Don't sweat it: how some schools do—and don't do—PE

Education Next, Fall, 2006 by Bob Cullen

Overweight children would not be the first thing a visitor to Grafton, West Virginia, would think of when seeing the small farms that cling to steep hillsides and cultivate the bottomland along the Tygart River as one drives into town. Like most of the state, the landscape around this village of 5,200, the county seat of Taylor County, just 20 miles south of Morgantown, nods to pastoral enterprise, suggesting a place where citizens might be eating healthy foods, hiking, working farms and mines--staying fit.

Unfortunately, this isn't so.

"When the kids finish school, they take the bus home," says Rod Auvil, a physical education (PE) teacher at Taylor County Middle School in Grafton. "They let themselves in the house because both their parents work. They play video games. They watch TV. They eat. It's a very sedentary lifestyle."

And it shows. In a survey done between 1999 and 2005 by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Science, 46 percent of West Virginia's 5th graders were found to be either obese or overweight. According to West Virginia's Bureau of Public Health, more than a third of the state's residents are obese and many more are overweight. The problem worries organizations like Mountain State Blue Cross, which will have to pay for the diabetes and heart problems associated with obesity. And it bothers the state government, which has decreed a doubling of PE class hours for middle-school students, who currently get one exercise period a day for nine weeks out of an entire school year.

Is that enough? Will it make a difference?

Though weight, and that includes overweight, is the result of a complex set of interactions between an individual's genes, behavior, and the environment, at its simplest, as a recent National Institutes of Health report states, our size is the result of "a balance between energy intake and energy expenditures." Eating and exercise. Here we discuss the second of these two fundamentals: energy expenditures and what our schools are doing to affect the equation. (For an analysis of schools' role in energy intake, see "The School Lunch Lobby" and "What's for Lunch?" features, Summer 2005.)

America the Fat

West Virginia is not alone in its struggles with weight (see Figure 1)--or its decision to ratchet up PE requirements as a means of dealing with the problem. The United Health Foundation, a nonprofit organization that publishes an annual "health rankings" of states, says that the Mountain State is 48th in the nation in "prevalence of obesity" in the population (only Mississippi and Alabama are fatter), but its 27.7 percent obese population is only five points higher than the national average, which is 22.8 percent obese.

Across America, kids are not just chubby, but alarmingly fat. The American Academy of Pediatrics reports that childhood obesity has doubled in the last two decades. About one in six children is seriously overweight. And, as in West Virginia, legislatures have taken notice, and have given schools the job of solving the problem (see "Not Your Father's PE," research, page 60). Last year 18 states passed new legislation on physical activity in schools. In both Maryland and Virginia, bills were introduced requiring schools to do body mass index screenings.

Will schools be able to handle their new assignment of downsizing the American child?

"A waste of time," says one physical education teacher I spoke to, commenting on PE practices. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), the current state of affairs could be the result of some bad habits in recent years, as daily participation in high-school physical education classes dropped from 42 percent in 1991 to 28 percent in 2003. Currently, only one state, Illinois, requires daily PE for grades K-12. And this lackluster--lazy?--attitude about physical exercise persists despite the evidence that, as the NCSL reports, "Thirty minutes of active physical activity during the school day can help control weight, build healthy bones, muscles, and joints, reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression, enhance feelings of well-being, and may even improve academic performance."

Rod Auvil's school is one of several I visited to assess the likelihood that schools can help stem the obesity tide. Besides rural West Virginia, I observed PE in working-class Chesapeake, Maryland, and at Yorktown High in suburban Arlington, Virginia, which boasts graduates such as the late senator Paul Wellstone, astronaut David Brown, and television journalist Katie Couric. I also visited a school in Fairfax, Virginia, whose demographic diversity makes it look like America itself. I saw a mix of rural and metropolitan, blue-collar and white-collar, rich and poor. I saw good PE and bad PE. And though we all know that rising childhood obesity stems from powerful social and cultural factors over which the schools have little or no control, I can also conclude, from what I observed at these schools, that PE classes as currently conducted are not particularly efficient burners of calories or builders of muscle.