Finally, a little opinion from the N&R sports pages on the Northern Guilford recruiting scandal. Unfortunately, reading Ed Hardin’s columns are wandering through a maze: you don’t know where you’re going and you don’t where you’ve been.
Hardin teases us with this passage, more or less making my point that sports aren’t the only reason why a student would be attracted to a particular school:
Do we really want to go back to forcing kids to go to schools in their own attendance zones? This isn’t a sports question. It’s a busing question, a civil rights question, an academics question. And the answer is simple: No way.
The same thing is going on with flute players and aspiring ROTC students and early college-plan students wanting to take certain classes. We assume the system works for the whole, recognizing that some will take advantage of it. Our hopes are that those who would use the system for personal glory would be caught and exposed, and that those who continually do it will be purged.
But aren’t flute players and ROTC students seeking their own particular brand of personal glory? Hey, more power to them if they are. It’s well-established that sports have been a path to a college education and more productive overall life for many poor kids. But, as Hardin says, “rules are rules” and they need to be enforced. Thinking about it like that, Hardin makes a strong argument for school choice and competition, though I’m not sure that’s what he meant to do.
