If You’re Not Cheating You’re Not Trying: I Call BS!

I am sure that many of you, especially those of you have have competing in athletics, have heard someone say “if you’re not cheating you’re not trying."   I honestly cannot tell you the first time I heard it, but I can tell you that I have heard it come out of people’s mouths too many times to count.  I have heard it from coaches, parents, family members, fans, and athletes, among others.  It has been said to me by people I have worked with closely, sometimes jokingly, but not always.  It generally is said by people who maintain a win-at-all-costs mentality, that tend to believe that the integrity of the game is secondary to winning.  More often than not, it comes from people who recognize that they do not have what it takes to win, and thus they believe that either they or the team they follow must circumvent the rules to beat the better team or individual.  

This was brought up not long ago in a conversation that I was having with a colleague at school who shared that 1) he absolutely hates that philosophy and 2) he was bothered because someone had made the comment in front of one of his kids, who did not understand the context in which it was being said.  As an avid sports fan, I value the integrity of sports and recognize that in order for games or contests to be fair, there must be rules to govern them.  A person of character respects rules and follows them.  As a former athlete and a coach, I recognized how important it was to find an edge, an advantage, to improve my/our opportunity to win.  They way that is done is to put in more time to sharpen skills, or studying the opponent to plan strategy that will better take advantage of my/our strengths.  Building up one’s cardio fitness, or developing a game plan to our maneuver a team are common, accepted methods used to pursue victory.  Cheating is not.  Exploiting loopholes in rules is not.  Attempting to injure an opponent is not.

A true sportsman wants to compete against the best, when their opponent is at their best.  Whether it is in team competition or individual against individual, to truly measure yourself in the quest for ultimate victory, you want to compete with integrity so that you can honestly say you won.  Victory is not as meaningful when the opponent is not at their best, whether it is a football game against a team who has lost it’s best quarterback, or a 3200m race against a runner that is under the weather.  To be the best, you have to beat the best!  True competitors want to challenge themselves against the best, and frankly, are frustrated when they do not get that chance.  By the same token, they want to compete on a level playing field, which is where the issue of cheating comes in to play.

For all of their Super Bowl championships, history is not going to be kind of the New England Patriots.  People can argue all they want about the greatness of Coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady, and it is reasonable to consider both of them as the greatest of all time in their respective positions.  That said, in the sporting world, they are considered to be cheaters, and one has to question whether or not they would have won as many championships without cheating.  Belichick has pulled different shenanigans over the years, including “Spygate” when a Patriot staffer was directed to videotape the New York Jets play-call signals so coaches could study them for a future game.  The team and head coach were fined a combined $750,000.00.  Perhaps more famous was “Deflategate,” when the game balls used by the Patriots had air let out of them so Brady could grip them better.  In that same season, they used “deception” with what were determined to be illegal formations in a game versus the Baltimore Ravens that were so cleverly designed that they fooled the referees as well!  Bill Belichick epitomizes the statement used for this article: If you’re not cheating you’re not trying!”  And the crazy thing is, most football pundits argue that they most likely would have won without cheating!

Cheating is a character flaw, and if I have heard it once, I have heard it thousands of times . . . sports build character!  Some of the same people that I have heard make the later comment, have also said the former.  Or, perhaps they have not said it, but have done it!  In my younger days I coached against one of the most competitive people I have met in my lifetime, and he was busted on more than one occasion helping or supporting his wrestlers cheating at weigh-ins.  Caught red-handed!  I am aware of coaches that have covered up incidents that would have otherwise resulted in their athletes being found in violation of the Good Conduct policy.  One of the more prominent softball coaches in the state of Iowa, who knows the rules as well as anyone, has broken them by having his players use illegal equipment.  I cannot count the number of times when I have brought up rules regarding coaching out of season I have heard the reply, “coaches from other schools are doing it."  The question then is “Why?”  Because, if you aren’t doing everything possible to win, you aren’t doing enough, and that includes cheating.  That is unacceptable!

In some parts of the sporting world there truly is a cesspool in which the win at all cost mentality is pervasive.  In particular I am thinking about college basketball recruiting.  What is frustrating is that to some degree there is acceptance, though recently, federal law enforcement has gotten involved and perhaps there will be changes.  I am concerned that our society has come to accept cheating as something that is going to happen and we just have to acknowledge it.  I would hope that we are better than that, and would prefer that our attitude would be that if you have to cheat, is it really worth it.  We cannot turn a blind eye to it and accept that we cannot do anything about it.  Those who cheat are not worthy of victory, under any circumstance.  

