On Wednesday, a group called America's Promise Alliance issued its latest report on the education of our country's youth. America's Promise was started by Gen. Colin Powell back in 1997 with a band of corporations, nonprofits, foundations, policymakers, advocacy and faith-based groups to ensure that we provide our kids a foundation from which they can be successful.The newest report from America's Promise found that nearly half (47 percent) of all young people in the nation's 50 largest cities are not graduating from high school on time and that many of those aren't graduating at all, hence, becoming dropouts.
It is a problem because, the report reminded, the median income for high school dropouts is $14,000, which is significantly lower than the median income for high school graduates ($24,000) and for college graduates ($48,000). More troubling, the report pointed out, high school dropouts were the only workers who saw their income levels decline over the last 30 years.
But if you didn't comb through your newspaper, or maybe watch C-SPAN, you probably didn't notice this report on our national epidemic. Chances are, however, that you did hear of our newest dropout, a high school junior named Jeremy Tyler, who really isn't part of this problem at all. His story was everywhere, starting in The New York Times, which teased it on its front page.
This is how out of whack our concerns are in this country: Over a million kids drop out of school each year and start walking the economic road to nowhere and we don't so much as pay attention, but we can't find enough towels to soak up our collective lather over Tyler, a 17-year-old, 6-foot-11 basketball prodigy equipped with physical gifts to earn gobs of money, who revealed Wednesday -- the same day the report from America's Promise came out -- that he intended to walk away from high school as a junior to hone his skills for pay overseas.
If only the kids who drop out of high school unequipped to prosper, and maybe not even survive, got as much attention as Tyler, maybe we would be solving this national dropout problem. But they don't get the publicity or our worry. Tyler doesn't need it either. Tyler won't be among the dropouts who account for 13 percent of our adult population while earning less than six percent of all dollars in the country.
To be sure, the basketball talent broker Sonny Vaccaro told the Times that Tyler stood to make a six-figure salary playing basketball in Europe next season. Vaccaro helped a high school senior last year, Brandon Jennings, cut a deal to play in Europe this season for a reported $1.2 million in salary and endorsements rather than play for room, board, books and tuition at some sweatshop here known as a college basketball team, for a coach stuffing a couple million bucks in his pocket for his troubles. That's how ridiculous major college athletics has become. It makes you wonder how a college coach like USC football boss Pete Carroll could gather the audacity to criticize his last quarterback, Mark Sanchez, for not hanging around campus for a fifth year and play for a multimillionaire coach rather than play for his own millions in the NFL. That is the height of disingenuousness.
The only thing that challenges such absurdity would be Tyler playing college basketball for one year -- pretending to be a college student and soaking up a scholarship from some lesser talent who could really use it -- before turning pro.
It would be nice, of course, if Tyler and Jennings could just ply their trade in the NBA without having to stop at college first, or now go overseas, but the NBA's commissioner, owners and current players -- who are fearful of their jobs -- colluded to keep kids from jumping from their high school proms to NBA paydays.
As a result, we look at Tyler and wonder if he is doing the right thing rather than look at the builders of this pro basketball structure and wonder if they've done the wrong thing, which they have.
Professional basketball is an oxymoron. You don't have to be licensed to play it. We're not talking about neurosurgery and contract law. We're talking about shooting, rebounding and dribbling.
If Tyler is good enough at basketball to get someone to pay him a fat salary to do so, he should be able to do so right here in the U.S. of A. If he came up with a cure for cancer while in high school would we refuse to recognize it simply because he hasn't sported a mortarboard?
Tyler is doing the right thing. A pro athletic career has a shelf life. The faster he -- or anyone like him -- can start tapping it, the better off he will be. Doing so for relative slave wages in a major college program shouldn't be the only option. It isn't for prodigious tennis players. It isn't for prodigious soccer players. It shouldn't be for Jeremy Tyler or Brandon Jennings or any teenage talents like them to follow.
"In order to continue to move forward and make the U.S. competitive in today's global economy," Gen. Powell's wife, Alma, who chairs America's Promise, declared Wednesday, "we must work together like never before to provide the supports that young people need in order to graduate high school ready for college, work and life."
Tyler is an exception who has the opportunity to move ahead of that game, and he can always finish his high school studies and even go to college. In fact, more and more pro athletes are doing just that. They wind up being anything but dropouts.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
4-24-2009 @ 5:17AM
rwing said...
Kevin...I found your article most interesting. In some ways it is contradictory to America's Promise Alliance, but it also makes sense for the truly talented, assuming of course they REMAIN that way. But for the majority who drop out, as you stated, their future is bleak. But it is also for the majority that the NBA has such rules, which I generally tend to agree with. But you make a great point that the truly talented SHOULD not be held back, and their options should not be limited. Good article.
