For what it's worth, Bissinger also wrote Friday Night Lights, which is one of the more famous investigative journalism pieces ever written about sports.

It's one thing to point out that, having identified and (famously) exploited market inefficiencies in the MLB Draft, Billy Beane helped eliminate his claimed edge. That's how markets work. It's another thing to take Michael Lewis' book, look at the career of one of the central characters (Jeremy Brown), and find that he wound up only getting 10 at-bats before retiring. Ouch.

My recollection is the book Friday Night Lights lays out the racism and classism at the core of high school football and that's just in Texas and James Michener brought up these sorts of issues of societal opportunity cost/health cost/monetary benefit of the worship of football/basketball (from childhood to the 99% that don't make in pro or even college sports) in "Sports in America" decades ago.

I think that's a fair characterization of my point in your first three paragraphs. There's just not a history of being able to take on the unions and "win", regardless of the labor laws. So let's stop trying to fight the unions and characterize them as devil spawn since that isn't going to work.

I'd rather focus on the areas where there aren't necessarily entrenched interests so we can focus on experimentation and trying to change the anti-education sentiment[1]. Schools like the KIPP Academies have exceptional outcomes over and over again. We need to find a way to get their techniques wider distribution.

I believe that fighting a war of words with the teachers unions is both a waste of time and counterproductive from a policy/results perspective. Public sector unions just aren't going anywhere. Furthermore, we're going to have a shortage of teachers - estimated to be as high as a million teachers [2] - once the Boomer generation retires. Demeaning the remaining teachers (who are generally union-affiliated) strikes me as ridiculously counterproductive. The experiences in NYC and DC are proof that there are ways to make teachers more accountable, reward better teachers, remove crappier teachers, and generally change the culture in our schools without taking tactical nukes to the NEA and AFT.

[1] Read Bissinger's Friday Night Lights for the best-written example of what I'm talking about.

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/education/07teacher.html

Omalu first found the syndrome in 2002 and published his studies of dead NFL players brains in 2005 and the NFL denied any link for ten years, sort of like the UIL of Texas does now.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/meet-the-real-dr-...
A more recent study confirmed the prevalence of CTE with autopsies of 100 NFL players.
https://www.npr.org/2017/07/25/539198429/study-cte-found-in-...

There's already been studies that showed repeated low impact hits on the head (ala soccer) create a deficit in cognitive ability in young people - http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/14/health/brain-damage-dementia-c...

The only reason to keep asking for more studies is to stall so they can make money off of high school athletes, high school football in Texas in a racket as documented in the book Friday Night Lights (not the movie or TV show). Also, if you don't believe that book, James Michener wrote a book 20 years earlier called Sports in America that documents the same phenomena across America in all amateur athletics.

Also I grew up in Texas and no matter how podunk the town was, they spent bank on high school football stadiums then and tens of millions now. You wouldn't understand this if you dont know this.