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

Education Next, Fall, 2006 by Bob Cullen

"Fantastic, guys," says Lee, an enthusiastic teacher who looks for opportunities to be encouraging. He leads the class back across the hall and puts them through 20 minutes of an indoor game called speed-ball, akin to soccer. The class divides into three teams and each team splits time between playing and watching.

It is early in the semester, and the curl-up benchmark is one of several Lee is establishing for skills ranging from the mile run to pull-ups. He expects he will see significant improvement in the students' performances by the end of the semester. He usually does. But there are limits to what he can do, limits imposed primarily by the culture the kids re-enter when they leave class.

Lee introduces me to a slender, black-haired girl named Paige Gardener, who is 14. Last year, in middle school, she says, her beginning time for the mile run was 10:51. By the end of the semester it was down to 9:51. "I like doing physical things, improving," she says. But when I ask her how often she runs on her own, she says, "Maybe once a month." Paige works four days a week giving shampoos in a hair salon for $5.50 an hour. That cuts into the time she has for sports, and though she might like to try out for the soccer or track teams at Chesapeake, she doesn't feel she can.

That's part of what he is up against, Lee tells me after class is over. Pasadena, Maryland, is a suburb of modest houses and apartments about ten miles south of Baltimore. Not every family has the wherewithal to permit a child to spend her leisure time on exercise and sports. And many students opt for a part-time job to finance a car.

"Kids take the path of least resistance," says Lee. "The parents in this community don't, by and large, work out. They don't walk anywhere. The kids tend to end up like that, too. When a kid turns 16, he gets a job so he can get a car." And walk less often.

Lee sees two distinct categories of students at Chesapeake: the athletes--about a third of Chesapeake's 1,940 students participate on a varsity or junior varsity team--and the nonathletes. Lee, who is 41, feels the varsity athletes are just as fit as, if not fitter than, the athletes of his own high-school days. He has coached the track team for the past seven years, and in that time his athletes have broken 13 school records. But he works them hard--two hours a day, five days a week.

But the nonathletes get much less daily exercise than their peers of two or three decades ago, and Lee sees the consequences in his classes. "Twenty years ago, to be considered fit, a 14-year-old boy was supposed to be able to do 11 pull-ups. Nowadays, I'd be happy to have one kid do that many." These days, he starts his classes out doing push-ups with their knees on the ground, rather than the "military" push-ups (only hands and toes on the ground) that were de rigueur for boys a generation ago. He expects to have all the class members doing military push-ups by the end of the semester.

Skip Lee is not sanguine about the future. He thinks that standards of fitness are dropping and that the state should require at least two courses of PE. "Fit kids," he says, "would do better in their academic classes." It's an argument for exercise as old as the ancient Greeks--or Thomas Jefferson, who in 1786, advised a future son-in-law, "If the body be feeble, the mind will not be strong--the sovereign invigorator of the body is exercise."