A Generation of High-tech Couch Potatoes Meets a New Kind of PE

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By Lee Sherman

A sixth-grade boy zaps digital monsters left and right without breaking a sweat. But climbing a flight of stairs makes him huff and puff. A 15-year-old girl tapes every episode of Friends and watches them over and over. One lap around the track, however, leaves her gasping. A mom drives her kids to Blockbuster to rent Air Bud. Across the street, the neighborhood hoop casts a lonely shadow in the afternoon sun. There's not a basketball—or a player—in sight.

Fingertip technologies have largely relegated swimming holes, tree forts, and sandlot ball games to history. In the vernacular of Generation Y, "surfing" has nothing to do with hanging 10 on a fiberglass board. Many of today's kids are deft with a computer mouse, and they smoke with a remote. But as they increasingly play and learn in the blue glow of cathode-ray tubes, their health and fitness have declined alarmingly. While their fingers may be nimble, their arms and abs are too often fat and flabby. For a lot of kids, their endurance for lolling on the living room sofa beats their stamina in the gym by miles. In the couch potato Olympics, today's kids would bring home the gold.

Schools must step up to fill the fitness void, health experts nationwide insist. Government agencies and advocacy groups such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the American Heart Association are clamoring for daily physical education at every grade level. The surgeon general recommends that communities provide "quality, preferably daily, K-12 physical education." Even the president recently called for a "renewal of physical education in our schools."

But other factors are conspiring to undermine these recommendations. Just when kids are logging more seat time at home, school reformers and budget cutters are lopping nonacademic classes off the school roster. The convergence of dwindling dollars and higher standards has squeezed out PE in many states and districts. Together, these trends have created what some are calling a crisis in children's health.

"Recent studies have shown that the vast majority of America's children and youth are not physically fit," the U.S. Department of Defense notes on its Web site. "And more tragically, they are not getting enough physical education to understand how and why to keep themselves fit for life."

To address this growing concern for the long-term health and well-being of Americans, PE is undergoing a radical transformation. In schools where PE has managed to hang on, enlightened teachers are introducing kids to activities they can take with them through the years. Instead of dodging a hard rubber ball, kids are mastering cool moves on inline skates and cross-country skis. Instead of doing a million jumping jacks, they're learning to maneuver mountain bikes, balance unicycles, bounce on pogo sticks, juggle plastic bowling pins—even manipulate wheelchairs with ease. They're paddling white-water kayaks. Dancing to Latin music. Fishing for rainbow trout. Climbing vertical rock walls. Doing stuff you might see on the cover of Outdoor magazine or in the pages of Sunday's lifestyle section.

"We need to find ways to attract students to the joys of movement," Professor R. Scott Kretchmar of Pennsylvania State University recently told Education Week. "We need to make it as powerful as the draw of computers and television."

OBESITY CRISIS

Advocacy for physical education is hardly new. Way back in the mid-1700s, no less an American icon than Benjamin Franklin was calling for schools to "have provisions for running, leaping, wrestling, and swimming," writer Jack McCallum reports in Sports Illustrated. But it wasn't until the next century that officials began linking physical education with public health concerns. And yet another hundred years rolled by before physical education became a national priority. That's when President Eisenhower created what is now called the Presidential Council on Physical Fitness and Sports in response to a study showing poor muscle strength among U.S. students.

But, like so many initiatives in education, the PE pendulum has swung back again. Despite continuing calls from Congress and others for keeping and/or beefing up PE, physical education programs have dwindled or died over the last 10 to 15 years. Today, not one state mandates daily PE. Only one-fourth of high school students take gym every day, according to the landmark 1996 report of the Office of the Surgeon General, Physical Activity and Health. Between 1991 and 1995 alone, the number of kids taking daily PE plunged steeply, from 42 percent to 25 percent. Fewer than half of U.S. middle schools and just over a quarter of high schools require at least three years of PE. In fact, most high school students take only one year of PE between ninth and 12th grades, the National Association for Sport and Physical Education (NASPE) found in a 1997 state-by-state survey.

"I think we're paying a tremendous price for the rollback in physical education," Surgeon General David Satcher told the convention of the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance in March. "One of the greatest contributions you can make to an adult's health is to get them started as a child on a lifetime of physical activity."

There is a loud lament among journalists, policymakers, health advocates, and physical educators over what Professor Charles Kuntzelman of the University of Michigan calls the "substantial erosion" of PE programs. McCallum drives the point home in his April Sports Illustrated article, "Gym Class Struggle."

"The saddest thing about the decline in physical education," he writes, "is that we now know so much about the benefits of physical fitness and the perils of a sedentary lifestyle. Principals and school-board members who themselves may be in fitness programs are often the ones who slash budgets and resources for gym class; they do so even as they are inundated with reports about the obesity crisis in our Twinkie-eating, TV-watching, video-game-playing younger generation."

