Counterintuitive Fall 2024

It’s Time to Address the Media’s Role in School Shootings

“Mental illness and hatred pull the trigger,” said President Donald Trump last year about school shootings. “I want guns to be in the hands of people that are mentally stable. People that are insane, people that are sick up here, I don’t want them to get a gun.” This notion of mental illness as a red flag of potential school shooters has been parroted by gun-rights advocates for decades. In fact, politicians and researchers have tried relentlessly to search for “root” causes of school shootings; the circumstances that compel a child to commit mass murder. The premise that only psychologically unstable or bullied people can commit mass murder might seem intuitive to many but is based mostly on myth and prejudice, not fact. We will have a higher chance of minimizing school shootings if we focus instead on researching and addressing more immediate, rather than precipitating, causes of these tragedies.

Supposed “experts” of school shootings have long tried to paint personality disorders like psychopathy or sociopathy as the prime causes of school shootings. Peter Langman, director of KidsPeace, an organization that treats at-risk youth, suggests this very idea in his book Why Kids Kill. He boldly claims that “these are simply not ordinary kids. These are kids with serious psychological problems. This fact has been missed or minimized in reports on school shooters.” He divides school shooters into three categories of mental illness: Psychopathic, Psychotic, or Traumatized. Langman gives us many interesting stories of how some people of these types of mental illness came to become mass murders and comes up with factors that contribute to creating these types of school shooters. However, his conclusion doesn’t follow that these people represent a majority or even a significant portion of school shooters. He cherry-picks offenders with rare circumstances and completely ignores all the data we have on the mentally ill’s contribution to these crimes.

It’s important first to note the overwhelming lack of evidence that mental illness is a contributor to school shootings. In its 2018 report on the pre-attack behaviors of active shooters, the FBI highlights that it “could only verify that 25% (n = 16) of the active shooters in Phase II were known to have been diagnosed by a mental health professional with a mental illness of any kind prior to the offense.” Though it acknowledged that researchers were unable to determine a psychiatric history for 37% (n = 23) of cases, it nevertheless concluded that “declarations that all active shooters must simply be mentally ill are misleading and unhelpful.” In addition, the National Council for Behavioral Health’s 2019 report on mass violence in America concluded that “having a psychiatric diagnosis is neither necessary nor sufficient as a risk factor for committing an act of mass violence.”

In the book Gun Violence and Mental Illness, published by the American Psychiatric Association in 2016, the notion of a school shooting being caused by people with severe mental illness “snapping” is listed, by Peter Ash, among the many misconceptions surrounding such incidents. Ash goes further to point out that “only a small proportion of school shooters have a psychotic mental illness” and that school shootings are the product of long, careful planning rather than impulsive acts.

In a 2015 study published by Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, researchers reviewed 235 cases of mass shootings. They found a weak link between mental illness and mass shootings: only about 22% of the school shooters, or 52 out of 235, in these cases could be linked to mental illness. If we only consider school shootings from 2000 to 2015, this rate does not increase significantly. In that case, 32%, or 28 out of 88 mass murderers were mentally ill. In summary, most school shootings are not perpetrated by people with histories of mental illness.

In the article, Mass Shootings and Mental Illness, medical experts James Knoll et al. report that mass shootings by people with serious mental illness represent less than 1% of all yearly gun-related homicides. In addition, the overall contribution of people with serious mental illness to violent crimes is only about 3%, and an even smaller percentage of these violent crimes were found to involve firearms. The authors of this article agree that an effort to tackle this “phantom” mental illness cause will result in a significant loss of resources and time and not a successful intervention in school shootings.

Those who assert that mental illness is a cause of school shootings must also ask themselves what constitutes a mental illness that is a predictor of violence. In the 2015 article Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms, authors Jonathan Metzl et al. note that “data supporting the predictive value of psychiatric diagnosis in matters of gun violence is thin at best.” According to the article, “research dating back to the 1970s suggests that psychiatrists using clinical judgment are not much better than laypersons at predicting which individual patients will commit violent crimes and which will not.” Furthermore, the authors found that associations between violence and psychiatric diagnosis frequently change over time; schizophrenia, for example, used to be associated with docility and considered largely nonthreatening. That was until the late 1960s and early 1970s, during which schizophrenia and psychiatric conditions in general began to be associated with hostility, aggression, and projected anger. The authors also remarked, earlier in the article, that the 1980s “marked a consistent broadening of diagnostic categories and an expanding number of persons classifiable as ‘mentally ill.’” In other words, it’s likely that a significant portion of perpetrators of school shootings who were classified as “mentally ill” do not in fact have any psychiatric conditions that are accurate predictors of violence.

It follows that the myth of mental illness as a “red flag,” or an indicator that someone is at risk of committing a mass shooting has clearly been unhelpful in mitigating mass shootings. But it’s also been very counter-productive. In 2018, American Psychological Association President Jessica Henderson Daniel responded to those blaming mental illness as a cause for the school shooting in Parkland, Florida: “…remember that only a very small percentage of violent acts are committed by people who are diagnosed with, or in treatment for, mental illness. Framing the conversation about gun violence in the context of mental illness does a disservice to the victims of violence and unfairly stigmatizes the many others with mental illness.” This reflects the rapidly growing stigma that people who are mentally ill are more dangerous than those who are not.

According to the article Mass Shootings and Mental Illness, “perceptions of persons with mental illness as violent or frightening have substantially increased rather than decreased. In short, persons with serious mental illness are more feared today than they were half a century ago.” So, how have those with mental illnesses fared under a culture that blames them for mass violence? A study by Cynthia Hoffner et al. found that “news coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting, which linked mental illness with danger, appears to have led to threatening appraisals and fear among these viewers [people who had no experience with mental illness].” In addition, the perception by people with mental illness that the attitudes of others towards them had become more negative was associated with less engagement in support/comfort activities as well as less willingness to disclose mental health treatment.

Mental illness is not the only trait to be falsely implicated as a cause of school shootings. One of the biggest misconceptions about school gun violence is that there is an accurate or useful “common profile” of school shooters at all. The Secret Service reported in 2002 that “there is no accurate or useful ‘profile’ of students who engaged in targeted school violence.” The attackers referenced in the report varied in demographics such as age, race, status of family, academic success, social relationships, etc. In fact, there were indications that many of the attackers were successful in school and relationships. Over two-thirds of the attackers had never been in trouble or rarely were in trouble at school. The only noticeable circumstances shared by most of the attackers were that 71 percent experienced some form of bullying and 78 percent had a history of suicide attempts or suicidal thoughts prior to the attack. Though this highlights the importance of treating those with suicidal thoughts and supporting the fight against bullying, these circumstances are too common among the millions of children in the United States who don’t commit mass murders to be considered red flags. According to surveys from a report by the 2017 Youth Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 17.2 percent of high school students nationwide had seriously considered attempting suicide within the past year. Additionally, 19.0 percent of high school students nationwide had been bullied on school property in the past year, and 14.9 percent had been electronically bullied.

Researchers have tried, and failed, to come up with a “common profile” of school shooters. Authors Jack Levin and Eric Madfis attempted to illustrate the path to mass murder by children in their proposal of a five-stage model in which multiple criminological theories were integrated. Such a model suggested that long-term frustrations experienced in early life or in adolescence—whether at home or at school—lead to social isolations. These strains and the child’s lack of support systems, they add, cause any short-term negative event to be devastating, rendering him mentally and emotionally disturbed. This leads to the planning stage, during which the child fantasizes about situations in which they are the perpetrators of mass murder. Then the massacre eventually happens. The analyses of multiple school shootings such as the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School Massacre seemed to be consistent with Levin and Madfis’ model. Except there’s one critical flaw with it: it fails spectacularly to distinguish between the socially isolated children who have committed mass murder and the millions of American children who experience some form of social isolation but haven’t murdered anyone.

So, there’s evidently no negative trait shared by a significant portion of perpetrators that can predict school shootings. Then what causes are there, and what preventative measures can be taken?

There is one often-overlooked cause that, if addressed properly, could drastically reduce the number of school shootings: mass media coverage. It is counterintuitive to suggest that something as seemingly harmless as reporting the names of school shooters and telling their stories—as opposed to mental illness or social isolation—might be one of the biggest causes of modern school shootings. But sensationalism by the news and media is rampant in today’s world, and it’s inciting at-risk individuals to seek what journalists have been giving the school shooters on which they’ve reported: international fame and notoriety.

Instances of school shooting tragedies frequently appear on the front pages of national news outlets, with the primary focus of the story being the identity, motivations and backstory of the shooter during the first week of the tragedy.  Sometimes the editors sensationalize mass-murder tragedies with headlines like “BLOODBATH.” CNN, at one time, practically glorified the 2015 Oregon shooter by putting his motivation, manifested in a blog quote, on display to the world: “When they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who they are. His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one day. Seems the more people you kill, the more you’re in the limelight.” Ironically, CNN unintentionally gave the Oregon shooter exactly the fame he wanted.

Numerous studies and articles suggest that media sensationalism has become a major cause of school shootings today. Adam Lankford found, in his article, Fame Seeking-Rampage Shooters: Initial Findings and Empirical Predictions, that not only are fame-seeking rampage shooters becoming more common, but also that the United States has a disproportionate number of these offenders. According to a study, published in Aggression and Violent Behavior by Jason R. Silva et al., half of the 10 most widely covered mass shootings since 1999 were perpetrated by individuals explicitly classified as “fame-seekers.” They also found that 45 out of 308 cases of school shootings were motivated by a desire for fame.

But evidence of the effect of mass media coverage on at-risk individuals goes beyond merely reports that some rampage shooters explicitly sought fame. The percentage of perpetrators influenced to a significant degree by media sensationalism may very well be higher than those numbers, given that its effect can be subconscious. Another phenomenon that plays a role in school shootings and has been studied for quite some time is the “copycat effect.” The copycat effect is the tendency of media sensationalism or mass news coverage of a violent crime to result in similar events in the future. It has been shown to be a cause of various tragedies and has been observed for centuries. In his book, The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow’s Headlines, Loren Coleman describes how the phenomenon has influenced history and how tragedies are being perpetuated by mass media sensationalism today. One of the earliest instances of the copycat effect in action, Coleman described, was in Goathe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, which tells the story of a young man who shot himself after a failed romance and encouraged others to commit suicide as well. Coleman adds that mass media coverage of Marilyn Monroe’s death in 1962 caused the suicide rate in the United States to increase by over 12 percent for a brief time. Infamous murderers like Charles Manson and Jack the Ripper created many copycat killers. The incidents of suicide bombings over recent decades, he notes, were perpetuated by media sensationalism.

