By Dale Moore |
By Dale Moore |
|
It’s football time again. Time to scour the sports page, gathering data to determine which team has the best chance of going to the Rose Bowl! Time to wander past the local high school stadium, to scout the team and check out how the coach is doing! Time to see how the old college Alma Mater’s team looks and plan a tailgate party. Oh yes! We do love our football and our coaches…well, as long as they win! After all, what kind of pride can a person have in a university that doesn’t have a winning team? I suppose that is why on most university campuses the football coach makes upwards of $100,000. a year (plus perks and endorsement monies that may triple his salary), while the professor of education who struggled for many years to earn a Ph.D. in order to be the best possible teacher, earns in the $50,000 range. One might assume that since our coach earns so much more, and has a number of assistants to work with a chosen few athletes on the field, that he invests his extra time to ensure those athletes take advantage of every learning opportunity to make the best grades possible. I mean, after all, isn’t that why students go to college, to get an education? Isn’t that why colleges dole out huge scholarships to football players, so that they may learn? Surely no university would give a multi-thousand dollar scholarship to a student just because he can play football, would it? Yet the statistics reveal that less than fifty percent of the athletes reaping those magnificent football scholarships ever finish college. What are we, the taxpayer, getting for our $100,000, if the coach doesn’t even oversee what his chosen few are learning? I wonder, would that same university keep a classroom professor, even at $50,000, if more than half of his/her students failed year after year? When a university pays a coach $100,000 and at the same time pays an education or social worker professor $50,000. what is that university saying to its own students with education or social work majors about the value that school places on teaching? It seems to say, “Here is your lesson! If you want to be successful, to make big money, to be somebody, aim for the world of sports. Forget teaching! Forget helping others!” Is this the message we want our universities to send? Not with my tax dollar! And
that is my two cents worth |
