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Educating the Student Body
youth and school-related policies and practices that enable or 
impede those behaviors is inadequate.
•
An adequate description of the current status of and monitoring 
of changes in students’ school-related physical activity behaviors 
currently is not possible. Public health and education surveillance 
and research need to be enhanced so that the impact of efforts to 
increase students’ physical activity can be monitored. 
•
Policies are and will be important in creating an atmosphere in 
schools that enables, facilitates, and encourages children to be more 
physically active. Less clear are the factors that create an effective 
policy. An understanding is needed of what facilitators (e.g., funding, 
promotions, awards) and enforcers (e.g., less funding, job security) 
lead to policies that are fully implemented.
A
s discussed in further detail throughout this chapter, few children in the 
United States, probably no more than half, meet the currently recom-
mended standard of at least 60 minutes of vigorous- or moderate-intensity 
physical activity daily (CDC, 2012b). In addition, the proportion meeting 
the standard declines with age, with more elementary school children than 
middle and high school students achieving the goal. Boys are more likely 
than girls to meet the recommendation. Finally, it can be said with reason-
able certainty that during the past 30-40 years, probably even longer, the 
volume and intensity of daily physical activity among youth have gradually 
declined.
It is also known that because children and adolescents spend so many 
hours at school, school-related physical activity must be a large contributor 
to overall physical activity among youth. Not known, however, is exactly 
how large the overall contribution is or the contribution of each segment 
of the school day—transportation to and from school, physical education, 
recess, classroom time, and before- and after-school activities. It is known 
that over the past 40 years the proportion of children walking and biking 
to school has declined substantially; otherwise, there are at best rough 
estimates of the current physical activity behaviors, recent changes, or long-
term trends associated with each of these segments of the school day.
Guidelines, recommendations, and policies from all levels of govern-
ment (federal, state, district, local) and from various organizations (e.g., 

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Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
Educating the Student Body: Taking Physical Activity and Physical Education to School
Status and Trends of Physical Activity Behaviors and Related School Policies
 
37
National Association for Sport and Physical Education, American College 
of Sports Medicine) are known to influence youth’s school-related physical 
activity. Understood as well is that the strength of that influence is, in turn, 
affected by incentives and enforcements associated with those guidelines, 
recommendations, and policies (see Figure 1-3 in Chapter 1). What remains 
unclear is which guidelines, recommendations, policies, incentives, and 
enforcements are most influential in today’s social milieu.
What should also be apparent is that, despite some excellent research 
and a few good public health surveillance systems, current monitoring of 
overall and school-related physical activity behaviors and school-related 
policies and practices that enable or impede those behaviors is inadequate. 
These deficiencies have arisen for several reasons. First, physical activity has 
only recently been acknowledged as a vital public health issue, so monitor-
ing of the volume of physical activity at the population level is a recent 
objective with still insufficient priority. The Physical Activity and Health 
Branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was not 
established until 1996, and the first formal federal-level physical activity 
guidelines were not published until 2008 (HHS, 2008). Second, physical 
activity is a notoriously difficult behavior to measure. Third, understanding 
of the types and amounts of physical activity relevant to health and health 
outcomes is still growing. The types and amounts of physical activity rec-
ommended for children and adolescents have changed several times in the 
past 20 years, frustrating efforts to monitor trends. Fourth, information is 
scarce on prevalence and trends for policies that may enable (or inhibit) 
physical activity. Examples include school- and district-level policies on 
recess and training for physical education teachers, as well as community or 
neighborhood policies on active transport to and from school. Monitoring 
of policies and practices is improving but needs expansion and matura-
tion. Finally, schools and school districts vary greatly in size, resources, 
environmental setting, urbanization, population characteristics, traditions, 
and policies. Summary assessments and measures may capture the national 
gestalt but omit important differences among subgroups.