The copycat effect can be connected to the school shootings of today. A study, published nearly five years ago by PLOS ONE, found “significant evidence that mass killings involving firearms are incented by similar events in the immediate past.” In other words, school shootings are contagious. It notes that the time frame of temporarily-increased probability of a copycat incident is over 13 days. A 2016 study, published by the American Psychological Association, found that “for every four to five [school shooting] incidents, a new incident is copied within 13 days.” It also reported that “when the number of tweets about a school shooting incident went beyond 10 per million, the probability of a school shooting in the next eight days went up to 50%.” It conceded that a cause for this “contagion” phenomenon was unknown, but nevertheless concluded that there is a strong correlation between mass media coverage and the likelihood of a copycat incident.

Given that we have too little information to go on in terms of a “common profile” of mass shooters to tackle a root cause, the evidence that the media plays a significant role in mass shootings points to one solution: suppress media and news coverage. That means omitting the names, backstories, and other details of the perpetrators from social media pages, articles, and televised news. It’s time to stop giving mass murderers the fame they want. Eliminating or, at least, minimizing the international notoriety given to perpetrators as a result of committing mass shootings will significantly reduce the incentive to commit such acts by at-risk individuals in the future.

This is not to say that news stations and outlets should be forced by the government to stop giving out the names and backstories of school shooters. They have every right to do so. But it’s also true that they have a right to glorify school shooters while giving little attention to the victims, that they have the right to be greedy for views and ratings, that they have a right to be stupid. And they have exercised those rights to the fullest extent.

Though it holds very little prevalence in American politics, the argument that the media should suppress coverage of perpetrators due to their role in the problem has drawn its fair share of critics. For example, defenders of the “right to publish” the identities and details of school shooters attack arguments that refer to studies of the copycat effect with the insistence that there’s no hard proof of media contagion. However, when young lives are at stake, a preponderance of the evidence should be enough to convince the media to at least TRY voluntary suppression of the shooters’ identities to see if it reduces copycat atrocities. After all, a solution that is low risk with a potentially high reward deserves serious consideration.

But wait, these critics say, there are plenty of benefits associated with reporting on and publishing details of the shooter’s identity and background.

A short article, written by Kelly McBride and published on Poynter, touches specifically on this argument. McBride asserts that there are plenty of positives associated with naming the shooter and that they outweigh the negatives. In summary, she claims that naming the shooter gives people important context for the backstory, helps sociologists identify trends, and prevents misinformation. While these claims are true to a degree, McBride implicitly presents a false choice: journalists and news networks either continue to cover mass shooters the same way they’ve been doing so before or leave the public in the dark.

No one is suggesting we stop keeping records of the identities of shooters or that we examine their circumstances and motivations. The real issue lies with sensationalism: plastering the shooter’s name, face, and backstory all over Facebook, Twitter, and every national news outlet imaginable. It is the very idea that one will become an international sensation and, perhaps, a hero to individuals with similar ideologies that encourages those who are at-risk to commit mass violence.

Here’s a question for McBride: is it really necessary for the Columbine, Sandy Hook, Tucson, Virginia Tech, and Orlando shooters to be the subject of 38% (as reported in Aggression and Violent Behavior) of all articles dedicated to mass shootings from 1966 to May 2018?

Fortunately, there are plenty of ways by which the media can discontinue their contribution to a culture of fame-seeking shooters without causing other problems down the road. They can stop talking endlessly about the shooter and his backstory, give out the names of perpetrators only if it is absolutely necessary to do so (e.g. if he is on the loose, and reporting personal details are necessary for his capture), and encourage the everyday people of social media to stop giving the shooter the fame they want.

Overall, while it IS important to document the identities of school shooters, they certainly don’t belong on the front page, or on CNN or Twitter for an entire week. Even though we cannot consider circumstances like social isolation, mental illness, bullying, or childhood trauma solid factors in a rampage shooter’s decision to commit mass murder, we now know that external forces such as media sensationalism play a major role in pushing such individuals on the brink of doing so. Even though no study is 100% certain on how this phenomenon works or what drives it, there’s nothing to lose by voluntarily minimizing media coverage of the personal details of school shooters. In fact, the 2016 American Psychological Association study predicted a one third reduction in shootings if the contagion is removed. It’s worth trying and, because it doesn’t revolve around gun control or mental illness, an idea against which neither gun-rights nor gun-control advocates can argue. Reducing media sensationalism demands dedication from journalists and the collaborative effort of everyone in the media.

References

Langman, Peter. Why Kids Kill: inside the Minds of School Shooters. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. https://books.google.com/books?id=UUTtO5P6DncC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false.

“A Study of Pre-Attack Behaviors of Active Shooters in the United States Between 2000 and 2013.” FBI, FBI, 20 June 2018, http://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/pre-attack-behaviors-of-active-shooters-in-us-2000-2013.pdf/view.

West, Julia. “Mass Violence in America.” Homeland Security Digital Library, 13 Aug. 2019, http://www.hsdl.org/c/mass-violence-in-america/.

Gold, Liza H., and Robert I. Simon. “Gun Violence and Mental Illness.” American Psychiatric Association Publishing, American Psychiatric Association, 2016, http://www.appi.org/gun_violence_and_mental_illness.

StoneMichael, H. “Mass Murder, Mental Illness, and Men: Semantic Scholar.” Semantic Scholar, Jan. 2015, www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Mass-murder%2C-mental-illness%2C-and-men-StoneMichael/eb845a337408bd17f73f7301f2c197f57777ff17.

Metzl, Jonathan M., and Kenneth T. MacLeish. “The American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) from the American Public Health Association (APHA) Publications.” American Journal of Public Health, American Public Health Association (APHA) Publications, 12 Dec. 2014, ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2014.302242#_i2.

Knoll IV, James L., and George D. Annas. Mass Shootings and Mental Illness. American Psychiatric Association Publishing, 2016, Psychiatry Online, psychiatryonline.org/doi/pdf/10.5555/appi.books.9781615371099.

Hoffner, C. A., Fujioka, Y., Cohen, E. L., & Atwell Seate, A. (2017). Perceived media influence, mental illness, and responses to news coverage of a mass shooting. Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 6(2), 159–173. https://doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000093

Vossekuil, Bryan, et al. “The Final Report and Findings of the ‘Safe School Initiative’: Implications for the Prevention of School Attacks in the United States.” Govinfo, 1 May 2002, http://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/ERIC-ED466024.

Kann, Laura, et al. “Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance – United States, 2017.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 21 May 2018, www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/ss/ss6708a1.htm.

Madfis, Eric. “In Search of Meaning: Are School Rampage Shootings Random and Senseless Violence?” Taylor & Francis, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00223980.2016.1196161.

Lankford A. (2016). Fame Seeking-Rampage Shooters: Initial Findings and Empirical Predictions. Aggression and Violent Behavior 27, p. 122–129. [Lengthy link]

Silva, Jason R., and Emily Ann Greene-Colozzi. “Fame-Seeking Mass Shooters in America: Severity, Characteristics, and Media Coverage.” Aggression and Violent Behavior, Pergamon, 2 Aug. 2019, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S135917891830274X.

Coleman, Loren. “The Copycat Effect.” Google Libros, Google, 2004, books.google.com.pa/books/about/The_Copycat_Effect.html?id=3B4lTTZE58oC.

Gomez-Lievano, Andres, et al. “Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings.” PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, 2 July 2015, journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0117259.

Johnston, Jennifer, and Andrew Joy. Mass Shootings and the Media Contagion Effect. Western New Mexico University, http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2016/08/media-contagion-effect.pdf.

McBride, Kelly. “Why It’s Important to Name the Shooter.” Poynter, Poynter, 6 Nov. 2017, www.poynter.org/ethics-trust/2017/why-its-important-to-name-the-shooter-2/.

Adding a Hard Salary Cap in MLB Would Improve League Parity, Increasing Fan Attendance and TV Ratings

Major League Baseball has struggled to achieve parity ever since the implementation of the luxury tax in 2002. The hard cap for equality movement would effectively create competitive balance in the league, increase fan attendance and tv ratings, and expand the league’s economy. However, and understandably so, there are many sports fans who believe that the hard salary cap is negatively affecting leagues that use it, and they would likely be opposed to introducing the hard cap to America’s favorite pastime. For example, the New England Patriot’s dominance over the past decade is a reasonable reason for “Luxury Tax Fans” to assume that the hard cap fails to effectively create competitive balance. The Patriots have made the playoffs in eleven consecutive seasons (dating back to the 2009-2010 season), earned a ticket to the Super Bowl in five of those seasons, and won it all three times.

With that situation in mind, Luxury Tax Fans are probably thankful that they do not have to watch similar dominance in baseball. But the hard cap is not meant to prevent elite organizations, ones that make intelligent trades and signings, draft players efficiently, and make coaching staff adjustments, from competing year after year. Teams should not be penalized for being run exceptionally well, but they should be penalized for breaching a spending limit! However, a competitively balanced league should severely limit the number of dynasties, and it should also involve teams of all markets making the postseason as often as possible.

In the NFL, the hard salary cap does just that, for only 3 teams: the Cleveland Browns, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and the New York Jets, have not made postseason appearances since 2014. Meanwhile, 8 teams in Major League Baseball, which is more than ¼ of the league’s teams, have experienced postseason droughts since 2014. Not only has the NFL’s use of the hard salary cap helped achieve parity regarding postseason appearances, but there have also been a healthy number of small market teams winning the entire postseason (the Super Bowl).

Teams such as the Yankees, Red Sox, and Dodgers are classified as big market teams due to their worldwide popularity, media market size/outreach, and city-based population. Big market teams are also some of the most valuable organizations in all of baseball. Oftentimes, these are the organizations that have the financial power to dominate their respective divisions and leagues for years. Meanwhile, the opposite of big market teams is, unsurprisingly, the small market teams. Teams like the Tampa Bay Rays, Seattle Mariners, and Pittsburgh Pirates are lesser-known teams with small city populations, a poor media market, and/or a shared media market with rival clubs. Due to their overall unfavorable markets, they typically struggle to compete with the big market teams whose owners can easily afford to exceed the luxury tax so that they can acquire more talent.

As a result, small market teams practice a concept termed “tanking” more often than big market teams. Tanking teams discuss losing intentionally, behind closed doors, in order to receive higher draft picks in the following year’s draft. Tanking for draft picks only ends successfully when teams draft well, but judging young talent is one of the most challenging tasks to accomplish in baseball. Small market teams that rely on tanking defy the odds and make great picks every so often, but many times high draft picks are “busts,” and teams enter a cycle of tanking that lasts for years. Tanking hurts the baseball economy tremendously because it negatively affects league parity, and fans do not want to invest their time or hard-earned money into watching a subpar team.

The only small market team to win the World Series in TWO DECADES under MLB’s luxury tax is the Kansas City Royals, while NFL teams from small markets such as Kansas City, New Orleans, Denver, Seattle, Baltimore, Green Bay, and Pittsburgh have all brought home a championship in the past decade alone. Although the Patriots were dominant for many years, their success was not largely dependent on tanking teams, for the league still saw a plethora of teams from different markets make, and win, in the postseason while enforcing a hard salary cap. The NFL uncovered gold when they developed their hard salary cap system because it discouraged tanking, and in the process, it improved the game’s economy and parity.

