Summary Of The Case Against High School Sports By Amanda Ripley Essay

Have high school sports teams brought a negative effect on American School’s education? In the Article “The Case against High School Sports", published by the Atlantic, Amanda Ripley argues the negative effects of high-school sports on a student’s education in America. Also she discusses how today's society make people think that high school sports is more of a necessity to students than getting a good education. However, Amanda fails to persuade the general audience because she used an excess of unneeded interviews by foreign exchange students and had failed to tear down the counterargument that sports teach discipline and social skills, which resulted in the audience feeling unchanged about their opinions toward the subject. In summary,

However she fails to state that high school sports teach discipline. For example in today’s society more and more kids find themselves on streets drinking and doing drugs. However for the kids who partake in sports are more likely to stay in school and get an education. In the article Amanda states “sports can be bait for students who otherwise might not care about school” contradicting her own main argument. This type of contradiction causes the audience to feel unchanged about their opinions towards the subject and proves that sports teach discipline. Amanda also argues that because students are spending their time playing sports, they don’t study as much. This argument is false because the University of Arkansas’s Anna Egalite, Daniel Bowen, and Julie Trivitt find that “athletic coaches in Florida mostly tend to perform just as well as their non-coaching counterparts, with respect to raising student test scores.” Furthermore students who do not have after school activities would not go home and study. They would find something else to do with their time. Most students put off their assignments until the last minute anyway. In fact, playing sports help raise the GPA's of some students. Many students are satisfied with receiving D's because they do not have any incentive to get better grades. If an athlete were to

For example she states “nine out of 10 foreign students who had lived in the U.S. said that kids here cared more about sports than their peers back home did.”, however she fails in this statement to correlate how kids caring about sports lead to a drop in academic performance. Amanda in her article has a tendency to state a fact and not further develop it to strengthen her argument, for example she states “like Finland and Germany, many kids play club sports in their local towns—outside of school. Most schools do not staff, manage, transport, insure, or glorify sports teams…” yet she does not explain if these countries academics scores are better than the United States, making the author lose their credibility and leaving the audience feeling confused. Amanda uses Marguerite Roza’s statement, the author of Educational Economics, to support her claim, she states “ the school was spending $328 a student for math instruction and more than four times that much for cheerleading—$1,348 a cheerleader.” However she fails to state that in a high school there is probably only about 15 to 30 cheerleaders in the entire school while there are about 500 kids per grade who take math classes. As the audience can see math instruction actually costs more than the cheer leading costs, this completely hurts and