On a frigid February morning in 1963, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy set out to hike 50 miles from Great Falls, Virginia to Camp David. He walked along the C&O Canal for 17 hours and 50 minutes, trekking through slushy conditions in dress shoes.
Kennedy reached his 50-mile goal in West Virginia, requiring a drive to Camp David. But he fulfilled an even larger mission than completing an arduous hike: He drew nationwide attention to efforts by his brother, President John F. Kennedy, to encourage physical fitness.
President Kennedy, building on President Eisenhower’s initiative, rolled out a splashy media campaign encouraging Americans to get fit. During this project, Kennedy joked that his staff should be able to accomplish the same 50-mile hike required of the Marines. His brother took this as a challenge.
Three years later, under the Johnson administration, the Presidential Fitness Test was born. For more than 50 years, thousands of public school students participated annually in sprints, pull-ups, curl-ups, and the sit-and-reach, among other challenges. Students who scored at the 85th percentile or higher in all of the tasks were awarded the Presidential Physical Fitness Award.
The test was inherently competitive and public. Students in gym classes watched one other attempt each exercise and knew where they ranked among their peers. As progressivism took hold over education, anything that separated students by ability had to go. It is no surprise that a test that rewards excellence did not survive the era of participation trophies.
In 2013, President Obama ended the Presidential Fitness Test, opting to replace it with the Cooper Institute’s FitnessGram. The FitnessGram uses similar athletic challenges as the test, but it takes competition out of the equation. The FitnessGram “should never be used to compare students to one another” or to determine their grades in a physical education class, its website warns.
The new system also expects much less out of students. In 1985, a 16-year-old boy needed to complete 44 push-ups in one minute to attain the Presidential Physical Fitness Award. Today, a 16-year-old boy must complete only 17 push-ups to be rated in the FitnessGram’s Healthy Fitness Zone. Why would any teenager strive for that eighteenth push-up, when 17 is satisfactory? There is no incentive to demonstrate excellence.
This missing piece of education extends into every classroom, not just the school gym. Students are rarely asked to push themselves physically or mentally. Academic standards have slid downward across decades, and so has achievement.
Teacher unions, desperate to cover up the failures of public schools, have lobbied hard against any attempt to measure student achievement. They have campaigned especially hard to ensure students are no longer required to pass a test in order to graduate from high school. Their efforts have largely succeeded: Out of 27 states that once used graduation tests, only 13 states required students to pass a test to earn a diploma last year, and Massachusetts just voted to end the practice.
Without systemic change, high schools will continue to churn out graduates who lack the basics of reading, writing, and math, let alone science or history. States and districts have lowered the bar, striving for equity instead of excellence in every subject — even gym class.
Protecting students from the opportunity to fail has robbed them of the opportunity to try. The effects on mental and physical health are devastating. Low self-esteem is a growing epidemic among teenagers, and nearly 1 in every 5 American children is obese. Both of these ailments were accelerated during Covid, when teacher union bosses forced schools to remain closed, siloing kids away from their peers for far longer than was necessary.
Neither Robert F. Kennedy nor his brother could have predicted this crisis at the time of the famous 50-mile march. The former’s son and the latter’s nephew could soon be in a position to help change it, in tandem with future Education Secretary Linda McMahon.
Instead of being forced into the dull sameness of an equity agenda, students deserve plenty of chances to compete, excel, and discover their unique talents. They also deserve the chance to fail, developing resilience in the process.
For three generations, the Presidential Fitness Test gave kids a crash course in taking on challenges. The incoming Trump administration should restore the test. Doing so sends a powerful message: Excellence deserves to be celebrated, and the days of low school standards are over.
Angela Morabito is a former U.S. Department of Education press secretary and a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
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