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Transfers

January 10, 2017

When it comes to transfers, the staff of the Michigan High School Athletic Association gets lots of advice, but it comes from opposing directions.

One camp thinks MHSAA rules are inadequate. This group suggests that we expand the basic period of ineligibility from approximately 90 days to 180 days and/or it wants the MHSAA to eliminate most or all exceptions that allow for immediate eligibility of a transfer student.

This first camp is so frustrated with high-profile athletic-motivated or related transfers that they want to clamp down on all transfers.

The other camp thinks parents have the right and responsibility to send their children to any school they wish and have immediate access to the full benefits of that school’s curricular and extracurricular offerings.

This second camp is encouraged by the laws of Michigan which have gradually extended “schools of choice” as an option that all school districts may exercise. And this camp will be emboldened if the Secretary of Education under the new regime in Washington, D.C. is the long-time schools of choice advocate who has been nominated by the President-Elect for this position.

This second camp is on the right side of history, no matter how much I dislike it and no matter how convinced I am that the better way to have improved public education would have been to invest more in neighborhood schools. Improving them builds most communities. Ignoring them, as we have for 25 years, sends surrounding communities into downward spirals that worsen poverty and public health.

The ill-advised efforts to improve education by enticing students out of their neighborhoods to attend schools elsewhere has undermined “local ownership” in schools; and it has had the side effect of encouraging more transfers motivated by or related to athletics. Monitoring and managing such transfers is made more difficult by these educational reforms; but the new world will not tolerate transfer rules that are seen as too broad and contrary to what has become public policy, however poorly conceived and executed.

The fact is, the future of the transfer rule will be less about extending its reach and more about retaining its existence.

Rocket Science

January 5, 2015

I have always been fascinated by space exploration and in awe of all that is required and must go right to send a space vehicle atop a multi-stage booster rocket from a moving object like Earth, and land it softly on another moving object like the moon or Mars or most recently a massive rock, after a journey of many months and millions of miles. How can people figure that stuff out?

There cannot be a problem of school sports that is more complicated than those of space exploration, except for one feature – which is that our problems deal with people, who are far less predictable and dependable than the laws of physics.

Making matters worse is that we are working with people in a competitive arena, and in an emotional setting, where the objectivity which characterizes the scientific method of rocket scientists is generally if not universally absent.

As long as potential problem-solvers view potential solutions through the lens of what does or does not benefit them in terms of competitive edge, our efforts to make good changes will never launch or, if launched, will miss the target.