Major League Baseball is the only league of the four major American professional sports leagues: National Basketball Association (NBA), National Football League (NFL), and the National Hockey League (NFL), to not have a salary cap on spending. Major League Baseball’s salary tax, also known as the Competitive Balance Tax, is an outdated model from 2002 that sets teams to a specified limit on spending. The luxury tax boundary is declared in the Collective Bargaining Agreement each year, which is constituted by the Major League Baseball Players Association and Major League Baseball’s commissioner. As Corey Seidman notes in his NBC Sports Philadelphia article “Explaining MLB’s luxury tax in relation to 2020 Phillies,” the luxury tax is a boundary that causes teams to pay a tax if they exceed the payroll threshold. For the 2020 season, the threshold sits at $208 million, and first-time offenders pay a 20% tax on overages.

The penalties become increasingly harsh if a team’s payroll is over the luxury tax threshold for consecutive seasons. For second-year offenders, that tax rate rises to 30%. If a team remains over the luxury tax threshold for three consecutive years, they are taxed 50% on all overages. However, surtaxes are appended when teams exceed specific “milestones” past the luxury tax threshold, regardless of whether they are repeat offenders or not. If a team exceeds the tax by $20 million at any point, they are automatically issued a 12% surtax, while organizations that are more than $40 million over are penalized with a 42.5% surtax, and their top draft pick is lowered by 10 spots.

To put the luxury tax further into perspective, Mike Trout is nearly ubiquitously accepted as the best player in baseball. Per Spotrac, Trout will earn $37,666,666 in 2020, making him the highest paid player in the sport next season. Hypothetically, a baseball team that is already at the $208 million luxury tax threshold could sign a free agent player of Mike Trout’s caliber to a one-year contract, hand that player the largest contract in all of baseball for the 2020 season ($38 million average annual value), and then lose the player to free agency the following year. Under the current luxury tax system, the assumed first time-offending organization would be permitted to sign that hypothetical elite player, and they would be fined a measly $9.6 million (pocket change to big market team owners). In essence, staying below the luxury tax is only a recommendation, and it is a recommendation that is often disregarded by richer teams.

The luxury tax in Major League Baseball fails to create competitive balance because it does not set a finite limit for spending, inviting big market teams to exceed it and gain an advantage. More importantly, the luxury tax is not punishing enough which is why rich teams are so capable of flaunting the penalties and fines. Mike Axisa reviews the significant decrease in teams paying luxury tax penalties after the 2018 season in his CBS Sports article, “Only Red Sox, Nationals owe luxury tax in 2018 as MLB teams combine for smallest bill in 15 years,” but he fails to recognize that 2018 was an outlier season. With hindsight, it is revealed that teams have not altered their mindset regarding the luxury tax. In 2019, three teams paid luxury tax penalties, and as it stands, four teams are set to exceed the threshold in 2020.

One reason for the sudden decrease in teams paying luxury tax penalties in 2018 is that two MLB teams had been paying the fines for many years. Big market teams reset the luxury tax threshold by going under the threshold for one year in order to avoid the repeat-offense surtaxes. In Axisa’s article, he explains that the Yankees had paid the luxury tax every year during a 13-year span from 2003-2017. They paid upwards of $340 million dollars in penalties for their excessive spending. Meanwhile, the Dodgers also remained over the luxury tax threshold for several years before shedding salary and getting under in 2018. They paid the luxury tax from 2013-2017.

By going over the luxury tax, both the Yankees and Dodgers were able to dominate their divisions. In the 10-season stretch from 2003-2012, the Yankees won their division seven times, made the playoffs nine times (only in 2007 were they not a playoff team), and won a World Series in 2009. Meanwhile, the Dodgers had paid the tax and won their division every year from 2013-2017. They also advanced to Game 7 of the 2017 World Series before losing to the Houston Astros (who have since been persecuted for cheating in that series). The luxury tax penalties clearly do not phase big market teams, but smaller market teams do not have the financial means to exceed the luxury tax for fifteen straight years!

The Tampa Bay Rays are a beautiful example of a team succeeding while spending very little. In fact, the 2019 Rays had the lowest payroll in baseball, yet they won 96 games and earned themselves the second Wild Card spot in the American League. The Rays have been beating the odds for years. However, their success has been largely influenced by an elite general manager and coaches who consistently turn outcasts into some of MLB’s most productive players. Since the year 2000, there has only been one small market team that won the World Series: the Kansas City Royals, while the top five markets in MLB: New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston have combined for half of the World Series’ won in the past two decades. Simply put, teams that spend the most tend to win the most.

Teams can spend less money and still be successful, but a hard salary cap provides constant stability and competitive balance for the league, regardless of how much money is spent by small market teams. Hard caps, like MLB’s salary tax, are enforced by their respective leagues in order to maintain balance between all teams and to ensure that no team has a spending advantage. Preventing big market teams from “buying championships” by signing all the best available players is the primary reason why the caps and taxes are created. However, hard salary caps allow no leniency and are the strictest systems in modern American sports. Monica Charlton outlines the NFL hard salary cap penalties in “A Brief History of the NFL Salary Cap,” mentioning that any team that surpasses the hard cap is subject to any of the following: suspension or dismissal of team staff (typically the general manager or owner), forfeiture of games for the duration of a team circumventing the cap, loss of future draft picks, voiding of player extension contracts, and fines up to $5 million. In addition, any attempt to sign or extend a player’s contract, subsequently putting them over the salary cap, automatically issues the team a $25,000 fine.

The NFL is incredibly balanced due to the hard salary cap, and it encourages smaller market teams to spend money, thereby opening the door for them to compete on AND off the field with the bigger markets. In John Vrooman’s journal article, titled “A General Theory of Professional Sports Leagues,” he conducted a study regarding market size and revenue elasticity of winning within MLB, NFL, and NBA.

“The estimates of the revenue elasticity of winning are consistent with the hypotheses of the general theory of sports leagues. MLB has the highest winning elasticity (b=.6), the NBA has less (b=.5), while the NFL has the lowest revenue elasticity of winning (b=.12). These results are precisely what should be expected under the current institutional configuration of the three leagues. The large market revenue advantage is greatest in MLB, less for the NBA, and the least for the NFL.”

The large market revenue advantage is 2 times greater in Major League Baseball than in the NFL, and it shows. As stated earlier, only 3 teams: the Cleveland Browns, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and the New York Jets, have not made a postseason appearance since 2014. On the other hand, a whopping 8 teams in Major League Baseball, which is more than ¼ of the league’s teams, have experienced postseason droughts since 2014! In addition, half of the World Series winners over the past 20 years have come from the top five MLB markets. Why is there such a difference? In large part it is directly due to the hard salary cap. Less incentive to tank and more (but limited) spending due to the regulations of a hard cap creates parity in the NFL. As a result, they are the king of competitive balance in American professional sports.

In addition, the use of a hard salary cap would also make attendance and TV ratings go up, which would in turn boost MLB’s economy, which would then raise the hard cap and allow general managers to hand out larger contracts to the players. For example, NFL’s attendance and TV ratings are thriving due to their consistently entertaining and drama-filled regular seasons, postseasons, and off-seasons. Meanwhile, Major League Baseball is experiencing a significant drop in their ratings. In the article “From Terrible Teams To Rising Costs: Why MLB Attendance Is Down Over 7% Since 2015,” author Maury Forbes outlines the severity of Major League Baseball’s fan attendance decrease since 2015. In the 2019 season, 14 teams out of 30 saw attendance declines from 2018. Altogether, MLB has not witnessed an attendance increase since the 2015 season, and fan attendance has dropped 7.14% which equates to 5,265,268 fans.

Admittedly, the NFL’s success is not entirely reliant on its hard cap system. But it certainly plays a role in increasing fan engagement, which is still vital for a sport’s success. Greater competition creates greater demand and intrigue from fans. The aforementioned drop in fan engagement seen in MLB is in large part due to widespread belief among general managers that their purchase(s) of players will not be enough to contend with the stacked big market teams in the playoffs. Revenues may be soaring, but the fans and popularity of the sport are more essential to the future of the game than revenue. And fans do not want to watch a league that lacks competitive balance, one where the current luxury tax rules benefit only a small percentage of teams while scaring the others away from improving the quality that they put on the field. The more fans that would watch and attend games, the more money Major League Baseball would make. The more money they would make, the more the salary cap would increase. A transition to using a hard salary cap would not only make fans happier, but it would also improve the attendance and tv ratings of the sport, and the average player salary would increase since baseball’s net worth would skyrocket!

Many people are led to believe that an altered agreement of revenue sharing in Major League Baseball would have a greater impact on competitive balance than the addition of a hard salary cap. The concept behind revenue sharing is sensible because one would expect that an even distribution of revenue would create competitive balance/equality regardless of where teams are located. However, MLB has already altered their revenue sharing agreement in the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) in 1996, 2002, and 2006, and 2017 to no avail. In author William Ryan Colby’s essay, “Revenue Sharing, Competitive Balance, and Incentives in Major League Baseball,” he analyzed the different approaches that Major League Baseball has used in order to achieve parity through revenue sharing. Colby concluded,

“The analysis also indicates that the effects of these systems are sticky; although MLB has begun to fix the problems, it will likely take more time for the improvements to take hold. Regardless, however, this research shows that MLB has tried and ultimately appears to have failed in their attempts to promote competitive balance through increased payroll balance.  They have failed because they have constructed institutions that create backwards incentives and because they have failed to draw a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ imbalance.”

In 2011, Colby predicted that conditions would improve; but the latest CBA rules for revenue sharing from 2017 indicate no progress in competitive balance. The teams that make the most money get less back in return, while the lower spending teams get more in return than what they paid. In the 2020 article “Looking Under the Hood of MLB’s Revenue Sharing Plan,” William Juliano of The Captain’s Blog says,

“…teams can pretty much guarantee a hefty profit by maintaining a low payroll. However, according to the collective bargaining agreement (CBA), clubs are supposed to use revenue sharing to enhance their winning percentage, not their bottom line. The MLBPA isn’t convinced that every team is operating in accordance with that stipulation, and the recent trend toward tanking seems to back up their claim.”

Essentially, MLB has no beneficial way to alter the revenue sharing agreement in order to improve competitive balance within the league.

Major League Baseball has played with increasing percentage of shares below 50% over the years. In the 1996 agreement, 20% of local revenue shares were subject to equal distribution among the 30 MLB teams. Since then, the CBA has continued to increase revenue sharing, and in 2020 Baseball Reference lists that the local revenue sharing has progressed to 48% distributed equally between teams. It appears there is no perfect percentage to avoid tanking teams because the larger the percentage, the more money tanking teams make (which inclines them to tank even more). The lower the percentage, the more money higher-profit teams get to keep, only encouraging them to overspend and go over the luxury tax. With a hard salary cap, those teams would not be permitted to over-spend or they would risk forfeiting games, losing draft picks, and even suspension or dismissal. Plus, the hard salary cap encourages small markets to spend and compete with the bigger markets, rather than changing the revenue sharing agreement which would make the tanking issue even worse (regardless of whether the league boosted or lowered the percentage).

