Unpopular Opinion: High School Students Should Not Graduate Unless They Pass a Physical Fitness Test
Hear me out...
Every June students all across New York State bust out the study guides and begin preparing for the state wide Regents test. These regent tests determine student competency across a broad range of subjects including English, Biology, Earth Science, Physics, Algebra, Algebra II, Geometry, World history, US History, and Geography.
Stakes are high. In order to graduate high school in New York State students must pass the English Regent, one Science Regent, one Math regent, one History Regent, and an additional regent of their choosing. Even if they pass all of their classes, failure to pass the regents requirements will result in no diploma.
Later in this article I’ll present my thoughts on whether or not these regent tests are worth our time and effort, but the fact is, once these tests can stop a student from graduating, the curriculum will change in order to help students pass these tests. The graduation rate is the main way the public grades schools. If you have a 99% graduation rate the public views your school as a success, if your graduation rate slips below a 70%, generally speaking, bye bye principal, hello new principal. Therefore, principals put a high degree of stress on their staff to get kids to pass the regents.
This is all predictable and dandy, but here’s my question
Why isn’t there a Physical Fitness Regent?
Tests Govern Curriculum
Let's rewind the clock back to 2001 when I was in the fifth grade. Back when you were still allowed to play tackle football at recess there was the Presidential Fitness Test. In order to win the Presidential Fitness award you had to complete the mile in under 7:30 seconds, perform a certain number of curl-ups and push-ups in under a minute, and the real kicker, you had to be able to complete at least 5 pull ups.
I remember 5th grade “graduation” where I had won what seemed like a thousand academic participation trophies, but I actually felt a sense of pride for receiving the Presidential Fitness Award. It was the only award that didn’t feel subjective and only 3 kids in the entire elementary school were able to complete the test with “exemplary marks.”
The thing was, because this test existed and had awards attached to it, the P.E. teachers trained us for it. We performed laps every class along with push-ups and curl-ups before the test. (They got plenty of kids to hang from monkey bars but their success with getting kids to accomplish a pull up mostly amounted to the teachers yelling “pull!” while kids dangled helplessly.) The test dictated the P.E. curriculum to a certain extent.
After a 46 year run from 1966 to 2012, the Presidential Fitness Test was replaced by the Fitness Gramm which is more accessible due to the lack of pull ups, and attempts to emphasize competing against oneself as opposed to others. While there’s nothing wrong with the test, it appears as though P.E. Teachers don’t implement the Fitness Gramm test with the same gravitas that they did with the Presidential Fitness Test.
From my experience most P.E. Teachers simply roll out the test because they’re required to, and they never prepare their students for what’s to come. The fitness gram test often becomes a boring day of data collection, with kids giving up halfway through the running portion because it gets “uncomfortable.”
Contrast this to how classes prepare for the Regents exams.
Every class based on a regents test aligns its curriculum to passing said test. Teacher made test questions often imitate actual test questions, and there is a high degree of multiple choice practice that kids go through in every class.
Hell, I know some teachers that tell kids if they fail the class, but pass the regents test, then the teacher will give them a passing grade anyway. Once implemented as Pass/Fail barriers to graduation, these tests do a remarkable job governing what students learn in school.
Are These Tests Worthy of Our Time?
There is a never ending war on whether or not the state should force students to take these tests. The ardent opponents claim the test favors rich kids who grow up in environments that allow them to pass easily, and supporters of the test say it provides accountability on teachers and schools for how they instruct their students.
Here’s my thoughts
These tests need to exist
Physical fitness and health knowledge need to be tested.
The tests need to exist because without them there is no way to grade how well a school is managing to teach its students. I’ve written extensively about how grading a school based on its graduation rate is an absolute shit way to judge a school.
I’ve seen and personally experienced administration leaning on teachers to pass their students, and how they can make it ludicrously hard to fail students who have no business passing your class. It’s immensely frustrating, and it creates a culture of lazy students who rely on the administration to save them at the last minute.
As for the argument that these tests favor students from higher socio-economic backgrounds….that’s absolutely true. One the of the best history teachers I have ever met left the school I currently work at and joined a school that serves students from richer backgrounds. At our school his pass rate for the history regent was around 60%. His first year at his new school his pass rate was 99%.
Did he change his teaching style that radically in one year? Of course not, he was working with students who came from families with greater resources and time to put towards their child’s education.
