In twenty-first century America, there is a big emphasis on academic success, being at the top of your class and going to a prestigious college. However, are these just empty expectations? Do our schools really care about our grades and achievement in the classroom? At first, you might say of course they do, they are, after all, a school. But if you look at the state of American schools today, you just might find a shocking truth.

Take a look at our school, Whitman, for example. At the beginning of each school year, students are taken out of their math, English, science, and social studies classes to congregate in the gym for “Pep Rally,” a celebration of not the upcoming scholastic year, but the upcoming athletic year. Learning about quadratic functions and Shakespeare is suspended in favor of watching the varsity football team jump up and down on the basketball court. Our nine period days are gone forever, electives are disappearing every year, the language honor societies have had to be combined, and yet the football team just got a new scoreboard. If you look on our website, you would see picture upon picture of our sports teams, and yet almost no one knows that our school newspaper has gone online. In fact, Paw Print recently became recognized by the Columbia Scholastic Press Association, and yet the school cares more about the football team that lost at homecoming.

This past year, New York State decided it was better to shuffle taxpayer money into officially naming cheerleading a sport, and yet 80% of New York City school graduates lack basic reading, writing, and math skills. Participation in high school sports continues to rise every year, but somehow 25% percent of high school freshman fail to graduate on time. Some may say that schools are putting more money into sports for our benefit because it gives us a better chance of getting athletic scholarships. However, if the school is trying to better our chance of getting a scholarship for sports, they are doing us a huge injustice. The truth of the matter is that, according to the Wall Street Journal, there is more money in academic scholarships than athletic scholarships. Every year, colleges award $9.5 billion in academic merit scholarships as opposed to the $1 billion they spare for athletic scholarships. With those statistics, Whitman probably should’ve brought back sign language instead of redoing the track.

If you were to go to Europe and tell someone at a sports game that in the US, some college stadiums can hold over 100,000 fans, they would think you were crazy. This is due to the simple fact that everywhere else in the world, school sports are secondary to learning. In other countries, school sports are just a fun activity, not huge competitive events that devour all of a school’s budget. Some of you athletes may be happy at the big role sports play in American schools, but while our periods are shortened for Pep Rally, European students are already learning their third language by the age of eleven.

Today in America, unemployment rates are frighteningly high, and yet, American companies are still forced to outsource jobs because American workers simply can’t compete with other countries in the fields of math, science, and engineering. In 2009, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to students all across the globe, found that only 32% of American eighth graders were proficient in math.

Ever since America was founded in 1776, it has been the country that all other countries aspire to be like. However, if the American school system doesn’t shift its priorities from athletics to academics soon, we might just be the laughingstock of the world.