In conclusion, although the notion that the hard salary cap movement could benefit Major League Baseball conflicts with common opinion, it is the most efficient recourse by far. Baseball desperately needs to change its tax system, and despite looking like one of the least successful methods for achieving parity, upon dissection NFL’s hard salary cap has actually revealed itself to be an incredibly effective taxing method to achieve competitive balance in sports. Many people believe that an alteration in Major League Baseball’s revenue sharing agreement under the CBA would be a more impactful way to create league parity. But history has shown that revenue sharing agreements tend to be counterproductive because they unintentionally promote the concept of tanking. Overall, MLB’s best opportunity to make the league better would be to employ a hard salary cap.

References

Axisa, M. (2018, December 15). Only Red Sox, Nationals owe luxury tax in 2018 as MLB teams combine for smallest bill in 15 years.

B-R Bullpen. (Baseball Reference, 2016). Retrieved April 14, 2020.

Brown, M. (2019, October 4). From Terrible Teams To Rising Costs: Why MLB Attendance Is Down Over 7% Since 2015.

Charlton, Monica. (2018, July 12). A Brief History of the NFL Salary Cap.

Colby, W. R. (2011). Revenue Sharing, Competitive Balance, and Incentives in Major League Baseball. How MLB Revenue Sharing Made the Yankees Better.

Juliano, W. Looking Under the Hood of MLB’s Revenue Sharing Plan. (2020, March 7).

MLB Rankings. (Spotrac). Retrieved April 14, 2020.

Seidman, C., Salisbury, J., & NBC Sports Philadelphia Staff. (2020, January 9). A refresher on MLB’s luxury tax in relation to 2020 Phillies.

Vrooman, J. (1995). A General Theory of Professional Sports Leagues. Southern Economic Journal, 61(4), 971-990. doi:10.2307/1060735

Learning Begins in the Womb

Babies begin to learn in the mother’s womb, and by that I mean more than merely developing reflexes. They learn to recognize the sound of their mother’s voice and learn food preferences as well. No one would deny that distinguishing human voices is a cognitive skill that requires learning from experience; in other words, it’s knowledge. By contrast, a reflex is an action performed as a response to a stimulus without conscious thought. If the baby’s heart rate slows at the sound of the mother’s voice and spikes in response to a very loud sound, these would be reflexes. I will use the terms with care and demonstrate that fetuses don’t merely react to stimulus; they learn. It is commonly perceived that developing is the only thing going on with a fetus in the womb. Fetal origins hypothesis has debunked this idea and said that learning also is occuring which creates a big controversy along the lines of deciphering between what is learning and what is developing.

The argument on deck is that all of it development, which cannot be the case after researching the learning aspects the fetus goes through. I am not arguing that all of what goes on in the womb is learning, I know that there is also lots of development occurring in the fetuses body and brain but I am definitely advocating that babies also begin learning, even before they are born. You know the saying “they got that from their mother” that the mother embarrassingly says when their child does something good? That really means they learned that from their mother because while in utero the baby feeds off of when their mother is talking, what they eat the most, and the emotions she is feeling. Fetuses have enough cognitive ability to absorb information, process sensory data, and enter the world with a set of preferences that they developed by being in their mother’s womb during their gestation period. Learning is a huge part of what goes on with the fetus as it is growing in the womb, even up until the last day it is fully grown and ready to come out. Lots of people would disagree and say babies don’t begin learning until they are born. The argument here is that if a one-day-year-old newborn is learning why can’t a 270-day fetus also be learning? 

Learning is defined as “The acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience, study, or by being taught,”. Reflex is defined as “An action that is performed as a response to a stimulus and without conscious thought,”. These terms significantly differ, and proving that all the factors in my hypothesis are evidence of  “learning” is the goal of my research. Providing evidence that fetuses memorize their mother’s voice, creating food preferences through their mom, and share the same distressed feelings as their mother are all learned before birth is the key to proving the fetal origins hypothesis. A great quote from Annie Murphy, TED Talk speaker on the topic of What babies learn before they are born reads, “Much of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life — the air she breathes, the food and drink she consumes, the chemicals she’s exposed to, even the emotions she feels — are shared in some fashion with her fetus. They make up a mix of influences as individual and idiosyncratic as the woman herself. The fetus incorporates these offerings into its own body, makes them part of its flesh and blood. And often it does something more. It treats these maternal contributions as information, as what I like to call biological postcards from the world outside,”. I like to think that what Murphy means by “biological postcards” is that when the fetus gains new insight from its mom it holds onto that information like a postcard, therefore they are learning from her. 

    Babies who recognize their mother’s voice in the womb and outside the womb is evidence of learning. The child has learned the mom’s voice vibration in the womb and so that when it is born it knows her voice because of listening and memorizing it. Memorization and recognizing sound is learning to a fetus and would not be considered a reflex. The difference between a reflex and learning is that reflexes occur naturally to the human, like moving their hand from a stove when something is hot. Learning, to humans, is knowing that the stove is hot because there is a flame which I associate being the agent of burning and I do not touch it so I won’t get hurt again. Babies gain their reflexes through learning, they aren’t born with the reflexes of knowing voices and knowing what food they like; they learn this from their mother while still unborn. We can begin exploring this idea by taking a look at how babies in the womb absorb information. By absorbing information such as the vibration of their mother’s voice babies are learning. While the mother is talking when pregnant the baby begins to pick up on the vibration that leads to the womb and know that it’s their mom’s. When the baby is born it knows right away the difference between anyone else’s voice and their mom’s. The baby gravitates toward their mother’s voice because it was comforting to them in the womb and is now a sign of comfort outside of the womb. The fetus learns through sound vibrations so that way when they are born they will automatically know their mom’s voice and know that that is a safe place.

     At the University of Washington, co-author and director of The Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences Patricia Kuhl says the mother’s vowel sounds in her speech are the loudest and the fetus locks onto them. She also says, “Sensory and brain mechanisms for hearing are developed at 30 weeks of gestational age, and the new study shows that unborn babies are listening to their mothers talk during the last 10 weeks of pregnancy and at birth can demonstrate what they’ve heard,”. The study that proved this statement was conducted at Pacific Lutheran University of Tacoma, and professor of psychology there, Christine Moon, says previously it was believed that babies discriminate language in the first few months of birth and proves this is the first study done that shows fetuses prenatally learn language, which moves the results from the first six months of birth to before birth.

The study was conducted in Sweden with one-day old babies and was described as this: “ babies listened to vowel sounds in their native tongue and in foreign languages. Their interest in the sounds was captured by how long they sucked on a pacifier that was wired into a computer measuring the babies’ reaction to the sounds. Longer or shorter sucking for unfamiliar or familiar sounds is evidence for learning, because it indicates that infants can differentiate between the sounds heard in utero. In both countries, the babies at birth sucked longer for the foreign language than they did for their native tongue,”. With this information we are able to provide aid and “evidence for learning” that in fact babies begin recognizing language and sounds through their mother’s voice in utero. Some may think of babies recognizing their mother’s voice in the womb is a reflex or developmental part of their time as a fetus because they believe it happens naturally therefore it must be a part of development , but in fact the fetus is learning. Back to the definition of learning which is, “to gain knowledge or understanding of or skill in by study, instruction, or experience,”. With the definition in mind, think of being able to recognize their mom’s voice as the skill that they’re going to obtain, they learned to know the vibrations of her voice through studying it in their third trimester in the womb. 

It’s not just sounds that babies learn while in the womb, preferences are acquired as well. Food preference is definitely learned in the womb and is not a reflex, they are learned through their mothers repetitive eating habits. Food preferences is another part of fetal origins that my opposing side might see as developmental. Food preferences in babies are definitely learned while in utero, they learn what they like by what their mother eats while pregnant. Some may argue back at this by saying things like women have cravings when they’re pregnant and only eat junk foods, which babies can’t eat. But it is not cravings I am referring to, I am talking about repetition in the food that is consumed by the mom. A different study was done that involves something much healthier for their mom and baby; carrots. In Annals of Nutrition and Metabolism; Complementary Foods and Flavor Experience: Setting the Scene an experiment was done on pages 44-45 by author Julie Mennella with random pregnant women who planned on breastfeeding were assigned to three different groups. Group one was in their third trimester and drank carrot juice for several days, group two was in their first three months of lactation and drank carrot juice for several days of the week as well, and the final group drank only water.

When born, the babies were introduced to regular cereal and carrot cereal, the babies whose mothers drank carrot juice gravitated and had a liking toward the carrot juice than the babies whose moms drank water. The babies who weren’t exposed to carrots either from amniotic fluid or breast milk were reluctant to try the carrot flavored cereal and showed this through facial expressions and ate way less of it than the babies who were exposed to carrots in the womb. With this information we can conclude that babies learn from their mother’s daily food intake and agree with whatever food their mother ingests often, this is a learned trait passed to the baby because they are taught that their mom likes carrots so they learn that they must like that food as well. There are huge teaching moments in the womb and mom’s cannot let that opportunity go to waste when there’s a chance to teach your kids to like vegetables before they’re even born! You can say that babies develop a food preference through their mom but this study aids in proving that is taught to them through repetition in utero. 

Another thing that is learned in the womb is emotional distress, specifically PTSD that the mother develops while pregnant and the baby learns from the emotions their mom is undergoing. In a TED Talk called What Babies Learn Before They’re Born speaker Annie Murphy Paul tells about the fetal origin hypothesis. Annie Murphy is an advocate that learning begins in the womb and tells about different instances when the fetus is learning. One study she talks about was conducted on pregnant women who were in New York during the 9/11 tragedy. The mothers tested positive for PTSD but researchers were interested in seeing if the now born baby also had signs of PTSD since their birth. It is estimated that there were about 1,700 pregnant women in New York during the attack, 38 of those women gave researchers their saliva to conduct a study done by professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Mount Sinai Medical Sentre in New York, Rachel Yehuda, and her colleagues conducted an experiment with these women and then their born babies a year later.

They found that the women in their third trimester who had been diagnosed with PTSD baby’s also showed high levels of stress in the only one-year-old infant. Their cortisol levels were significantly low and so were their childrens when tested a year later, as well as showing signs of great distress at just the age of one years old. This is evidence that the baby is learning from their mother before they are even born, whatever their mom feels they soak up that information like a sponge. Infants also experience post traumatic stress disorder even if they have not been through the trauma first hand. To the opposing view this topic alone could easily be seen as developmental but after referring back to the definition of learning we know the PTSD is obtained by the baby through “experience”. This is not to say that all infants or fetuses whose mother has been through serious trauma also experiences her pain but it is very likely and we know that through experimentation. This study helps to provide evidence that babies in utero also experience tragedies like their mother does, they learn from her emotions. I can see why one might say this disorder is passed down but after researching this study I am able to prove that because the fetus was in utero when the tragedy happened that they learned from their mom’s own experiences how to feel about the situation. The mother’s from the 9/11 tragedy had these emotions while pregnant and therefore taught their baby to share the same post traumatic stress disorder after they were born and while still in the womb.