Failing Online Charter Schools

I am not a fan of charter schools, or rather, I am not a fan of for-profit charter schools that siphon public money away from public schools.  It does not matter whether they are brick and mortar schools, or online programs.  In recent travels to other parts of the country, I have seen brand new buildings housing charter schools that look like palaces, and I have driven by some that occupy space in what appears to be worn out strip malls.  I am very aware of a few charters that have done incredible things, particularly KIPP Public Charter Schools, turning lives around for kids who come from poverty stricken backgrounds, but note that “public” is included in the title.  In Iowa, charter schools have struggled to gain a foothold.  In large part I believe that is due to the fact that the majority of people in a community have a positive feeling about the job being done in our public schools.  However, there are a few, and while proponents can argue that they provide more educational options to parents, overall, in our country they are not doing what they were intended to do.

In a report published in April 2019 by the Education Week Research Center, nearly three-quarters of students enrolled in online charter schools in the U.S. are attending “schools” where less than half of the students have graduated in four years.  Also contained in this report is the following:

Nationally, half of all virtual charter high schools had graduation rates     below 50-percent in the 2016-17 school year. Thirty-seven percent of schools had graduation rates at or above 50-percent. Graduation data for the remaining 13-percent of schools was masked for various reasons, such as to protect student privacy. There are about 163 virtual charter schools educating over 30,000 seniors nationally as determined by the adjusted cohort graduation rate, according to federal numbers.

In a Stanford University study in 2015, it was found that students attending an online charter school made so little progress in math over the course of a year that it was as if they hadn’t attended school at all.  That is unconscionable!  Let us apply that to our high school, or for that matter, any public high school in the United States.  If our students were not learning math in our classes, the community would be justifiably upset and many of us — from teachers up to administrators — would most likely lose our jobs.  In essence, we are talking about malpractice, and yet it appears that nothing is being done to demand accountability from these charters.

Most of the online charter schools are run by for-profit companies, and since the beginning, they have struggled with academic performance.  On a trip four summers ago we stopped in Indianapolis and spent some time downtown.  In a shopping mall, there was a lot of signage, including forty-foot banners spanning the walking area, advertising a couple of different online charter programs.  Both schools had kiosks where you could get information and sign your child up.  According to the Education Week study, not one virtual charter school operating in Indiana in 2016-17 had a graduation rate over 50% in the past four years.  What would you think if our school had a graduation rate of less than 50%?  On a national level, anything under a 90% graduation rate is considered low!

In Iowa, there are two “state approved” charter schools.  Both of them are for-profit, and both of them are aligned with and administrated by public school districts.  Students in the state can open enroll to either of the two districts and then enroll in the online charter option.  One of them is Iowa Connections Academy that is aligned with the CAM school district in southwest Iowa.  The other is called Iowa Virtual Academy in the nearby Clayton Ridge district.  In looking at graduation rates in Iowa, the state average for public schools in 2018 was an all-time high of 91.4%.  (North Fayette Valley has consistently exceeded the state average.)  The school district with the lowest graduation rate in that year was Storm Lake in western Iowa, a district with a very high percentage of ESL and low-economic status students, as well as a very transient population.  The second lowest graduation rate was CAM at 77%, which must include those students who enrolled in the Iowa Connections Academy (ICA).  In an online search, ICA’s profile reports a graduation rate between 70 and 79%, which is in lowest 50% of Iowa schools.  Clayton Ridge’s graduation rate was reported at 82.7%, which also puts them very close to the bottom of schools in the state.  There is no additional information provided by this district on the ICA profile.

While I am not sure of the financial arrangement between these two schools and their partner school district, I do know that state funds in the form of per pupil costs go to them through the open enrollment law we have in Iowa.  We have had a small number of students from our district choose to open enroll into the programs, two of whom graduated as they transferred their senior year.  None of the others graduated.  

In my opinion, this whole charter movement, which is strongly supported by current Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, is a way to separate certain groups of kids from other groups.  Many of the brick and mortar charter schools have specific entrance requirements that prevent students from certain demographic groups from enrolling, despite state and local laws that are supposed to prevent it.  It has been a way for the private sector to get public funding, and yet stay free of the same requirements and standards that public schools must meet.  In the accountability laws that exist in every state, no public school could survive unscathed with a graduation rate less than 50%.  The state would have swooped in, shut it down, and either close it or forced dramatic restructuring.  They have done this since the advent of No Child Left Behind.  However, the for-profit charter schools have been protected, and have not been held to the same standard.  It is a significant question of fairness and a level playing field.  In my mind, it is a misuse of taxpayer dollars to allow these failing schools to continue.  We wouldn’t stand for that if our school was failing.