Allison on academics & athletics in high school

[I double-posted Stagnation at the Top last week. Allison left this comment on the first, which I'm deleting, on 6-19-08.]

Actually, I think that the good-academics and good-schools idea you have is all about trade offs and opportunity costs. And high performing organizations understand that, and recognize that the opportunity cost of losing talent is that Someone Else has that talent, and will beat you with it.

Selective schools need to find ways to attract the talented students. The trade off isn't between a good basketball player and a good student. The trade off is between spending the time/energy/money to recruit, coach, and challenge talent vs. spending that time/energy/money on something else. High performing orgs know that talent is an asset, and basically every thing else is a liability. You can't have high morale without talent.

But talent in high schoolers comes in the form not of pure, raw unmitigated strength or coordination, but in the form of Someone Who Can Be Coached. Someone who has the discipline to do what's expected, Someone who responds well to demanding expectations. Because unless you're Michael Oher, the single talent on a team sport still isn't enough to propel that team to the top. The whole team has to play together, and it's as weak as its weakest link. This is true in history class and on the baseball field. When you set out to recruit students who won't be disruptive to your mission, who will be leaders and optimistic about your mission, then it doesn't matter whether they are football players, dramatists or math whizzes--they are supporting the goal.

I think high performing organizations just admit their trade offs up front--they can't attract the best students without spending money on infrastructure; if you ignore discipline problems, it's easier in the short term but worse in the long term; if you want excessive teacher autonomy, you won't have all classes following the same curriculum. So they decide on which trade offs they can afford. It works because they've Got A Mission, and the Mission guides their choices.