This concept is one that no one really ever talked with until a couple decades ago so we want to know why all of a sudden this is so important? The fetal origins hypothesis is crucial in understanding why an infant is born with the cognitive abilities he or she has. Once we can understand why babies know what they know then it becomes easier to say that babies learn before their parents even start teaching them. Infants are way smarter than we believe them to be since their learning experience actually started a little under 9 months ago when they were growing inside their mother’s womb. Scientific author, Annie Murphy, also the speaker in the TED Talk titled What babies learn before they’re born says this, “Fetal origins is a scientific discipline that emerged just about two decades ago, and it’s based on the theory that our health and well-being throughout our lives is crucially affected by the nine months we spend in the womb,”. This hypothesis changes the whole outlook on learning stages in children. Murphy continues by saying, “When we hold our babies for the first time, we might imagine that they’re clean slates, unmarked by life, when in fact, they’ve already been shaped by us and by the particular world we live in. Today I want to share with you some of the amazing things that scientists are discovering about what fetuses learn while they’re still in their mothers’ bellies,”. Murphy agrees that babies’ brains are extraordinarily capable of being far more than just a clean slate once they are brought into this world.

To some, when they think of learning it may just be the alphabet, colors, shapes, or simple addition but learning in fact can be as small as beginning to recognize voices and knowing which food they prefer. Knowing that learning begins in utero through sounds, foods, and emotions may be a hard concept to wrap one’s head around but when given the evidence is truly eye opening to the fact that simple things can be taught in the womb by the mother to their unborn child. When the baby is born it is brought into this world with way more knowledge than we give them credit for, just think of their time in utero as a 9 month homeschooling where they learn all about the world and their mother is the teacher. It is a commonality that toddlers go to preschool to begin learning since school is associated with learning. I think people forget that learning is all around us from day one, and by day one I mean day 1 in the womb. Learning is not only shown in the classroom but is everywhere especially for young developing minds, fetuses feed off their mothers knowledge and acquire their very first lessons while still in the womb. 

We know that there is lots of evidence to argue that the fetus is learning. The question is now, do babies begin learning these traits in the womb or are they just reflexes to them when they are born? Differing the learning stages a fetus goes through in utero from their developmental stages is my objective. Defining learning and reflex and comparing them was crucial to this research in order to understand that the aspects of my hypothesis are in fact considered learning. I understand that it is easiest to believe that fetuses only develop while in the womb but it is so far beyond that. In her TED Talk, Annie Murphy ends by stating, “Let me be clear. Fetal origins research is not about blaming women for what happens during pregnancy. It’s about discovering how best to promote the health and well-being of the next generation. That important effort must include a focus on what fetuses learn during the nine months they spend in the womb. Learning is one of life’s most essential activities, and it begins much earlier than we ever imagined,”. Having this fetal origins hypothesis in mind should open up doors in our brains that may be hard to break down but after hearing the incredible evidence researchers have put out should make all the most sense that babies in utero are learners.

I believe that mother’s are teaching their babies so much about the world they will soon live in to give them a head start. This world is so crazy to come into it with no prior knowledge but because of research and the fetal origins hypothesis we can be rest assured that our generation of babies and the nest to come are born fully equipped to handle what lies ahead of them. Babies and toddlers are often described as sponges who pick up on everything around them, but through science we’ve discovered that actually they’ve been sponges since they were fetuses. Newborns come into the world the way they are because of what they learn and experience through their mother in the womb.

References

“Can Trauma Be Transmitted Intergenerationally?” – Sandra Hercegova. (n.d.).

Costandi, M. (2011, September 9). Pregnant 9/11 survivors transmitted trauma to their children.

Fleming, A. (2014, April 8). How a child’s food preferences begin in the womb.

Mennella, J., & Trabulsi, J. (2012). Complementary Foods and Flavor Experiences: Setting the Foundation. Annals of Nutrition & Metabolism, 60, 40-50. doi:10.2307/48507172

Murphy, Annie(2011) What Babies Learn Before They are Born 

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College Degrees in the NBA

College degrees are a gift that not everyone gets the chance to have. In Jaleesa Bustamante’s article, “Percentage of High School Graduates That Go to College,” Bustamante claims that “nearly 25% of high school students considered middle class indicated they were not planning to attend college because of the expense.” Student athletes that get full ride scholarships or just scholarships in general to colleges, are lucky people. They have the ability to play the sport they love while also getting a degree. In a Scholarship Owl article, “Athletic Scholarship Statistics,” it claims that in 2017, 181,306 student athletes got some sort of athletic scholarships. Many people do not have the ability to attend college due to their lack of money, so student athletes who are getting handed college for free have once in a lifetime opportunities, which includes coming out of college debt free. This leads me to feel that NBA players should get a college degree, whether it’s before their careers, during or after. 

I believe that having a college degree is important in everyone’s lives because it can open up many opportunities. College degrees can even give former professional athletes a life after their sports career. It’s hard to find many NBA players getting their college degrees before their careers because they have the opportunity to participate in the one-and-done rule, which means they go straight to the league one year after high school. In Nate Burleyson’s article, “The History of NBA Draft Eligibility and the Elimination of the One-and-Done Rule,” Burleyson talks about how in the 1960s, to be eligible to enter the NBA, a player had to be four years out of high school, meaning they needed to graduate college. In the 1970s, Spencer Haywood decided to go to the ABA, which was the NBA’s rival, after only playing two years of college basketball. One year after playing in the ABA, Haywood decided to play in the NBA, being only three years out of high school. The NBA was hesitant to let Haywood play so this was taken to court and found to be violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. This led to high school graduates and young college players eligible for the NBA before they graduated college. From about 1995-2005 a huge amount of players went straight to the league after graduating high school. 

The one-and-done rule then became apparent for the NBA in 2005 with players having to be at least 19 years old and one year out of high school before entering the NBA. In “One-and-Done: An Academic Tragedy in Three Acts,” Jerome C. Weber talks about how the only benefits of the NBA’s one-and-done rule is that the players get a chance to play basketball at a higher competitive level in the NCAA and the NBA teams can get a closer look at the players they are expecting to draft. The players also get a chance to make their name more well known to fans, so once they do get drafted to the NBA, their merchandise can sell more. Although I do understand these so-called “benefits”, there is no benefit of getting a college education for a year, just to go to the NBA and not get a degree out of the education part. All these players have to do is pass two classes in their fall semester to make them eligible for a spring semester and after that it does not matter how they do in their classes because they are not returning for a second year. So in reality, they do not have to actually learn anything at school while participating in the one-and-done rule, they just have to make sure they are eligible for basketball season. This rule just seems to degrade the opportunity of getting an education, showing players that as long as they do the bare minimum, they will succeed. To be able to fulfill all the opportunities the players are given, I see the most beneficial ways for a player to do that is either go to college for four years, get a degree, go to the NBA and make a load of money or they just go straight to the NBA right after high school, make a load of money and get a degree during or after their careers. This one-and-done rule could even be affecting non-student athletes’ education. The NBA prospects are taking up class seats that other students could actually need in order to fulfill the requirements of their majors. The NBA prospects are even taking scholarships from the universities so they can play, but these scholarships can go to students who plan on staying for four or more years to actually get a degree and need the money. I see it as unfair to both the student athletes who might not have had any interest in going to college in the first place and for the non-student athletes who care to actually learn, as they are not as lucky as the NBA prospects who are going to make millions from their careers. 

The one-and-done rule not only does not benefit the student athletes much, the rule also does not benefit the universities or the NCAA. Players in a way are encouraged to focus more on their own careers rather than the whole teams’ season. Players who decide to participate in the one-and-done rule or even go to college for two years are more focused on their stats and getting out of college to make it to the NBA. Although taking a year to play at the collegiate level is supposed to help mentally mature the players which is supposed to make them not think that way, their own stats have to continuously be running through their minds. When teams have players constantly coming and going, it is hard to have a flow, especially when they all have not played together before. When athletes play for teams, they are expected to be 100% committed to that team. Mark Emmert, president of the NCAA, makes a good statement in Allen Barra’s article, “Both the NBA and NCAA Want to Keep Athletes in College for Too Long,” saying “if you’re coming to us to be a collegiate athlete, we want you to be a collegiate athlete.” 

Though some people might find the one-and-done rule beneficial for players who need to mature, it is also a huge risk factor for unnecessary injuries. By playing a season in college, the players are giving their bodies a chance to ruin their careers before they are even started. If you look at it this way, a player can go play college basketball and risk getting a career ending injury before entering the NBA or they can go straight to the NBA, make a bunch of money and risk getting a career ending injury. In “The One-and-Done Dilemma” written by Rachel Stark-Mason, she interviewed Jonathan Bender, the 5th overall pick in the 1999 draft. Bender states “When you’re projected to be a top-10, possibly top-five (pick), you don’t want to sacrifice (it by) going to college at that point, or going anywhere else, because you could get injured or anything else could happen. So you want to take that opportunity when it’s presented.” High school seniors who know they’re going to be picked in the first round of the draft are not going to want to risk a season of college basketball where they can potentially lose that pick and all of the money due to an injury. Even Adam Silver, Commissioner of the NBA, says that the NCAA suggested that players who are doing the one-and-done rule should just go straight to the league, being there is no benefit from the rule.

Playing a season of college basketball before the NBA is keeping the players away from a well deserving salary. In the article, “Here’s how much the first pick of the 2018 NBA Draft will make as a rookie,” Tom Huddleston Jr. commented that the first round pick in the 2018 draft was projected to make as much as $8 million dollars. The second pick can make about $6 million, the third pick can make about $5.4 million and even the last pick in the first round can make around $1.3 million. Those salaries are just for playing basketball, not even considering how much more money a player can make with all of their endorsements. Not only are players being deprived of these salaries when they are forced to play a year of college basketball, but they also have to watch their families financially struggle, as pointed out in Grant Hughes’ article, “Why the NBA’s 1-and-done Rule Is Causing More Harm Than Good.” When NBA prospects are in high school, they have the opportunity to get some sort of job to provide extra income for their household, but once they have to go to college and play, they do not have enough time to have a job. If the players were able to go straight to the NBA after high school, they would not have to worry about their family losing income. A lot of things can happen in a year and if a player’s family is financially struggling, waiting a year to make it to the NBA might be too late. 

