Education Week - February 26, 2020 - 14

Cincinnati Athletes Get an Assist on Academics
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

Photographs by Kaiti Sullivan for Education Week

schools with athletic departments now
has a teacher, administrator, or counselor who serves in a role similar to
Ruby's. The program, in effect, offers
for secondary students the same type
of developmental support common
for college athletes who must meet
eligibility requirements to play.
"We've got a lot of students in the
district that are battling different
things on a daily basis, and the support they need sometimes is just one
more person that's really there to care
for them, support them, hear them
out," said Joshua Hardin, the athletics manager for the 36,000-student
Cincinnati district. "Athletics is a way
for a lot of students in the district to be
connected to the school and community and to feel like they have an opportunity to have their thing."

'No Pass, No Play'
Now in its second full year in the
Cincinnati district, the program,
dubbed the Academic and Athletic
Accountability Pathway, is an extra
layer of support for students whose
prowess on the athletic field tends
to get a brighter spotlight than their
academics. In addition to the personalized support, students who play
sports in the Queen City get a free
boot camp to prep for the ACT. The
program is a new wrinkle on what's
now an established part of secondary
sports-eligibility.
In 1984, Texas instituted the first
so-called "no pass, no play" rule,
which requires students to pass all
their courses to participate in sports
or extracurricular activities. Some 30odd states followed with variations of
their own-often, as in Ohio, leaving it
up to local districts to specify the academic measure and penalties. Some
districts work attendance or conduct
into the calculus in addition to a grade
or course-completion measure. The
penalties for missing the cutoffs range
from being benched for a couple of
weeks through several semesters.
Further complicating matters, state
high school athletic associations also
set benchmarks that can effectively
carry the same weight as state law.
That's the case in Ohio, where the
Ohio High School Athletic Association requires high school students to
carry and pass five one-credit courses.
Many Ohio districts have interpreted
that as at least a D or 1.0 GPA.
Research generally suggests that
no-pass-no-play policies do shape
students' attendance patterns and
grades.
"There is no doubt about the fact
that if you require students to be eligible to play on a team, they are more
serious about their studies; there is
no doubt about the fact that they are
more motivated," said Angela Lumpkin, a professor in the department of
kinesiology and sports management
at Texas Tech University, in Lubbock.
"If you have to pass your algebra class
to play on a football team, you'll find a
way to pass your algebra class."

Senior basketball player Ismail
James practices at Hughes
STEM High School in Cincinnati.
All of the school's athletes work
with a teacher, administrator,
or counselor who provides
them with academic support
to meet eligibility requirements
to play.
Jill Ruby, left, one of the
coaches in the program that
provides academic assistance
at Hughes, helps senior
cheerleader Randionna Wright
with her homework.

But it's far less clear exactly how
stringent the standard should be.
Does too low send a bad signal about
the relative value of academics? Does
too high encourage cheating or push
students who mainly attend school for
athletics out the door?
Such questions are topics of perennial debate, and as a result, any movement in districts' eligibility standards
attracts scrutiny. (Both the Dayton
and the Stow-Munroe Falls districts in
Ohio kicked up controversy in recent
years when they proposed lowering
their eligibility GPAs.)

Building Supports
Cincinnati, like many other Ohio
districts, had tried to strike a balance
between too high and too low. The
school board had set the bar higher
than many districts at 2.0-a C average. And though it had established
free tutoring tables after school for
students needing more attention,
what was missing was some coherent
system for motivating students to pull
up weak grades.
When Hardin, the district's athletics manager, started looking at
achievement data among athletes, he
found some troubling patterns. Most
of his athletes cleared the 1.0 GPA
bar, but fewer were meeting the 2.0

