An Educator's Take on the BCS

 

How did I become so obsessed with college football?

Well, first and foremost, the blame lies with Gary Bettman and the National Hockey League, who have locked out the athletes that normally occupy my sports-geek brain cells through the autumn and winter months. With my two fantasy teams forced into hibernation thanks to the prolonged labor dispute, I had to sink my teeth into some other athletic escapade. I’ve never really been a football fan, despite being raised by pigskin-obsessed parents, but since my brother’s alma mater (Notre Dame) started making headlines with their streak of victories, I find myself increasingly intrigued and engaged.

You would think the convenience of counting wins and losses would eliminate any need to debate how success is defined in a sport like football, but consensus has been tricky in this arena. The Associated Press has polled its journalists and published weekly standings since 1936, and the football coaches themselves have had their own survey since 1950.  The polls supplant the standings we typically associate with sports because the hundreds of colleges that compete under the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) are typically organized into local conferences, with each school playing a small set of nearby opponents. College football also stands out as the only sports enterprise that does not embrace a traditional playoff tournament. For decades, each conference pitted its season champion against another top team in a singular bowl game. If there was a debate about who should rank highest among two or three schools, there was no guarantee that those teams would play in the same bowl game that year. For instance, in 1994, both Penn State and Nebraska were undefeated at the top of the football charts, but they didn’t play in the same conference, so they were committed to different bowl games.

After a couple of failed attempts to orchestrate the bowl game match-ups, the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) was established to create a separate national championship game based on its own weekly rankings. The BCS has caught plenty of flack for the calculation of its standings. For one, they seem to routinely favor half of the eleven football conferences far more than the others. When the 2010 season produced three undefeated teams, the Mountain West champion was left out of the title game in favor of the Pacific 10 and Southeastern champions. In each of the next two years, the BCS standings placed a team with twelve wins below half a dozen teams with fewer wins, presumably due to conference affiliation. Nonetheless, at least every (post-secondary) school in the country(’s top division of football) can be meaningfully and consistently compared.

Up until the turn of the millennium, America’s dialogue about education certainly would have benefited from a standard criteria by which our K-12 schools could be measured. Alas, we were left with a chaos akin to the college football universe, and as with the BCS standings, the rankings seemed a bit skewed. The National Blue Ribbon program lauds high test scores in reading and math as well as schools who show substantial improvement among their disadvantaged students. Elementary schools constituted seven of every ten award winners in 2012, and well over half the blue ribbons went to schools in small towns or suburban areas. For over a decade, U.S. News & World Report and Newsweek (nee The Daily Beast) have each published national rankings of high schools, based on the aforementioned test scores plus graduation rates and other data regarding the students’ preparation for college. In 2012, only four of the top twenty-five schools on the U.S. News list had an enrollment above the nation’s public school average of about 900 students; sixteen of the top twenty had less than 700 students. On the Newsweek chart, we find only five schools with open enrollment among the top twenty-five, and of those, only Corbett High in Oregon (#25) served subsidized lunches to over ten percent of their students. In other words, you, too, can build a highly successful school if you just avoid the urban slums, the depressed farmlands, and anywhere else that a family may struggle financially. At least make sure your school can hand-pick the poor students that it enrolls.

The trend would be more alarming if it wasn’t so predictable, and it lies at the roots of the BCS bias, too. When Harvey Perlman, chancellor at the University of Nebraska, attempted to justify why certain conferences tended to be favored above the others back in January 2010, he argued the point thusly: “The real question is whether including those conferences [other than the favorites] when you negotiate a TV contract adds to the willingness of the network to increase the bid. I don’t think we’ve seen evidence that that’s true.” He spells it out plainly: each conference’s history of winning isn’t nearly as critical as its ability to lure a rich TV contract. What matters is how teams pay, not how they play. Such an overt economic bias turns the stomach of sports fans and educators alike; in fact, it rallied thousands of Americans to join both the Tea Party and Occupy movements. (One forgets that the former actually began with CNBC anchor Rick Santelli raging against the government’s bailout of the super-wealthy banks.) We believe in the integrity of work, not the advantage of wealth, and we expect students and athletes to be ultimately judged on their merits in the classroom and on the field.

In this sense, the widespread testing mechanism ushered in by No Child Left Behind may have nearly achieved what the BCS hasn’t quite mastered. Each state was held to account for measuring student knowledge on an annual basis, publishing the results, and ensuring that every kind of student, from cultural minorities to the impoverished, from the disabled to the non-native English speaker, progresses towards ultimate proficiency.  We’ll discuss the failings of the testing program shortly, but its objectivity cannot be argued. No school or district can claim that they are a top-tier establishment until all of their students earn high marks irrespective of their heritage, income, or physical traits. Even if the tests vanish, this would still be the widely acknowledged goal of our education system.

Unfortunately, the NCLB model failed on two levels. First, it couldn’t bring the consistency necessary to compare schools across state lines, for every state wrote its own curricula and set its own benchmarks for what constituted a proficient mark on their tests. As I wrote earlier, a number of states deliberately set the bar pretty low in the hopes of giving Uncle Sam something to smile about. Yet that was the second NCLB failing: the schools kept failing. Instead of progressing gradually since the law took effect, the proportion of schools who missed the federal target stayed roughly the same from 2006-2009, then ballooned. By NCLB’s standards, nearly half of America’s schools are failures, and only nine states can boast a school failure rate that’s less than 25%. Even more tragically, the disadvantaged students aren’t getting ahead either. In 2009, the National Assessment of Educational Progress still showed a stubborn gap between white and African-American students despite improved scores for both groups. Last year, Stanford University professor Sean Reardon published his study that indicates the achievement gap between higher- and lower-income students is now nearly double the size of the racial gap.

The Obama administration seems to have addressed one of NCLB’s failings quite effectively. Unfortunately, it’s the easy one. All but five states have adopted the Common Core State Standards, the federally endorsed curriculum that pinpoints skills in language arts and mathematics (as well as literacy in the sciences and other subjects) and traces their development from kindergarten all the way through high school. It is a well-devised continuum that almost makes charting a student’s learning as easy as following one team’s progress across the yard lines of a football field. Nevertheless, instead of replacing the failed testing system with a more effective one, states are simply being given waivers. They are being excused from NCLB’s stringent requirements for student achievement on the promise that they develop alternative assessment and monitoring systems. As more and more states back out of the program in favor of their own unique tests, we will once again find it difficult to compare results and see where in this country students are achieving. Moreover, without the nationwide publication of these scores, and given some states’ history of choosing expedience over genuine rigor, we may not see any repercussions if schools continue to under-serve their students. We’ll have to turn back to the magazines for their skewed opinions, just as college football fans consulted the published polls from 1950-1997 and wondered if they would see any bowl games of consequence.

After enduring over a decade of criticism, the overlords of college football announced last summer that their bowl games will expand to include a four-team playoff for the national title beginning with the 2014 season. One wonders if their skewed standings will continue to restrict admission into that playoff (and I actually have an idea for how to make the arrangement more equitable and fair); nevertheless, the best football team in the land will be crowned based on its ability to score more points than the other guys twice in a row. It maintains the consistency that allows schools to be compared from coast to coast and restores, at least to some extent, the mantra that performance matters more than your property values. 

Good grief, has the BCS now become more progressive than the U.S. Department of Education?