Global Education
September 10, 2013
More than a dozen years after our second and last son moved permanently from our home, a 19-year-old has moved in. She’s lived in South Korea, the Philippines and China; she graduated from the international school where our son and his wife are educators in China; and she’s attending our local community college.
Aside from having to change some of my ways to accommodate the presence of an unrelated female in my home, this has been an easier adjustment than I had anticipated. And one of the pleasant surprises is how interesting it has been to learn along with our guest about the English language and to see our local customs through her eyes.
When a word is used that she is unfamiliar with, we think up synonyms; when an idiom is used that she hasn’t heard before, we go to various apps on our mobile devices to learn about the origin of the phrase.
The county fair was a whole new experience with her in our company this year. Lake Michigan – a “fresh-water ocean” – was a wonder. The food portions served at restaurants are two or three times what she is accustomed to; but butter and blueberries are delights that disappear quickly from our refrigerator.
What my wife and I are doing is not unique. Literally thousands of families in this state alone open their homes to students from around the world to study in our schools and colleges. These interactions may be our best hope to save our planet from political and/or religious fanaticism around the world.
Michigan’s schools enroll more one-year foreign exchange students than any other state in the US, more than 2,400 during each of 2010, 2011 and 2012. If they are placed through a program listed by the Council on Standards for International Educational Travel (CSIET), these students are immediately eligible for interscholastic athletics, for one academic year, after which they have no eligibility for one academic year.
Of concern to many athletic administrators today is the increase in enrollment of international students outside a one-year foreign exchange program listed by CSIET. These students outnumber foreign exchange students by more than two-to-one in the US.
Our immediate challenge related to this topic is to assure these students are arriving in Michigan without undue influence related to athletics and that no Michigan school uses this pool of students to gain an unfair competitive advantage in interscholastic athletics.
Correctable Error?
May 30, 2017
A decade has passed since the court-ordered change in several sports seasons for Michigan high schools. Ten years has brought resignation more than satisfaction; and yet there remains hope in some places that the new status quo is not permanent, at least for those sports seasons changes that were and are seen by many people as collateral damage in a fight over seasons for girls basketball and volleyball.
Actually, the lawsuit sought to place all girls seasons in the same seasons as boys, like college schedules. The federal court did not require simultaneous scheduling; but the court did bring the intercollegiate mindset to the case. It determined, regardless of other facts, that the intercollegiate season was the “advantageous” season for high school sports. And the principle upon which it approved the compliance plan for high school sports in Michigan was that if all the seasons were not simultaneous for boys and girls, then there should be rough equality in the number of boys and girls assigned to “disadvantageous” seasons.
So, for example, from the federal court’s perspective, fall is the advantageous season for soccer, winter for swimming & diving, and spring for tennis. As for golf, the court opined that, even though it’s not the season of the NCAA championships, maybe fall was the better season. The court began with tortured logic and ended with hypocrisy.
As a result, in the Lower Peninsula, regardless of the preferences of the people involved, girls and boys had to switch seasons in two sports to even up the number of boys seasons and girls seasons in what the court had determined were disadvantageous. Schools thought the switch of golf and tennis for the genders was less injurious than switching soccer and swimming.
In the Upper Peninsula, because swimming and golf are combined for the genders in the winter and spring, respectively, the court’s option was to switch boys and girls seasons for either soccer or tennis. The schools chose soccer as the least disruptive change.
As people count the damaging effects and think about challenging the court-ordered placements a decade later, they must understand the court was looking for balance, for having the genders share the burden of participating in disadvantageous seasons. Moving Lower Peninsula boys golf to join girls in the fall and/or switching Lower Peninsula boys and girls tennis back to what was preferred and in place before judicial interference would recreate the imbalance the federal court conjured up and sought to remedy.
Those of us involved see many advantages to conducting fall golf for both genders in the Lower Peninsula and switching Lower Peninsula tennis seasons for boys and girls, no matter when colleges schedule those sports or how impractical the court’s logic and how inconsistently it was applied. Nevertheless, correcting the court’s errors could be both contentious and costly.