All of this money can also come with problems. Whether their former players or still playing, they need to know how to handle their money and who they can and cannot trust. This is where I believe a college degree such as business or finance might come in handy. Some people might say that getting a degree for an NBA player is useless because they are not going to need it when they are making millions of dollars that could last them a lifetime. The reality of that is, if NBA players do not handle their money right, they could end up scraping the surface to pay their bills. Some NBA players could be thinking the same thing, “Oh I have money to buy this, it is not a big deal.” If a player says that before he makes every purchase, that money in his bank account is going to eventually disappear. Although players want to give back to their families, there is also a possibility that their family members will try to take advantage of them. Most players will give money to their family without question, but sometimes they have to learn when to say no because in the end, they are the ones making the money for a living for themselves and eventually that money could end up fading away. In Chris Dudley’s article, “Money lessons learned from pro athletes’ financial fouls,” Dudley mentions that 60% of retired NBA players go broke their first five years after being done playing. This is due to financial scams, unqualified advisors and reckless spending. 

Former NBA player Antoine Walker had some serious debt with Las Vegas casinos and ended up losing over $1 million in a year and later declared bankruptcy after some bad real-estate investments. In an interview with Jane Wollmann Rusoff from ThinkAdvisor, Walker admits that he was stubborn with the way he wanted to spend his money and that he was young and was not thinking about his life after basketball, the way that his financial advisor was. Having a business degree could have helped Walker make better decisions with his money and could have opened his eyes to the bigger picture that there is in fact a life after basketball. Some might think that there is no point in getting a college degree when the NBA players can hire a financial advisor. There is nothing wrong with hiring someone to help since they are less connected to things that a player might feel obligated to give money towards, but the problem with that is players are putting their trust into complete strangers who are ultimately controlling their lives. Most likely NBA players do not know much about investments unless they teach themselves or know a trustworthy person to explain the concept, so they will not know the difference if their advisor is scamming them or not. In Rusoff’s interview with Walker, when she asks him if he had a financial advisor, he proves my point by answering, “yes, but back then you don’t know who’s good or who’s bad when choosing one.” Players would best benefit if they knew how to take care of their own money. 

All of the money that NBA players make along with their extraordinary careers get their names well known. Although their names are well known by many, that does not automatically mean they are qualified for all types of jobs after their basketball careers. For example, let’s say a retired player wanted to become a teacher and give back to the kids in their community. A school district is not going to hire the retired player just because they are famous and played a professional sport. They need to be qualified for the job and the school district needs to know that they actually understand the material that they will teach to the students. Not every retired athlete wants to or has the ability to become a broadcaster or movie star like Shaquille O’Neal or Rick Fox, others might want to fulfill another dream of theirs. Some former NBA players that are not as well known and do not have as much money as the top notch players will most likely need a fallback plan once they are done playing basketball. If they do not have a college degree, there could be a lesser chance of them being able to get a job because they are not equipped like others who have a degree.

After retiring, Michael Jordan went back to UNC, got his bachelor’s degree and now owns restaurants, a car dealership and part of the Charlotte Hornets. Once Shaquille O’Neal retired, he went back to LSU and got his bachelor’s degree and then went to Barry University to get his doctorate degree. He now is a broadcaster for ESPN and owns plenty of restaurants, car washes, fitness centers, a shopping center, a movie theater and multiple nightclubs. Tim Duncan stayed at Wake Forest University for four years, got his bachelor’s degree and was still able to be the #1 pick in the 1997 NBA draft. He is now an assistant coach for the San Antonio Spurs and owns a car customization business. This shows that these retired players were able to get their college degrees when they were done playing and for Duncan’s case, before his basketball career launched, and they all knew how to rightly invest their money into businesses. 

I keep reiterating that NBA players should get college degrees so that they have something to fall back on when their careers are over, but the degrees represent more than just an education. Getting a college degree is also about a sense of accomplishment and success. In the article, “Drew Gooden fulfills promise to earn his college degree,” written by Marc J. Spears, Gooden, former Washington Wizards center, talks about graduating from the University of Kansas with a degree in communication. He states “It was a relief because there was something missing in my life that was incomplete. It was getting the degree.” In 2002 when Gooden decided to enter the NBA draft, he promised his mother and his University of Kansas basketball coach that he was going to get his degree. In a Sports Illustrated article written by Stanley Kay, John Wall, current Washington Wizards player, talks about how he made a promise to his father before he died, that he was going to get a college degree. In the summer of 2018, Wall decided to return to the University of Kentucky to earn a business degree. For many players, a college degree represents an opportunity that most of their family members never had a chance to obtain. Players see getting their degree as an obligation to their family and the reality that they made it in life. 

If student athletes decided to stay and graduate college before going pro, there could be a nice benefit that they would enjoy in the long run. If the student athletes decided to take up the University’s scholarship offer, they would be able to come out of college debt free or close to it, which is a remarkable and rare opportunity. They would not have the life long stress of paying off student debt and they would have the chance to spend their money on luxurious items. If players decided to get their degree during or after their careers, they would have to pay, but probably would still come out debt free and barely make a dent in their bank accounts. Being able to get a college degree is a very remarkable achievement, so the moment should not go to waste. 

Getting a degree can be very beneficial in the long run, but if NBA prospects are so worried about going straight to the draft and making the most amount of money that they can at the moment, then they should attempt to get a degree while in the league or after. When people have goals for themselves, they seem to forget about the obstacles that may come along the way. NBA prospects only focus on making it to the NBA and fulfilling their childhood dreams, but they forget about the idea that there is a life after basketball and that there are multiple factors that could affect their futures. Having a degree to fall back on could be beneficial to someone who is just beginning to start the rest of their life. 

  References 

“Percentage of High Schoolers Attending College.” Educationdata.org. Percentage of High School Graduates That Go to College. Jaleesa Bustamante. September 7, 2019.   

“Athletic Scholarship Statistics.”   ScholarshipOwl. Athletic Scholarship Statistics. June 24, 2018.  

“NBA One-and-Done History.” Medium. The History of NBA Draft Eligibility and the Elimination of the One-and-Done Rule. Nate Burleyson. July 2018.  

“One-and-Done.” College and University. One-and-Done: An Academic Tragedy in Three Acts Vol. 85, Iss. 2, Jerome C. Weber. Fall 2009. 

“The NBA Having Players in College.” The Atlantic. Both the NBA and the NCAA Want to Keep Athletes in College for Too Long. Allen Barra. April 2012. 

“One and Done Dilemma.” NCAA. The One-and-Done Dilemma. Rachel Stark-Mason. Fall 2018.

“NBA Rookie’s Earnings.” CNBC. Here’s how much the first pick in the 2018 NBA Draft will make as a rookie. Tom Huddleston Jr. June 2018.  

“The Harm of One-And-Done.” Bleacher Report. Why the NBA’s 1-and-Done Rule Is Causing More Harm Than Good. Grant Hughes. August 2013. 

“Money Lessons Learned.” CNBC. Money Lessons learned from pro athletes’ financial fouls. Chris Dudley. May 14, 2018.

“Antoine Walker’s Crumble.”  ThinkAdvisor. Ex-NBA Star Says He Should’ve Listened to His Financial Advisor. Jane Wollmann Rusoff. June 2019. 

“Drew Gooden Getting College Degree.” The Undefeated. Drew Gooden Fulfills Promise to Earn His College Degree. Marc J. Spears. May 2017. 

“John Wall’s Return to College.”Sports Illustrated. John Wall Plans to Return to College This Summer to Pursue Degree, Fulfill Promise to Father. Stanley Kay. February 2018.

An Evolutionary Plan: Repair Student’s Damaged Futures from the Education System

Nothing in the education system is more obsolete, and does less to prepare students for adulthood, than the classic high school schedule of four core classes and a few exploratories.  Ask the students. They report feeling extremely underprepared to meet the challenges of modern life, yet American schools insist on teaching complex maths and in-depth details of historical events instead of how to handle finances or navigate a gig economy. Students are receiving an education, but they’re not receiving the proper learning experience, and the difference is what affects their futures.  

According to the official definitions, education is the process in which knowledge, values and skills are passed down at one point in life while learning is defined as acquiring new knowledge, values and skills. This difference can easily be explained through a story of a real high school student. Tiffany Cabrera, a high school senior at the time of the TEDTalk video’s publication, discusses her concern over the education system. Her class was asked a question in government class about political polarization. It made her realize that she and her peers did not know how to respond truly in their own opinion on the subject. This meant that information had just been fed to them and not taught in order for them to form their own ideas. This situation made Tiffany question the current education system. She explains that when we hear the word “education”, we think of memorizing information for a test and once the test is over, the information is deemed useless. What if we applied knowledge that we were interested in? She believes that this will help us learn not only information, but skills to be active members of society. Instead of making a silly poster project that could be scraped up in 30 minutes, students should take on a bigger project that will actually help them learn. 

So it can be said that education gets in the way of our learning. Learning is an ongoing process that begins at birth and ends when we die. A baby is using the learning process when they attempt to crawl or walk just as much as an adult learning how to cook or deal with their finances. Education is only a temporary way of passing down information. In actuality, education begins at the age of five and goes to the age of 18 or possibly through someone’s mid twenties if they decide to attend higher education. After that, education ends, but learning is forever.

As someone who is currently studying education, we become educators, but we study the process of learning. There are many types of learners and there are three distinct types of learning that we all possess. Some people learn information/skills visually, others auditorily, and many kinesthetically. It is possible to adopt more than one type of learning, but there is always one type that exceeds the rest. Visual and kinesthetic learning come out on top as the most common and successful ways of learning. By definition, learning is gaining knowledge through experience and physically doing. Education is nothing other than being fed information. When I think back to my days in public school, I distinctly remember when I thoroughly learned a topic and when I didn’t. Unfortunately, a lot of the time I did not learn, mostly because my teachers just fed us information where it went in one ear and out the other or they handed out packets to read and rely on for “learning” the information. Moments where I truly learned were when my teachers took the time to have class discussions and practice using the knowledge by asking questions/problems often for us to answer.

There is a famous “Learning Pyramid” that educators use to dictate how to conduct lessons. It shows the different ways to deliver a lesson and the percentage of retention for those approaches. For example, a lecture only yields a 5% retention rate while having students teach others yields a 90% retention rate of the material. Teaching others material involves the student having a deep understanding of the material in order to relay it to others. The deep understanding comes from picking up the proper skills to learn the material instead of being educated on it. This is classified as kinesthetic learning since it is a physical practice. Seeing that 5% of retention comes from lectures shows that this strategy is more a form of education, while having students practice doing or teaching others is learning since the retention rate is so much higher. Another benefit to the practicing and teaching method is the fact that students are collaborating together in order to learn. This is specifically called cooperative learning, and the social aspect of this retention process contributes to this important life skill, which students are also being deprived of and goes hand and hand with the education problem. Teachers can use this to reflect on their lessons and compare when education is going on versus learning. 

Through some word investigation, there is a clear difference between education and learning. There is also evidence of many teachers going the education route to teach their students as seen in Tiffany’s video, but we can convince them that education is not the way to go if you want students to retain information and build propper life skills. A large part of a teacher’s life is reflection on oneself. It is time for them and education systems to look at themselves more as learning systems. For these reasons, I’ve created a new system with more research gathered to improve the learning experience with a mixture of micro-lessons and a slightly restructured schedule. 

