The logic seems pretty simple: if you eliminate gym class, school kids will get fatter. In 2006, a blue-ribbon commission released a worried report about the precipitous decline of physical education in schools since the early '90s, coinciding with a ballooning rate of obesity in kids. Both Democrats and Republicans have latched onto that argument to criticize school districts for eliminating P.E. in order to spend more to meet the rigorous testing standards of 2001's No Child Left Behind Act. Even G.O.P. Senator John Cornyn, a Texan who despises most government spending, has bragged about his support for a federal program that gives grants to schools for P.E. classes. Congress has appropriated more than $320 million for the grants.
But could it be that the underlying assumption behind the program is wrong? Last week at the European Congress on Obesity in Amsterdam, a team of researchers from Peninsula Medical School in the U.K. presented findings from a painstaking study of physical activity in 206 children ages 7 to 11 from three schools in and around Plymouth, on the southern coast of England. Kids at the first school, an expensive private academy, got an average of 9.2 hours per week of scheduled P.E. Kids at the other two schools - one in a village near Plymouth and the other an urban school - got just 2.4 hours and 1.7 hours of P.E. per week, respectively.
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