Yeah, great idea:
Texas school districts would be required to include the body mass index of students as part of their regular report cards under a bill introduced by a lawmaker seeking to link healthy minds with healthy bodies.
When the measurement, which calculates body fat based on height and weight, indicates a student is overweight, the school would provide parents with information about links between increased body fat and health problems, said Democratic state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte.
"We should be just as concerned with students' physical health and performance as we are with their academic performance," she said.
This will be a great boon to parents who, in spite of buying clothes for their children and seeing them around the house every day, still have no idea the kid is obese.
Never mind the fact that BMI is a flawed, 19th century formula for fat measurement (according to this article in the New Zealand Herald, for example, all but one of the All Blacks are overweight), it isn't like fat kids don't know they're fat, for crying out loud.
Are they going to assign grades to different BMI scores? Does coming in over 30.0 earn them an "F?" If not, then why put in on a freaking report card in the first place?
Son, if you want to throw that shotput in the meet tonight, you'll need to take the powerful laxative. You're just over the BMI standards and Texas is still enforcing "No Pass, No Play."
I don't get it- it's not like kids "get obese" overnight- there is a curve, a gaining of weight.
But all the same, in classic Texan governmental form, they go about finding a solution in the wrongest way possible.
This sounds like something out of a Dickens novel. Soon, the kids are also going to be put to work in factories to learn the values of an honest day's work!
Maybe they can add blood alcohol content too. After all, Dean Wermer said, "Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son."
Yes, depend on the Texas legislature to envision such "feels good and makes the legislature look like they care" but totally unenforceable and offensive legislation. I'm just surprised the baboon-like Utah legislature didn't dream it up first! I think the legislative oaf who came up with this should be forced to accumulate the data herself. At least she'd be doing something instead of "thinking".
I don't think this is the venue to be introducing obesity/health issues to parents.
But related... I think I remember hearing somewhere that Texas has the highest population of obesity or something like that. So that might be why this is coming out of Texas. (Not just because Texas is otherwise silly with this stuff.)
How dare anyone attempt to curtain our God given right to be morbidly obease!
curtail, that is.
OMFG, what a waste of money and brain cycles. Texas, a state with rotten standardized testing scores and home to a huge immigrant population that needs to be better accounted for in public education, is spending time on BMI?
Most public education funding is poorly allocated anyway, but BMI...is it really April 1 and nobody told me?