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4-24-2009 @ 11:56PM
SoCoolCurt (PSN: KillaKornbread - XBL: SoCoolCurt) said...
i'm still not sure how i feel about this really. on the one hand, as a college student, i feel like an education is important. but on the other hand, i know i'm going to college to gain the skills that will net me a bigger pay check later in life. this is a capitalist society we live in after all.
if he already has the skills to net that big pay check, then really where is the incentive to go to college to learn those same skills. sure practice makes perfect and i think he would be better served playing in tough college games than sitting on an NBA bench for 3 year. but this may be the one way to get the best of both worlds.
he gets to play pro ball and make money while he hones his skill in parts of the world where fundamentals still play a VERY big part of the game, unlike in the US. i guess we will know in a couple years if this science experiment works. and if it does, get ready to see a new trend.
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4-26-2009 @ 9:00AM
jzz3skys said...
"some sweatshop here known as a college basketball team, for a coach stuffing a couple million bucks in his pocket for his troubles"
The millionaire college coach has become a stock figure in Kevin's columns and is depicted here "stuffing a couple of million bucks in his pocket" (singular), which is a) physically improbable, b) hackneyed prose, and c) borderline demagoguery.
I guess Mr. Blackistone also thinks that the that millionaire sports reporters like himself who joke and backslap their way through TV's "Around the Horn" are not feeding off of (and being overly-compensated by) the commercialization of college sports. Gosh, it must be so great being self-annointed.
Or maybe he thinks he's the first well-heeled black writer to use jailed Black Panther Party member George Jackson as an ironic reference in order to put a "revolutionary" spin on his own pursuit of affluence? ("We are not worth more than the amount of capital we can raise.") Try anti-affirmative action theorist Stephen L. Carter's "The Emperor of Ocean Park," where "George Jackson" is the solution to the riddle.
Or should we compare sports reporters who play "identity politics" to someone like Bill Maxwell, who gave up his journalism job for a year and at a huge cut in pay, fulfilled a promise he'd made to teach at a historically black college. But not an elite Atlanta school like Spelman or any of the sports powerhouses, but at an unranked school in Alabama.
Btw, it's easy for Joey to flash his Darfur t-shirt at the Beijing airport, but has he symbolically protested Rachel Madduw's interview with Colin Powell on the subject of the former administration's flaunting of the Geneva Convention, the international anti-torture treatise?
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4-26-2009 @ 1:11PM
ed344mu said...
If Blackistone knew how to do research he might have checked on all the kids who left high school and declared for the NBA draft. He might have given us the numbers who made it and those who failed. He also might have provided a follow-up on the lives of those who opted for the NBA. Of course, if he knew how to research, he'd be a reporter, not a columnist!
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4-27-2009 @ 6:01AM
Africanama said...
It could be the same percentage as the ones who spent 4 years playing college ball. The NBA Draft is a crap shoot with no guarantees any player can succeed at the next level. If Tyler wants to go Europe to play, let him be. It is his life, after all.
4-26-2009 @ 1:54PM
willrust69 said...
It is time to realize that cookie cutter ideas do not work when millions of dollars are spent looking for loopholes, and legitimate options are available. The NBA & NFL might need to actually spend money on a true development league and just stay away from the mafia, I mean college boards.
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4-26-2009 @ 8:17PM
DJPREACH said...
Mr. Blackistone,
This young man will probably never experience the thrill of accepting something that he worked hard for.....a diploma. Surely he won't get the college sheepskin..he's already decided that he is in his own words too focused on getting better at basketball to hit the books. He has decided that he would much rather pay some shill to manage his wealth than to take a few business courses and learn how to manage his own money.
Shame on you Mr. Blackistone....when did the education that your parents so strongly suggested you acquire to assist you in attaining your status become so irrelevant. I generally agree with most of your observations...but on this one you are dead wrong. Whats going to happen is the shill who is representing this young man already knows this kid does not have the smarts at this point to even think he might not make it, or worse blow his knee out.The shill will take out a large insurance policy on the kids legs naming himself as the beneficiary.
Mr. Blackistone, please rethink your position in light of the minimal stats you started your commentary with. Stop promoting this "Neo-Minstrel" ideology.
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4-27-2009 @ 11:11AM
dinohealth said...
Wow! You really nailed this one, Kevin! Multi-dimensionally thought-provoking! I am taking a big breath after reading it! I'd love to have some stats on folks that went back to get their degree(s) after leaving early (HS, or, college) to grab their "American Dream" (i.e. BUCKS!), early. I guess that would shut up all the naysayers that want to perpetuate sports serfdom/bondage as long as possible for those very talented few that generate the very BUCKS that they live on!
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