Among the troubling findings reported by the surgeon general, the CDC, the journal Pediatrics, and other sources are these:

• As many as 25 percent of children and adolescents are overweight or obese
• The percentage of youths who are overweight has more than doubled in the past 30 years
• Nearly 40 percent of kids ages five to eight have conditions that significantly increase their risk of early heart disease
• Some 70 percent of girls and 40 percent of boys ages six to 12 do not have enough muscle strength to do more than one pull-up

Using facts like these to get people's attention, health advocates are fighting to keep or reinstate physical education in places where PE dollars are drying up and the three Rs are crowding out other subjects. There's even a Web site where teachers can get ideas for defending PE in their own schools and communities http://pecentral.org/websites/defendingpe.html.

In Oregon, advocates recently won a big victory when they convinced lawmakers to include phys ed in the newly developed statewide standards for a Certificate of Initial Mastery (for details, see "Saving PE: The Oregon Story"). In Washington, D.C., Alaska's Senator Ted Stevens has won wide co-sponsorship for his Physical Education for Progress (PEP) bill. Currently making its way through the labyrinth of congressional decisionmaking, the bill would authorize grants of $400 million over five years to schools and districts for equipment, curriculum development, and teacher training in PE. "It's not just to keep the next generation from becoming obese," Stevens told Andrew Mollison, a reporter for Cox Newspapers, in April. "The kids who are causing all this violence and bullying are not getting the organized physical activity where you let off steam and learn about things like waiting your turn and not winning all the time."

HALL OF SHAME

One hurdle advocates need to leap is the widespread dislike—even hatred—of PE among parents, policymakers, and the general public. Many baby boomers vividly remember the hurt and mortification they endured in punishing games like dodge ball and team sports that pitted athletic kids against clumsy ones, aggressive against timid. And then there was the cruel practice of choosing up sides. Countless children were deeply wounded when team captains passed them over again and again in favor of their more agile peers. "For most of us, the ghost of PE past looms large," writes A. Virshup in Women's Sports and Fitness. "Ask any group of 10 adults for their memories of gym class and seven of them will launch into litanies of frustration and humiliation: the groans when they came up at bat, the failure to do a single pull-up on the annual fitness test, the gruesome uniforms." In her 1999 article, "Why Janey Can't Run," Virshup concludes that "PE seemed less a class than some tribal ritual for jocks to enjoy and the rest of us to endure."

McCallum echoes this view when he writes: "We remember gym class so vividly because it brought out emotions and existential crises that are central to our development. Fear. Intimidation. Humiliation. Nausea. Abject failure. Angst. Neurosis. All that—and showers, too!"

Several years ago, a physical educator in Vinton, Iowa, championed dignity for kids when she convinced the school board to build individual dressing and shower stalls in the locker rooms. "When you ask kids whose bodies are changing to undress and shower in front of everyone, you've destroyed their self-esteem before they even get into the gym," the teacher, Beth Kirkpatrick, argued.

There are still plenty of teachers who adhere to the "old" PE. But defenders of the "new" PE are on the offensive. The Journal of Physical Education, Recreation, & Dance ran a three-part series in the 1990s called "The Physical Education Hall of Shame" in which author and educator Neil Williams lambastes the worst practices. Not surprisingly, the Number 1 "charter inductee" is dodge ball, which the author calls "a litigation waiting to happen." In this brutal contest of the mighty against the meek, "at most, about half of the students really play—the rest hide in the farthest reaches of the gym." Another top pick is Duck, Duck, Goose, a circle chase game for primary kids in which "at least half of the students in the class will never be picked, friends usually pick friends, and generally, about five students do all of the playing," he reports. The author, a PE professor at Eastern Connecticut State University, is also scathing about elimination games like musical chairs. Such games, he argues, are "self-defeating, because the students who are in the greatest need of skill development are immediately banished, embarrassed, and punished, and then given no opportunity to improve."

For inclusion in the Hall of Shame, activities or games meet some or all of the following criteria:

• Absence of the purported objectives of the activity or game
• Potential to embarrass a student in front of the rest of the class
• Focus on eliminating students from participation
• Overemphasis on and concern about the students having "fun"
• Lack of emphasis on teaching motor skills and lifetime physical fitness skills
• Extremely low participation time factors
• Organizing into large groups where getting a "turn" is based on luck or individual aggressiveness or competitiveness
• Extremely high likelihood for danger, injury, and harm

The old PE emphasized competition, while the new PE stresses cooperation. The old PE taught mostly team sports, which have limited application after formal schooling. The new PE focuses on pursuits that students can use in the real world for fun and fitness. The old PE was geared for the physically gifted. The new PE is designed to let every kid succeed. Describing the gym-class renaissance in the New York Times several years ago, Melinda Henneberger describes "a growing curriculum overhaul in physical education, replacing competitive sports with activities that prepare children for lifetime health rather than for varsity teams. The goal," she writes, "is not so much to learn to score a basket as to develop body awareness, hand and motion skills, and the confidence to try new activities."