The way we engage our students today should be vastly different than the way we engaged them years ago. Unfortunately, we have kept the same model of education forever and with the aspect of technology, the model just doesn’t fit the students anymore. In the book, Engaging ‘Tweens and Teens, Raleigh Philp begins the first chapter by sharing what is known about the brain and learning. Keeping education the same has not let the learning process take its course like when students used to research in books piles high. Doing so would allow them to have to read through and fully comprehend the information for their school research. Now, technology is at our fingertips and it doesn’t take much to look something up on Google, copy, paste, and then quickly forget it. It’s a phenomenon that even Philp mentioned in the book through the lense of a college student. The student’s professor asked her class a science question, and frustration shook the room. After much of this struggling, she raised her hand and said. “I didn’t care that we had to think. All I wanted to do was ‘Google it’ to find the answer.” 

The answer to this is to think ahead of the rapidly evolving environment. The future of learning should not rely too heavily on technology. The students of today will develop an intolerance to learning. At the core of it, it all comes down to three main overlapping sciences, biology, psychology, and chemistry. The research in these areas help teachers understand the structure and development of the brain’s stages of maturity. Extensive research in Philp’s book shows that the brain is best at learning when it needs to survive. A typical student’s brain does not rank academic success high on the to do list for this reason, but it would if academic success relied heavily on survival in the real world. It would only be then where students would be engaged to learn because of the need of that survival in the future. Without learning crucial information, it will be very hard to live a comfortable life. Of course we do not want to enact fear into these students, but we want to make them understand that learning these specific skills are a crucial part of being an adult. This is where it is important to understand the development of students. The skills that are tailored towards adulthood are of course for the students in high school. Understanding the way the adolescent brain works will help find that perfect time to introduce these skills. Just like there is a pivotal point when a baby learns how to walk, there is a pivotal point when teenagers learn how to deal with the adult world. 

It’s time to be forward thinking. We need to take the old education model and shift it with today’s changes. Take a model schedule like Model A for example. This is your typical high school schedule that has been used for years. 

Model A:

Period 1	Math
Period 2	Band
Period 3	English
Period 4	History
Period 5	Lunch
Period 6	French
Period 7	Phys. Ed.
Period 8	Science

This schedule uses the four main core subjects along with a language and a couple of electives to balance out the school’s graduation requirements. This model is not necessarily bad, but for the new era we are in, it needs a bit of revamping. The introduction of technology into the classroom can be beneficial in the speed of the class, but as stated previously, it could be a detriment to the free thinking minds of the youth. Technology creates an instant gratification that rids the want to figure out a problem only using the brain. 

A more forward thinking model would be not to require an Intro to Business class where students spend most of their time discussing business terms that have no bearing on them, unless they are truly interested in studying this in the future. For the general population of students, they just take the class to receive the credit and graduate. Instead, make a class like psychology or finance a required class for everyone. The education system can also update the curriculums in core classes such as math and english to tackle more specific life skill topics. In between learning algebra and reading Shakespeare, there can be time to learn about tax and how to develop the proper interviewing skills for a job. This new schedule would look like Model B. 

Model B:

Period 1	Math (with new integrations) or Finance
Period 2	Band
Period 3	English (with new integrations)
Period 4	Psychology
Period 5	Lunch
Period 6	French
Period 7	Phys. Ed.
Period 8	Child Development

Model B, not quoting it exactly because there is some push and pull, but this layout would be much more beneficial to high school students. It incorporates a similar format to the original schedule, but there is now more of a purpose with some new curriculum or requirements. Psychology is beneficial to understanding the mind, while child development is beneficial to knowing how to take care of a child either by babysitting or a child of one’s own. Since these are classes that would inflict a survival instinct, they would motivate student’s more to learn. Another element of this model is to lessen the dependability of technology. The idea is to promote free thinking instead of the Google scavenger hunt. Technology would not be eradicated, but the use of it would be different. Students need to exercise their minds while they’re still moldable so that the idea of thinking isn’t such a painful experience. Once these changes are put into motion, the new results will slowly ease, but the future results will better prepare students for getting a job, or interviewing for a college, and much more. Overall, the practice of more conversational free thinking will allow for their voices to be heard and for them to be able to make an impact on the society they will soon be a part of. 

Though this is a great change to implement on the existing American education system, there may be concerns over changing what has seemed to be an okay model for the last number of decades. Change is not necessarily a bad thing when it is not overblown. I believe in evolution, not revolution. A small tweak would not knock the balance of the rest of the schooling experience. 

Although there are changes being made to core classes, the class itself is not being taken away. The normal curriculum still stands. There is just a small portion of time that is spent on life skills. This idea had already been introduced into the physical education classroom and there were very successful results. Through an experiment done in a physical education class, the results showed that in only eight 15-minutes sessions of integrating life skills, students showed “significant increases in participants’ knowledge about life skills and perception of their competence to achieve the goals they have set.” The study revealed that many life skills such as posture, decision making, and social communication provoke very physical learning opportunities. These specific life skills were perfect for this type of environment, so the short micro-lessons put into place made all the difference. There is just a question of how to teach the other life skills that don’t necessarily fit into a gym class. Those must be categorized into their proper subjects. Life skills such as learning how to deal with money or obtaining the right materials to give a successful job interview can be easily integrated into common subjects like math and english. The system of the physical education classroom can be used by allowing for 15 minutes of an hour class time to introduce small bites of these valuable lessons. If an immense impact can be made in only eight short sessions in a gym class, then imagine what can be done if it was practiced more often within the whole school.

While a reconstruction is happening within the requirements for students to graduate, it is only helping them for their future paths. A lot of the time schools create guidelines which need to be met before students graduate. They often include taking a performing arts course or a business course to expand on the skills of students. Of course these subjects hold value and they should never be taken away, but other requirements should join them to set a standard for the new wave of students that are coming through. There should be a requirement for life based classes such as child development or psychology as well as a technology based course like computer science. Adding these into the graduation requirements guarantees the whole student body to take the courses and receive the credit. They would also be structured to ensure that the skills are being taken away from the class into the real world. Often, we go into classes and do what we have to do to pass. In this instance, the definitions of education and learning stand strong. There will be no education and the simple passing of information. There will be true learning and the adapting of skills so that the requirements can hold up to their name and actually be able to aid the future generation to success. 

We see a common trend in the loss of learning in the youth today. It has come from the instant gratification of looking information up on the internet and having it in seconds. Unfortunately, this has created issues when motivating the youth to actually learn themselves without the aid of technology. In another case, technology is taking over human jobs in order to make them more convenient, so there is no need for people to do that kind of work by hand anymore. While technology shifts our jobs, we need to take advantage of using our own minds to strengthen them without a computer. According to the “Does education and training get in the way of learning?” article, we must encourage students “to connect and integrate concepts to participate in the important work of the community and become ethical leaders.” If we do not, the author explains his fear of the continuous development of learning disabled youth who will seek for the simple narrow solution to complex problems. As a result, it will prohibit them from becoming lifelong learners. The lack of learning will slow the advance of other technologies since no one would take the initiative to figure out the next advancement on their own. The slow pace of learning would stop us dead in the tracks of whatever we have at the moment and time. In that case, the technology would have taken over instead of us holding the ownership of creating such advancements. 

Taking a step back at this plan being laid out, it is clear that there would be no severe takeaways to the education system. There is simply the addition of learning and integration of life skills into the classroom as a whole. I can attest to a complete change of the curriculum being unnecessary and strange. This reflected when I was in elementary school, schools had a standard curriculum, but near the middle of my elementary years, the curriculum suddenly changed to a new one with an entirely new agenda called Common Core (2009). This introduced a new form of critical and specific practice of mathematics and language arts. Our classes quickly changed to incorporate the new way of teaching a simple math concept. It became more complex and the work took longer to complete. Nobody was a fan of this “revolutionary” change, even the teachers. So, in simple terms, this is an example of how my micro-lessons and the slightly restructured schedule will NOT function. 

I recognize that the core schedule that we hold today is a staple and necessary to understand fundamentals, but there must be more context to the story. Students just need to understand how to apply the core subjects in order to connect them to life skills or life situations. The attention of students would be grabbed if this were to be established. A common phrase in schools is “when are we going to use this in real life?” That question can be answered by following the new road map. Once students can see the answer, they will be more inclined to learn and know that they can eventually apply what seemed like nonsense into their real lives and their futures to make a difference in society.

References

S, P. (2011, July 28). Difference Between Education and Learning.

The Learning Pyramid. (2020). Education Corner. (n.d.).

TEDTalk. When School is Counterintuitive. (2017, August 25).

Danish. (2006). The effectiveness of teaching a life skills program in a physical education context.  Virginia Commonwealth University, U.S.

Marshall. (1997). Does education and training get in the way of learning?. Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, USA.

Philp. (2007). Engaging ‘Tweens and Teens. Corwin Press.

Common Core. (2020).

Speeding Through Neighborhoods

When people say that they have been “pulled over”, it is most likely due to speeding, a very common reason for being pulled over.  Speeding can be defined as someone who may run very fast or someone who operates a vehicle that exceeds the legal speed limit. Speeding is one of the leading causes in vehicle deaths right behind intoxication. In 2018 speeding killed 9,378 people in the United States alone. Almost one third of all motor vehicle accidents are caused from a person who is speeding.

Speeding is dangerous and results in a variety of bad outcomes.  Just going ten to fifteen miles per hour over the speed limit puts you and others on the road at risk. Speeding in bad weather, terrible road conditions, or on dark unlit roads increases the risk of injury to you or another person.  Traveling on highways, local roads or within a neighborhood does not decrease the risk or change outcomes related to speeding.  Speeding is not worth your life or someone else’s life.

When you think of speeding, you normally think the only punishment you will get is a ticket and a fine. A ticket and a fine is just a minor consequence you can receive from speeding. Twenty-six percent (26%) of all traffic fatalities resulted from speeding which brought on many types of punishments.  The thought of getting into a car and driving over the legal speed limit creates a scenario of intentional harm to yourself and others.  On average, 800 people die per month because of a speeding accident which results in people dying or going to jail for vehicular manslaughter. 

There is always one question that will be asked when it comes to speeding, why did you do it? There are several reasons why people decide to speed every day.  One of the main reasons a person speeds is because they are late for work or an event.  Another reason is people become intoxicated and end up driving.  Both of those reasons are not acceptable and are preventable incidents.  More than 50% of drivers who are caught speeding usually have a Blood Alcohol Count (BAC) of 0.08% and it is the leading factor to why people are killed in speeding accidents.

Not everyone considers the smaller reasons to why a person might be speeding. People who get new cars or first start driving and want to show off for a couple friends tend to get caught for speeding. New drivers are most likely to get pulled over for speeding but not the most likely to cause a fatal car accident from speeding.  People between the ages of 21 to 24 are the most likely to be involved in a fatal car crash. It is sad to say but once a person turns 21 it seems like the speeding accidents become much more of a risk since that person is legally able to drink. 

