TruthOut10
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- Dec 3, 2012
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US Education Secretary Arne Duncan did not dribble around the question when I asked him if collegiate basketball programs with longterm, gross racial disparities in graduation rates should be banned from March Madness. Where you have insidious gaps, and where there isnt movement, I think there have to be consequences, Duncan said in a conference call on athletic reform last week.
In a follow-up interview the next day, Duncan added, If a team can show its improving, thats one thing. But if a team is in the same spot for 10 years, if your dropout rate is such that your graduation rate year after year is 30 [percent], 30, 30, 30, that shows youre less serious.
Duncans thoughts, should he continue to voice them, could help move the National Collegiate Athletic Association to take its next major step to end the exploitation of African-American athletes. The NCAA took one meaningful step this year by banning 2011 national champion Connecticut from this years tournament because of low longterm graduation rates. They were 11 percent for the entire team last year.
But UConn was the lowest-hanging of the rotten fruit in big-time college sports. There are many more teams that make a mockery of the student-athlete model. Many basketball and football programs have what appear to be acceptable overall team graduation rates of 50 percent or higher, but their numbers hide unacceptable disparities between healthy graduation rates for white players and abysmal ones for black players. The 50-percent standard was advocated for many years by reformers as the minimum acceptable standard for postseason play, but it is not adequate.
For the third straight year in the 68-team field, 21 teams had black graduation rates below 50 percent. They include Indiana, Ohio State, Wisconsin, Syracuse, Arizona, and the ostensible public Ivy California, along with small-school darlings Butler and LaSalle. Florida was at the bottom of the barrel at zero.
The NCAA is thus far unmoved by the fact that nearly a third of the field is plagued by such poor performance, which is all the more noteworthy because most of those same 21 schools had a 100 percent graduation rate for their white players. A year and a half ago, I asked NCAA President Mark Emmert if there should be further consequences for programs in the tournament that harbor such racial gaps.
All he said then was, We dont subdivide the teams by race or ethnicity or income. We do know when weve created and raised those standards, the graduation rates of African-American students have gone up sharply.
March Madness brings vast graduation gaps | Black Star Journal
In a follow-up interview the next day, Duncan added, If a team can show its improving, thats one thing. But if a team is in the same spot for 10 years, if your dropout rate is such that your graduation rate year after year is 30 [percent], 30, 30, 30, that shows youre less serious.
Duncans thoughts, should he continue to voice them, could help move the National Collegiate Athletic Association to take its next major step to end the exploitation of African-American athletes. The NCAA took one meaningful step this year by banning 2011 national champion Connecticut from this years tournament because of low longterm graduation rates. They were 11 percent for the entire team last year.
But UConn was the lowest-hanging of the rotten fruit in big-time college sports. There are many more teams that make a mockery of the student-athlete model. Many basketball and football programs have what appear to be acceptable overall team graduation rates of 50 percent or higher, but their numbers hide unacceptable disparities between healthy graduation rates for white players and abysmal ones for black players. The 50-percent standard was advocated for many years by reformers as the minimum acceptable standard for postseason play, but it is not adequate.
For the third straight year in the 68-team field, 21 teams had black graduation rates below 50 percent. They include Indiana, Ohio State, Wisconsin, Syracuse, Arizona, and the ostensible public Ivy California, along with small-school darlings Butler and LaSalle. Florida was at the bottom of the barrel at zero.
The NCAA is thus far unmoved by the fact that nearly a third of the field is plagued by such poor performance, which is all the more noteworthy because most of those same 21 schools had a 100 percent graduation rate for their white players. A year and a half ago, I asked NCAA President Mark Emmert if there should be further consequences for programs in the tournament that harbor such racial gaps.
All he said then was, We dont subdivide the teams by race or ethnicity or income. We do know when weve created and raised those standards, the graduation rates of African-American students have gone up sharply.
March Madness brings vast graduation gaps | Black Star Journal
