Kids and exercise.

Thanks to "Don't Sweat It" (features, Fall 2006) and "Not Your Father's PE" (research, Fall 2006), we now know that top-down solutions to child obesity offer minimal benefit. A "bottom-up" approach would be to change the way we fund schooling. We fund systems; we do not fund students. Because districts tend to add classrooms to existing structures as enrollment grows, we have large schools.

District consolidation also put us on the road to supersize schools. In 1931, there were 120,000 school districts. By 2000, there were fewer than 15,000. University of Chicago professor Christopher Berry ("School Inflation," research, Fall 2004) studied the period of greatest school-district consolidation, 1930-70. Berry found a consistent correlation of .70 between school size and district size, across states. Big districts have big schools.

How do big schools lead to inactive, overweight kids? To go to and from big, consolidated schools--often at remote sites--children wait for and sit in buses instead of walking or bicycling to a nearby school and playing in the schoolyard before and after the bell. High schoolers and middle schoolers are doubly afflicted: when they finally arrive at their very large schools, they find that the most popular sports are dominated by elite athletes. A glance at almost any high-school annual of the 1920s through the 1950s (before the final wave of consolidation) will reveal a lot of skinny young people, small senior classes, and wide participation in the major sports.

Were we to fund students rather than systems, such schools--and skinny kids--would make a comeback.

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TOM SHUFORD

Retired Public School Teacher

Lenoir, North Carolina 

For combating kids' weight problems, K-12 dance education offers unique potential. Merging mind and body, dance education can contribute to students' intellectual growth in many academic subjects. Student dance making can offer some of what reading and writing offer--fantasy, storytelling, and performer-audience connection.

Dance is a way to cope with stress. In dances they make, kids can embody troubling ideas, hold them up to scrutiny, play with them, and, consequently, make them less threatening.

Kids need to get hooked on a physical activity in which they burn calories in physical education and that they can pursue outside of school. Breaking and krumping became popular on the streets, Mad Hot Ballroom engaged kids in and out of school, and So You Think You Can Dance drew huge audiences. Let kids make their own dances, compete, and find dances in their neighborhoods or on TV to demonstrate to classmates.

JUDITH LYNNE HANNA

Senior Research Scholar

University of Maryland 

Bob Cullen has done a fine job of identifying some of the challenges physical education teachers face. In "Don't Sweat It," Mr. Cullen implies that it is nearly impossible to have a permanent positive impact on the health and fitness of the students given the current graduation requirements for physical education, the attitudes of the kids and parents toward PE, social and cultural factors, the declining fitness levels of physical education teachers, and the low enthusiasm among teachers. Here in Miami-Dade Public Schools, we must add to this most difficult equation low family incomes, poor nutritional habits of students, extreme heat, no use of the indoor gymnasium, large classes, lack of adequate fountains for students to keep hydrated, and lack of classroom space.

BENNETT PACKMAN

Physical Education Teacher

Miami-Dade County Public Schools