But here’s the deal, that paradigm is always going to exist. Generally speaking, students who come from backgrounds with more time and resources do better in every aspect of life whether it be sports, financial intelligence, health, and even marital relationships.
Do we change the rules of a sport for a struggling team so they do better? No, we hold them to the standard of the rules and see how it plays out anyway. If a student fails the reading comprehension section of the English Regent and then we eliminate the test because it disproportionately affects students with less resources, then we may feel a moral win for eliminating what we perceive as an injustice…
But no one in the job market is ever going to reward a kid for not being able to read. No engineering company is going to hire someone who can’t perform basic algebra. No lab is going to hire someone who can’t identify the independent and dependent variable. The real world will discriminate who has what skills regardless of how hard a particular student had to work to get those skills.
One student came from a great family with tremendous resources that allowed that student to spend the required time to learn advanced calculus. Another student comes from a family that couldn’t afford the tutors and schools required to learn such skills, even though the student really wanted to learn anyway. Regardless of the story, if the job requires advanced calculus to succeed, then the person who doesn’t have the skills doesn’t get the job.
As I always tell my kids, “it sucks to suck.”
Tests have the potential to reveal skills, and if they’re the right skills, then the tests are worth our time and effort.
The Content Sized Hole in Standardized Testing
If tests govern curriculum and they are worthy of our time, then I’m going to ask the question I asked at the beginning of this article.
Why isn’t there a Physical Fitness Regent?
We obviously want students to walk out of schools with a skill set that makes them capable members of society. We want them to contribute in their own unique ways that make an impact on the world.
Why not emphasize a skill that makes us the absolute best version of ourselves? There isn’t a single skill we can learn that isn’t improved by a healthier body. Let's call exercise what it truly is, “self directed physical stress that leads to improved adaptations to every part of our biology.”
Any cardio-respiratory work is proven to improve brain health. Sleep is the foundation of all skill development. We increase the number of neurons we have from directed bouts of physical stress. Anxiety, depression, and all cause mortality all decrease in the presence of consistent physical training. There is no phase of life that doesn’t benefit from physical practice, and in our modern age it should be a mandatory skill for all human beings.
Something as simple as making the pacer test or the mile a regents based test would have incredible consequences for P.E. curriculum. The downstream changes would be immense for student health. P.E. teachers would have to get serious about increasing the cardiovascular health of the student body. Professional development would have to involve meaningful information suited to classes in a gymnasium. Schools would begin to take student health as seriously as reading comprehension. Perhaps the best part is the entire student body would improve not just physically, but academically as well.
Wait wait wait! You can’t stop a kid from graduating because they can’t run the mile fast enough!!! That’s cruel and unusual punishment!
Is it?
We have no problem telling a student they can’t graduate if they can’t read. We have no problem telling students your basic math reasoning skills are so low you’re not fit for a diploma. Lack of basic science knowledge can halt a kid from graduating. Why is it we judge a student’s intellectual fitness but completely ignore their physical fitness?
Let me be clear, I’m not suggesting a world class mile time be the prerequisite for graduation. The pass standards for getting a passing rate on any regents test is low. To get an idea, if you’re reading this article then you probably have the reading comprehension capacity to pass any of the regents. (You may have to brush up on algebra to get through the math though.)
The required rate for a pass for whatever the physical fitness test would be, should be fairly easy. Let’s say a mile time of ten minutes would represent a cut off for graduation. For many kids, this is already an easy accomplishment. On the flip side, other kids will have some serious training to do. They will have to learn how to get physically uncomfortable. Curriculum will change to accommodate these kids. It’s likely a skill that will save their life.
If that sounds mean to the kids who simply don’t have the physical capacity, I’d like to remind you of how any other test works. Many kids have the reading comprehension skills to pass the English regents without taking an English class. Some kids do not. So what do those kids do? They train. They get extra reading comprehension work, they go to after school help sessions, they work harder to make up the deficit. The reason the test exists is so students have attained the bare minimum of what it takes to be functional in society.
We ought to emphasize the skills that make the most difference. I can’t help but believe that some sort of physical fitness graduation requirement would do wonders in changing how seriously schools treat their P.E. programs, and how many more students would get formal exposure to cardiovascular training. All schools would benefit from this kind of curriculum change.
Physical fitness is as important and intellectual fitness, and schools should test for that trait as much as they test for anything else.
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