SECONDARY SCHOOL SPORTS PARTICIPATION AND EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT

The relationship between high school athletic participation and educational achievement is one of the most discussed, debated, and researched topics in all of sport scholarship, particularly when one looks at the social scientific research focused on sport and society interactions and their consequences. Dozens of dissertations have been written on the topic, and new studies and papers—the best and most important of which are reviewed in this report—appear every year.

Ongoing for nearly half a century (as old as sport studies itself), research and writing on this topic has come from academic disciplines ranging from sociology, psychology, and economics to sport management, kinesiology, and education, and yielded some of the most sophisticated and clear findings of any topic in the field.

Two main insights or findings emerge from this voluminous body of work for the general, non-specialist audience. First and most important, this research has time and again demonstrated a strong and positive correlation between high school sports participation and academic achievement. This basic, baseline finding holds for a wide variety of measures and on a whole range of data sets, methodological approaches, and social conditions. In contrast to prevailing ‘dumb-jock’ stereotypes, kids who play sports, on average, tend to perform better in school than kids who don’t. That said, scholars have also discovered that the factors and forces that help produce and explain the basic relationship or association between athletics and academics are far more complicated and multifaceted than sports idealists have often believed or assumed. 

The relationship between athletic involvement and academic success is not, for the most part, a direct, causal one. It can, in fact, vary dramatically depending upon type of sport, level of participation, the background of the student-athletes involved, school characteristics, and the relationship between the athletic program and the academic curriculum. Indeed, for some groups under certain conditions, sports participation can be detrimental, functioning as a risk factor for academic performance or substance abuse. This variability is the second basic insight of the field, and has led to an ongoing scholarly effort to isolate and evaluate the causal factors that account for the correlation between sport participation and academic achievement and its limitations. A comprehensive examination and assessment of the limitations and variability of the sport/education relationship is crucial if we are to understand how to best utilize and exploit sports programming and participation for educational benefit.