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Concussion Concerns

May 29, 2012

The MHSAA has been concerned for many years with the need for heightened awareness of concussions.  For example:  

  • In 2000 the laminated card “Head Injury Guide for Trainers and Coaches,” provided by St. Johns Health Systems, was distributed in quantities to every MHSAA member school.
  • The following fall, 20,000 laminated “Management of Concussions in Sports” cards, a joint project of the American Academy of Neurology and the Brain Injury Association of Michigan, were distributed to schools.
  • In the summer of 2005 the video “Concussions and Second Impact Syndrome” was provided at no cost to every MHSAA member high school.
  • In the fall of 2007 the DVD “Sports Head Injury,” a project of Henry Ford Health Systems, was provided to every MHSAA member junior high/middle school and high school.

All of this and many other efforts have been provided at no cost to our member schools, and continue to be provided at no cost to these cash-strapped institutions.

In 2010, the MHSAA adopted strong return-to-play protocols for students with concussions and suspected of being concussed.  Under our rule, any athlete who exhibits signs, symptoms or behaviors consistent with a concussion must be removed from competition.  Furthermore, our rule clearly states that if a student is removed from play due to a suspected concussion, that student cannot return to play that day and must be cleared in writing by an MD or DO prior to returning on any later day.  And the rule has a strong enforcement mechanism:  if a school allows a concussed student to return to play without the written authorization of an MD or DO, that is the same as playing an ineligible athlete and results in forfeiture of the contest.    

The MHSAA’s website posts training tools for athletes, parents and coaches, including those of the Centers for Disease Control, and three free online courses – one from CDC, one from the National Federation of State High School Associations and the third from Michigan NeuroSport at the University of Michigan.  The “Parent’s Guide to Concussion in Sports” has been widely distributed to school administrators, coaches, students and parents.

During this school year alone, nearly 20,000 high school coaches and officials will complete a rules meeting requirement that, beyond basic playing rules, is dominated by information regarding head trauma prevention, recognition and after care.  

We welcome help in this effort from professional sports organizations.  However, if professional sport leagues want to make a meaningful contribution to this topic in this state and other states, they must do more to change the culture of their programs.  All of our collective efforts on this topic are undermined when a professional player gets his “bell rung” in a nationally-televised game and returns later to that game, or is carried off the field or court one day and returns to play the next.  These nationally-televised tragedies-in-waiting may send the message to our youngest athletes and their parents and coaches that concussions are not serious.

This is not merely a football issue.  For us, it’s also an issue for soccer, ice hockey, wrestling, lacrosse and almost every sport we serve.  Furthermore, this issue is but one of several compelling health and safety issues in school sports that deserve our attention and must receive it every year to help local schools whose resources have been so severely reduced in recent years.  

Scandalous Schools

April 19, 2013

One of the bad features of the school reform movement that was cited in our posting of March 29 (“Hit Again”) is the obsession over standardized testing and the linkage between children’s scores and adults’ salaries.  The length to which some so-called educators have gone reached new highs (or perhaps lows) in Atlanta recently; but that’s far from the only school testing travesty we’ve seen, as Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post Writers Group reported on LSJ.com on April 4, 2013:

“It is time to acknowledge that the fashionable theory of school reform – requiring that pay and job security for teachers, principals and administrators depend on their students’ standardized test scores – is at best a well-intentioned mistake, and at worst nothing but a racket.

“I mean that literally.  Beverly Hall, the former superintendent of the Atlanta Public Schools, was indicted on racketeering charges Friday for an alleged cheating scheme that won her more than $500,000 in performance bonuses.  Hall, who retired two years ago, has denied any wrongdoing.

“Also facing criminal charges are 34 teachers and principals who allegedly participated in the cheating, which involved simply erasing students’ wrong answers on test papers and filling in the correct answers.

“In 2009, the American Association of School Administrators named Hall ‘National Superintendent of the Year’ for improvement in student achievement.  For educators who worked for Hall, bonuses and promotions were based on test scores.  After a day of testing, teachers would allegedly be told to gather the students’ test sheets and change the answers.  Suddenly a failing school would become a model of education reform.  The principal and teachers would get bonuses.  Hall would get a much bigger bonus.

“State education officials became suspicious.  The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote probing stories.  There seemed to be no way to legitimately explain the dramatic improvement in such a short time, or the statistically improbable number of erasures on answer sheets.

“Sonny Perdue was governor at the time, and in August 2010 he ordered a blue-ribbon investigation.  Hall resigned shortly before the release of the investigators’ report, which alleged that 178 teachers and principals cheated over nearly a decade.  Those findings laid the foundation for Friday’s Grand Jury indictment.

“My Washington Post colleague Valerie Strauss, a veteran education reporter and columnist, wrote Friday that there have been ‘dozens’ of alleged cheating episodes around the country, but only Atlanta’s has been aggressively and thoroughly investigated.

“Standardized achievement tests are a vital tool, but treating test scores the way a corporation might treat sales targets is wrong. Students are not widgets.  Even absent cheating, the blind obsession with test scores implies that teachers are interchangeable implements of information transfer, rather than caring professionals who know their students as individuals.

“School reform has to be something that is done with a community of teachers, students and parents – with honesty and, yes, a bit of old fashioned humility.”