Title:
Studies Link Girls' Sports to Gains in Life
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Education Report.
See text below
Text:
Most schools in the United States receive money from
federal programs. That means most schools must obey
a federal law known as Title Nine.
It bars discrimination on the basis of sex at any
educational institution that receives federal money.
An exception is made for admissions at private
undergraduate schools. For others, Title Nine covers
"any education program or activity" receiving
federal financial assistance.
The full name is Title Nine of the Education
Amendments of nineteen seventy-two. A lot of
Americans may be surprised to know that it was
written without saying anything directly about
sports. Yet that is
where its effects are best known, especially at the
high school level.
After Title Nine became law,
the number of girls who joined high school sports
teams sharply increased.
Research has linked participation in sports to
positive effects like better self-image, fewer teen
pregnancies and higher grades. But are these
a direct result?
Two recent studies suggest that the answer is yes.
They offer long-term evidence that it can lead to
improvements in education,
work and health.
Betsey Stevenson is a business
and public policy researcher
at the Wharton School of the
University of Pennsylvania.
She compared states, looking at differences in high
school sports participation and in women's education
and work. For each ten percentage point increase in
sports participation, she found a one point increase
in female college attendance. She also linked it to
a one to two
point increase in the number of
women in the labor force.
The other study looked at physical health. Robert
Kaestner is an economics professor at the University
of Illinois at Chicago. He compared obesity rates
and physical activity levels of women who had been
in high school before and after Title Nine took
effect. He found that those who came after Title
Nine had a seven percent lower risk of obesity
twenty to
twenty-five years later.
Nicole LaVoi is associate director of the Tucker
Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at
the University of Minnesota. She says the new
studies are important because they show trends over
time.
Still, she says, far more boys than girls join
sports teams nearly forty years after Title Nine
gave girls a chance to level the playing field.
And that's the VOA Special English Education Report.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