SIGNPOSTS FOR TEACHERS

To guide schools in designing high-quality physical education programs, NASPE recently developed a set of national standards to serve as "signposts" for teachers, in the words of Professor Terry Wood of Oregon State University. "The standards are not a national curriculum, but a set of criteria that provide a profile of the physically educated student at each grade level," says Wood, who served on the task force that developed the standards. "Each state or district must determine the appropriate curriculum to meet the standards, which serves as a planning document for states and districts." The most surprising thing about the seven standards is the heavy emphasis on attitudes, social interaction, and thinking skills. PE teacher Tom Heath of Jefferson Elementary School in Corvallis, Oregon, explains that the standards fall into three broad areas: movement skills, lifetime fitness, and interpersonal skills, including self-management and respect for diversity. The National Standards for Physical Education indicate that a physically educated student:

1. Demonstrates competency in many movement forms and proficiency in a few movement forms
2. Applies movement concepts and principles to the learning and development of motor skills
3. Exhibits a physically active lifestyle
4. Achieves and maintains a health-enhancing level of physical fitness
5. Demonstrates responsible personal and social behavior in physical activity settings
6. Demonstrates understanding and respect for differences among people in physical activity settings
7. Understands that physical activity provides opportunities for enjoyment, challenge, self-expression, and social interaction

In its 1995 publication Moving into the Future: National Standards for Physical Education, the NASPE task force provides sample benchmarks at every other grade level, K-12. For example, to meet Goal 2 ("applies movement concepts and principles to the learning and development of motor skills") a kindergartner should be able to walk, run, hop, and skip in forward and sideways directions, and to change direction quickly in response to a signal. She should identify and use a variety of relationships with objects (such as over, under, behind, alongside, and through). She should begin to use the "leg flexion" technique to soften the landing in jumping.

By sixth grade, a student should be able to detect, analyze, and correct errors in personal movement patterns. He ought to identify proper warm-up and cool-down techniques and the reasons for using them. And he should know basic practice and conditioning principles that enhance performance.

To meet the standard, a 12th-grader should, for example, be able to participate in a tennis match using all of the basic skills, rules, and strategies with some consistency. She should be able to pass the Red Cross intermediate swimming requirements; get nine out of 10 arrows on the target from 40 feet; navigate a kayak skillfully and safely through white water; use advanced offensive and defensive shots successfully in a racquetball game against an opponent of similar skill; and/or demonstrate the skills for a black belt in karate. The first press run of 2,000 standards documents was snatched up quickly, Wood reports. But, he says, translating the words into practice is the critical next step. It could in fact spell life or death for physical education.

"There is little doubt that physical educators, pressured by the national reform movement with its emphasis on content standards, alternative assessment strategies, and higher-order learning objectives, were waiting for some direction," Wood asserts in a 1996 article in Teaching Elementary Physical Education. "Now that the dust has settled after the initial rush to obtain the standards, teachers, schools, and districts are faced with a fundamental challenge not addressed in the document—implementation. How this challenge is met will determine the long-term success of the standards, and to some degree the future of PE in the public school system."

Top-notch teachers, like Meg Greiner in the rural Oregon town of Independence, consciously build their programs around the concepts contained in the standards.

"Good teachers naturally do, because the standards are everything that physical education should be about," says Greiner, who teaches at Independence Elementary. "It's about diversity. It's about movement concepts and manipulative skills. It's about dance, rhythm, and coordination. It's about fitness for a lifetime. It's about self-management and social behavior. My classes are full of all those things."

Every morning before the first bell, you can find Greiner alone in the empty gym. Wearing her "PE Rulz" T-shirt and a colorful pair of Hawaiian shorts, the award-winning teacher is thumbing through an eclectic collection of CDs—everything from polkas to Irish dance tunes to mariachi, ragtime, country, and zydeco (Cajun music from southern Louisiana, featuring guitar, washboard, and accordion). Not least are the hot pop stars like Celine Dion, Backstreet Boys, and Sheryl Crow. "That's how you get the kids hooked in," Greiner explains.

At 8:30 sharp she flings open the gym door and stands back. A herd of 350 gyrating grade-schoolers—mixed with a few parents and teachers—gallops in for Team Time, the all-school exercise class that kicks off each and every school day. Chucking their backpacks on the perimeter, they quickly find spots on the floor while Greiner climbs onto a table up front. "All together now!" She leads them through a series of warm-ups and intricate dance moves. "Heel, heel, toe, toe, front, side, back, side!" she calls. Every foot is on cue, every eye is on Greiner, all children are quietly concentrating—except when they're singing along with the music. "Lookin' good! Don't forget that hop at the end!"

No couch potatoes here.

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