http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/06/20/20health_edit.html
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Gov. Rick Perry signed a bill into law last week mandating more physical exercise for public school students and regular assessments of their physical condition.
Senate Bill 530 is another unfunded legislative mandate for local school districts, but the emphasis on physical conditioning could benefit students from kindergarten through high school. Conventional wisdom has long held that physical activity is good for the mind as well as the body.
Required daily physical activity for all students was stripped from the bill in the legislative process, but Texas now requires annual physical assessments in most grades and 30 minutes of daily physical activity in four of the six middle school semesters. High school students already are required to complete three semesters of physical education. The fitness assessment then will be compared to students’ academic standing.
Texas schools have had to balance physical education with ballooning academic course requirements for graduation. As the state mandated more courses for high school graduation, pushing some of those, like speech and health, down to the middle school grades, physical education lost ground.
Squeezing another math, science or language arts requirement into a seven-hour school day meant something had to go. In many cases that was phys ed.
But in a nation struggling with fast food calories, an obesity epidemic and debilitating diseases like diabetes, cutting back on physical activity wasn’t a good move. The bill is an effort to fight the battle against those problems and to see if more physical activity does, indeed, translate into better performance in school.
An Austin school district experiment indicates a correlation, though not a strong one, between overall fitness level and academic achievement. It has long made sense that more physically fit children and adolescents have better class attendance and performance records.
Whether 150 minutes of “moderate or strenuous” activity a week in elementary and middle school will make for healthier students is an open question. It’s more reasonable to conclude that healthy students are fit because of what they do outside of school — eat properly, exercise, play sports.
But physical exercise during the school day can only be beneficial, and the new law gives Texans an opportunity to see if there is an actual correlation between physical fitness and academic performance.
The required activity and assessment is another example of history repeating itself. Both used to be integral parts of the public school experience. Until the 1970s, almost all colleges required several semesters of physical education to obtain a degree.
But colleges and then secondary schools gradually relaxed or abandoned required physical activity, and states have mandated more academic course work for a diploma. In recent years, however, the obesity problem among the country’s young pushed education officials to reconsider the physical aspects of education.
When 40 percent of Austin school district fifth-graders are overweight, as a study determined, the problem is real. More physical activity during the school day can’t by itself reverse that trend; too much depends on diet and activity outside the classroom. But it can help.
