NJ Education Commissioner overrides NJSIAA's anti-Catholic sports segregation scheme

Earlier this month New Jersey's governing body for high school sports voted to segregate all the Catholic schools into their own state-wide conference, preventing them from competing with any public school teams. According to the NJSIAA the policy was needed to promote "fairness," because a handful of the Catholic schools are too good at football or wrestling.

Yesterday, Education Commissioner David Hespe disagreed.

In other words, the new policy was blatantly discriminatory, and designed to disadvantage student athletes attending Catholic high schools. Ergo, it cannot stand.

This is a tremendous victory for common sense and actual fairness.

The vast majority of Catholic high schools do not field elite sport teams. These schools have amicably competed with their local public counterparts for decades, and a policy which sequesters them into seeking out only other Catholic opponents would wreak havoc with students' lives, sending them potentially dozens of miles from home to venues far and wide in order to participate in sports programs.

The public schools are peeved because they're restricted to accepting students from a defined geographic area, ie the local town or school district. Catholic schools don't enforce arbitrary restrictions, so the "competitive balance" factor is trotted out to blame them for enrolling students from what could be a larger talent pool.

It's a problem that universal school choice would solve in the first 15 minutes of its implementation. But school choice would take power away from the urban teachers unions, and in New Jersey nothing can ever be done if the unions aren't on board. So, school choice is a non-starter.

The result is that the public schools will keep dreaming up schemes to make attending Catholic school less attractive, on the assumption that the students will then "come home." How that is good for the students is, sadly, unclear.

Thankfully we have in David Hespe an educator who is unwilling to countenance discrimination. I applaud him for reversing this blatant attempt at creating a Catholic athletic ghetto, and I pray that our state's student athletes will continue to freely compete in a spirit of fair play.

Posted at 12:44 by Chris Wysocki   [/education]   Comments | Perm Link |
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