitness.

Last week, as required by law, the California Department of Education reported the physical fitness test results. Only 23% of students passed the battery of simple fitness tasks, which include a one-mile walk/run, push-ups, arm hangs and a body fat test. The spin put on these numbers by the Department was both predictable and true. Poverty played a role, with poor kids getting the worst scores. Ethnicity and race played a major factor. Certainly the numbers bore out the analysis: While some 32% of seventh-grade whites and 34% of their Asian peers passed the test, only 19% of Latinos and African Americans passed. The numbers track with the latest obesity and Type 2 diabetes statistics, which find much higher rates of both conditions among blacks and Latinos.

But the official and unofficial spins left out one other factor: politics. Or, rather, the lack thereof.

Unlike other parts of our educational culture, physical education--the training of young bodies to go along with young minds--has rarely been the focus of a political battle. When a push did come for greater fitness, it was generally prompted by military need. Such was the case after the Korean War, when reports of unfit GIs provoked President Dwight D. Eisenhower into forming his President’s Council on Youth Fitness. Eisenhower was so unnerved by the trend--young recruits had been detected with advanced arterial streaking--that he made the Council a cabinet-level appointment. The Cold War--or more specifically the notion that little Ivan might be more fit than little Johnny--drove President John F. Kennedy to expand the Council’s mission, and President Lyndon B. Johnson brought glamour to it by appointing the baseball great Stan “The Man” Musial as chair.

But the boomer generation did not pick up the fitness ball--literally or metaphorically. Physical education--and the unfair barrage of embarrassing tests that kids had to undergo every year--soured an entire generation on the subject. PE teachers were seen as uncool, authoritarian, or, worse, traditional. No wonder that when Proposition 13 began undercutting PE in the 1980s, there was no hew and cry from boomer parents, who, if they were affluent, relied on youth-league teams outside of school to keep their own kids fit.

Today, of course, we increasingly realize that such neglect came at a steep price. The lack of a public fitness infrastructure is a prime culprit behind today’s soaring rates of inactivity, obesity, Type 2 diabetes and bone disease. It is not a trend that has been lost on a newly hungry U.S. Army, which recently released its own study on increased obesity in its ranks. Yet, with educational resources dearer than ever, how can we hope to make progress? The answer lies in the development of a smart, targeted politics of PE.

This means that the physical-education establishment must take action. While there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that PE leads to good fitness, which in turn leads to better Stanford 9 scores, there still are not enough good scientific studies to establish that link. Those involved in the science of physical education must push harder for better data about the effects of physical fitness on academic success.

Another potential political big stick is compliance reporting. State law requires that districts provide a minimum of 400 minutes of PE instruction every 10 days in high schools and 200 minutes every 10 days in elementary schools. Although many PE activists claim that schools in LA routinely skirt these requirements, hard data on the subject is almost entirely absent. The Los Angeles Unified School District, shockingly, has no one directly responsible for overseeing elementary PE; those in charge of overseeing secondary PE are generalists. Moreover, there are no written state curriculum standards for physical education--a situation that would be politically unacceptable in any other educational subject. (PE advocates tried earlier this year to pass a state bill requiring the creation of such standards, but failed, partly because they loaded the bill up with other, more costly mandates--hardly a wise approach in such austere times.)Before agitating for reforms and funds, PE advocates must also take a thorough inventory of LAUSD fitness resources: Exactly which schools are hurting the most? One roadmap has already been tendered by Betty Hennessy, a PE specialist at the Los Angeles County Office of Education. Hennessy’s office looked at the 13 schools currently under academic audit by the state, 10 of which are in LAUSD. The results are frightening. At Gompers Middle School, only 1% of the students passed this year’s fitness test. (The state middle-school average was 24.9%.) Elsewhere in audited L.A. schools, the results were almost as dismal. Only 10.8% of students at Jefferson High passed, compared to the 22.6% state average among high schools. Avalon Gardens Elementary had a pass rate of 14.3%, compared with 21.3% of elementary schools statewide.

Class size is one big culprit. Increasingly, school schedulers are reducing academic class size by increasing PE class size. At Gompers, the average size for a PE class is 85, a figure so shocking as to cause school board member Julie Korenstein to remark, at a recent committee meeting, that “a class that big is a safety issue itself.” The state average is 60. The standard endorsed by the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance is 25.

Earlier this year, PE advocates fought for passage of AB 367, which would have, among other things, required districts to notify parents of individual children’s’ test scores. But that bill was pocket vetoed by the governor for financial reasons. This means that the great political task of hooking parents into PE must be undertaken in other ways.

One approach would be a publicity campaign to educate parents about what PE is like today. Many of the more disagreeable features of the classic in-your-face, stopwatch-holding, muscle-bound coach culture of the ‘60s is gone. Although traditional team sports still command disproportionate resources and attention, the so-called “new PE” movement of the 1980s has made significant progress in making classes fun, challenging and focused on health. “We knew right away what the big enemy was,” says Dan Latham, a PE teacher at Downey’s West Middle School, who built, with donated funds, an after-school health club replete with video games that only work as long as kids are working out. “We knew we had to make fitness compete with Nintendo.”

Getting real results--to put fitness education on par with academic education--will require more than just making PE fun. It will take political will and perhaps require a more confrontational politics than the normally laid-back PE community has taken up to now. Middle-class parents, who instinctively know that fitness makes academic sense, need to be brought into the fold and put in leadership roles demanding that schools do better. And it means that poor parents--many in the immigrant Latino community who are still reluctant to confront authority--must be taught to demand what is legally theirs.

Here’s a question they need to get answered right off the bat: Is a school with 85 kids in a class--almost none of whom can pass a basic fitness test--really in compliance with state law?