14 | EDUCATION WEEK | February 26, 2020 | www.edweek.org

mark. That wasn't just academically
troubling news for players with college aspirations-it also meant that
those vying for athletic scholarships
could be in for a rude awakening.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association requires at least a 2.3 GPA
for Division I athletes and a 2.2 for
Division II.
For the pilot year, in 2018-19, Hardin cobbled together funding to select
and pay the AAA Pathway coaches a
stipend similar to the ones that athletic coaches were receiving. And he
brought on Stephanie Price, who had
worked in athletic development at
the University of Northern Kentucky,
to design a training manual for the
course and run the program. Price
meets with each coach twice each
quarter, offering assistance in how
they can support each of their charges.
Ruby, only in her second year of
teaching, had already found out that
attending her students' games helped
her build relationships with them.
Now, as an AAA Pathway coach, she
has another way to connect. A lot of
what she does is more like counseling,
she said, trying to empower students
to address the root of a low grade-
for instance, how to tell a teacher that
they didn't understand something
and need extra help.
"You can see a kid walk out [of our
meetings] almost standing a bit taller

and thinking, 'OK, I can have an adult
conversation and something good can
come out of it,' " she said.
And although other districts also
offer help for athletes, "I feel like the
consistency is really big in what makes
this program different," Ruby said.
For all that, the basic idea of supports for athletes does pull from a
higher education model that's had
its share of scandal-most notably
in 2014 at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. Independent
reports there found athletes were
enrolled in allegedly fake "paper"
classes to maintain their eligibility.
But Jerry Butler, an 8th grade social studies teacher at Shroder High
School, thinks the opposite is true
in Cincinnati's version. Before AAA
Pathways, he said, when grade checks
were done quarterly, a student could
play nearly 10 weeks of football before anyone checked his or her grades.
And athletic coaches and building
athletic directors held all the cards.
"It was like the Wild, Wild West-
basically anything went," said Butler,
a 27-year veteran and former athletic
coach. "You need an extra set of eyes
to just hold everyone accountable."
Under AAA Pathway, Butler said,
he's even pulled rank on athletic
coaches, demanding that a student
sit for a study session instead of going
to practice. And students know they

have to care about their schoolwork if
only because a low score means Butler will be coming to check on them.
"It's good for me, because at times
I do slip on my work," said Tommy
Young, a sophomore Butler coaches at
Shroder High who wrestles and plays
football.
Tommie Steed III, a sophomore at
Woodword Career & Technical High
School is aiming high. While he'd like
to win a track and field scholarship to
college, he says his goal this year is to
get a 4.0 in his academic classes.
"I don't think people understand
the way we have to balance sports and
education," he said. "It affects your
grades, and your grade is what is going
to get you into college, not sports."

Slippery Slope?
The program clocks in at about
$100,000 for 2019-20, not extravagant but also not nothing at a time of
tight school budgets. But the school
board and other departments have
been generally supportive.
"We do at times hear comments
in response to other clubs-arts and
music-and my response is always, I
support extracurriculars for the district
as a whole," said Hardin, adding that
he's has been talking with his counterparts in those divisions about expanding the program to encompass them.
AAA Pathway is too new to have
much data behind it, but Price, the
program leader, ticks off some successes, including three students who
were flagged for help through the
program last school year and who this
year qualified for Division II football
scholarships in college. Coaches like
Butler are integrating the support into
other initiatives, including a socialemotional development program for
boys.
"Anecdotally, we have AAA
coaches who are in the second year
who say the culture is changing. Student athletes are holding themselves
accountable and others accountable," Price said. "And we're not losing kids to eligibility problems-especially early on."
As to whether such an approach
could or should be replicated in other
districts, Lumpkin is of two minds.
She said she's for anything that supports students to do their best academically but not if districts start encouraging less rigorous coursework or
cheating the way some colleges have.
Although there is far less money at
stake in high school athletics than at
the collegiate level, the outlays can
still be considerable, she noted. (Some
Texas districts have built high school
football stadiums costing upwards of
$70 million.)
"It's not that big in high schools, no,
but that doesn't mean it won't be,"
Lumpkin said. "To me, one of the
kind of revealing facts is that school
districts have started calling them
'student athletes.' High school adolescents should be students, period,
and they should have lots of opportunities for extracurriculars-including
sports."

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Education Week - February 26, 2020

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