About 3-4 years ago in my high school town of Hammonton, NJ, there was a really bad accident involving a couple of local kids who thought it was a good idea to race down a dark road. It was said that they were going in upwards of 100 miles per hour when one of the cars ended up flipping and killing the two people in the car. This example goes back to the point of newer/younger drivers who feel the need to do stupid stuff or show off for friends to make a point. Obeying the rules of the road are very important for the safety of everyone and should be followed.  You could be the most cautious driver but the risk of someone else driving carelessly doesn’t lessen the risk.  You don’t know if the other person was intoxicated or not, having a bad day, suffering from a medical condition or just being rebellious.  All of those conditions exist on the road whether you are on a highway or in your neighborhood.

Neighborhoods are one of the most active areas for cars. When you tend to think of a neighborhood you think of a community of people and a place where kids are always outside playing, people walking or jogging or other activities.  The traffic that comes through a neighborhood can be quite constant. Neighborhoods usually have a speed limit of 25 or lower, but nowadays it really seems like people tend to just completely disregard that limit and do what they want. It is becoming a growing problem in the world and quite frankly doesn’t make sense.

The phrase “Speeding through Neighborhoods” is a common phrase and easy to define, driving too fast on a residential street or neighborhood.  Seventy-three percent (73%) of people tend to speed through a neighborhood but rarely get caught for it. There is a strict 15 miles per hour speed limit in school zones, but I believe that a neighborhood is no different from a school zone. They may have different definitions, but is there are similarities.  A school zone and a neighborhood both contain kids and other people and activities going on locally.  A neighborhood speed limit should be dropped to 15 miles per hour, similar to a school zone speed limit to ensure the safety of people. 

Neighborhoods are supposed to be safe environments for people to live, start a family, or even raise a pet. The number of people I see speeding in a neighborhood is insane. People should not have to worry about whether or not there child can go outside without being at risk of being hit by a speeding car. That is the last thing on someone’s mind who lives in a neighborhood, but it does happen, at various times of the day and at the hands of someone making a bad decision. Police do not take speeding in a neighborhood as serious compared to a highway or a local road. Neighborhoods have more people and are at greater risk of something happening because of speeding due to the lack of control and not wanting to drive so slowly.

Speeding can be one of the most dangerous things a person can do while behind the wheel. One in every six drivers gets pulled over for speeding and receives a ticket which accumulates to over 41 million tickets per year. Most speeding stops occur on active roads but everyone over looks speeding in neighborhoods and developments. I am sure that police have pulled over people for speeding in neighborhoods but it is for sure a low percentage or because someone in the neighborhood called and complained. I feel it is necessary for police to give more attention to neighborhoods due to the fact that I see people speeding through my very own neighborhood every day.

Police will tend to just leave a speed tracker sign in neighborhoods when a report of people speeding comes in. That speeding tracker doesn’t do anything for a neighborhood because people will still continue to speed after the tracker is gone. Police are very strict with people speeding through areas where schools are located due to the kids during the day. Neighborhoods are basically 24 hour schools since kids are everywhere and are always playing outside. If you can pay close attention to school areas during the day I don’t see a problem with keeping a close watch on neighborhoods through electronic trackers or frequent drive throughs.

I understand that police have bigger situations they need to worry about but people deserve to know that speeding is being monitored where they live. I think that possibly keeping a police vehicle parked in neighborhoods even if the police officer isn’t in the car will make speeding go down tremendously. The police vehicle itself will be enough to scare people into slowing themselves down. It is a creative way that will not cause the police to use any resources for a problem that may not be as big as the ones happening today. You could even put a camera inside the police vehicle that will be able to record people when they are speeding and give the speed they were doing.

There are two ideas that I believe could really work.  Installing cameras on light polls around the neighborhood or having signs that can record speed of passing vehicles. The cameras on light polls would most likely be the cheaper route, but people can easily take the camera down or cover the front. By putting those high on the pole or on top of the light, you allow for the camera to be out of reach of people. The signs would also be a good idea because it is an invisible way to keep track of people who speed and be able to send the ticket via mail. The one problem with the sign idea is that it could possibly blow over but if you cement it down the ground real well it will not move.

A more aggressive approach to stopping speeding in neighborhoods could be very effective.  For example, having an electronic sign that states the speed limit and if you are speeding it will say “this is you final warning.” If you happen to still be speeding the electronic sign will dispense spikes that will force your car to stop speeding. Once the car hits the spikes they will be retracted back into the electronic sign. This is a more forceful way and easily can scare people into no longer speeding through a neighborhood. This could be used as like a last resort type of option if none of the previous options work.

This last idea that I have could possibly work but it might be a long shot. The installment of crosswalks throughout the neighborhood could prevent speeding. A lot of people tend to go for runs or walks throughout a neighborhood and sometimes they have to cross over the street. By installing crosswalks it allows for people to have a safe way to cross a street but cars are required by law to stop at a crosswalk if there are people waiting to cross. A crosswalk could be considered a speed bump just without the bump and would really emphasize the importance that there are people always walking or running. It could also give people who are driving a warning that you may have to stop for a person which would make people drive slower.

Neighborhoods are super active every day and the speed limit of 25 is just too high. Lowering the speed limit to 15 and putting up signs all throughout the neighborhood saying “children playing” or “active people,” could really slow people down. You could argue that it’s a low percentage that something happens in neighborhood because of speeding but I disagree. My reason for disagreeing is that I have watched with my own eyes people almost get hit by just standing on the side of the road or grabbing their mail. My neighbor’s dog was hit because of a speeding driver and it seemed like no matter how many complaints were filed, little got done. By lowering the speed limit you are telling people that 25 was not cutting it and the signs are relaying a message to drivers that a neighborhood is not a place to be speeding through. 

I believe that people really deserve to have stricter speeding limits in their neighborhoods. The littlest things can go a long way in preventing unnecessary injuries. One sign, high speed bump or just one car stop can make the difference in a person’s life. As a brother, a dog owner, and someone who wants to be a future parent, I really would like to see an increase in speed control in neighborhoods. If it can get under control now, injuries can be prevented and parents can feel better about letting kids play outside.  Having firsthand experience and just believing in what’s right for the people around me could hopefully play an important part in trying to get police departments everywhere to take notice. No one deserves to have a tragic accident happen to them, their neighbor or their loved one due to speeding in a neighborhood. 

Although kids play in backyards, they also tend to play in front of their house.  Parents try to not let their kids play out front unless they are out there with them to prevent any type of accident from happening. This can decrease the chance of a kid being injured due to someone speeding.  Having fenced backyards will also help to prevent kids from wandering into a busy street.  Parents play a big role in teaching kids about car and street safety.  It is important that kids learn at a young age about these safety tips and the consequences of not paying attention to them.  It is not to scare them, but to let kids know that being in or near a street can be dangerous. 

Speed bumps throughout a neighborhood can keep people from speeding. Speed bumps are also really low cost so it would be easier to install those than types of technology like cameras. Speed bumps also act like a warning that if you don’t stop speeding.  Your car could go flying and could possibly cause damage to the car or someone else’s car.   The damage would result in you losing money or ending up in a legal battle. Speed bumps make people think about whether to slow down or not.  Speed bumps also act like a stop sign if there is someone who might be looking to cross the street.  The speed bumps need to be a certain height in order to be effective and cause someone to think twice before going over the bump.

Neighborhood roads are almost always thin which is fantastic. The thin roads are more likely able to make cars go slower since the curb is closer and acts like a boundary for cars. Speeding is less common on thinner roads than compared to like a highway or a busy road since there is a ton of more room on those types of roads. This factor explains why police tend to direct more of their focus on speeding everywhere else than in a neighborhood. It also prevents speeding because cars are going to be in close proximity with each other and won’t want to have any accidents happen. Thinner roads also make cars easier to spot if they are speeding because if there are curves you can see a car going around that turn in record time. 

Bouncing off the thinner roads example you also have people who park their cars on the side of the road. This literally forces cars to slow down or else an accident will happen. The cars on the side of the road also act like a camera because if someone who is speeding hits a car it will be heard throughout the neighborhood and bring people out of their houses to look. If the person tries to drive away someone will have easily seen the car and can track the person down who did it. Neighborhoods are basically like high security areas because you can’t get away from doing anything without someone seeing it happen. It is very rare that speeding goes unnoticed in neighborhoods since people are always outside. 

Trying to add high technological devices to catch speeding in a neighborhood will cost a good bit of money. That money will have to be taken from the people in the town so that means higher taxes. Taxes already make people go nuts and raising that cost will make people more angry and cause people to act out and rebel. People really love their money and may not vote for adding more monitoring options to better the neighborhood especially if it is going to cost them more in taxes or out of pocket.  There is a way to create a neighborhood watch group which could allow people to voluntarily join and contribute to expenses to improve the safety of the neighborhood.  The neighborhood watch could possibly influence local government to help with costs or take on the total cost of monitoring.  Government will not automatically put cameras in place or signs up or install speed bumps unless there are many complaints from people in the neighborhood. 

The French put GPS tracking systems into their cars which sends the driver a ticket if they go over the speed limit.  We also know that speed is currently tracked by GPS apps on the phone and potentially tracked.  This could be the wave of the future with remote speed tracking.

Having a police officer living in the neighborhood is a plus and can be very effective when trying to ask for changes to improve safety. Seeing a police car in a neighborhood automatically makes people think, slow down and try to not get embarrassed or get a speeding ticket.  Police presence definitely helps but for those living in the neighborhood may become used to seeing that car and continue to speed.  Police officers take an oath to protect communities and expect the community to also obey the rules and report those that do not.  For example, if you see a car speeding, you can report the car’s license plate along with where and when it happened.  

Using natural resources within a neighborhood to help prevent speeding is less expensive than having to pay more money to install technology. The examples of using people in the neighborhood, parking cars on both sides of the road, installing speed bumps or thin roads all help to slow speeding cars down.  While a neighborhood may have a ton of problems that could be more important than speeding, the safety of people, kids and animals is very important and should be a priority.  People in a neighborhood contribute to protecting their neighborhood by obeying speed limits, report speeding, and communicate with local government on ways they could help keep their neighborhood safe and decrease the risk of people getting hurt.  As technology evolves and other tracking methods are identified, we continue to rely on people to help keep our neighborhood roads safe.

References

Amy.lee.ctr@dot.gov. (2019, December 12). Speeding. Retrieved from https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/speeding

Whalen, H. (2019, July 31). 5 Ways To Stop Speeding In Your Neighborhood. Retrieved from https://homealarmreport.com/safety/5-ways-stop-speeding/

Ioby. (2019, March 22). How can I slow down traffic on my street? Retrieved from https://blog.ioby.org/how-can-i-slow-down-traffic-on-my-street/