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By Root 810 0

The board game hours continued on early-release days, but the conversations didn’t veer toward the personal. Eli had the lingering feeling that even his supposedly close friends didn’t get him. They considered him odd for not wanting to go to prom because he thought the dance was “a waste of hard-earned money.” Eli didn’t mind that he wasn’t going, but he did mind that his friends made such a big deal about it, trying to fix him up or warning that it was a mistake to miss his only prom. In addition, they repeatedly questioned why Eli was going to Westcoast University when he had been accepted to more prestigious schools. Eli would shrug amiably and daydream about going to a university where students would appreciate him.

Finally the moderator returned to the stage. “The winner”—he paused, “with five hundred sixty points is”—he paused again and surveyed the audience—“Frostpike!” Frostpike erupted in cheers. “In second, with five hundred fifty points . . . Strattville.”

“What?!” Eli’s team exploded in muffled outrage. As soon as the moderator completed his remarks and presented the trophy to Frostpike, the Strattville coach marched to the judge’s table to protest the ten-point Bible question. Eli and his team remained in the now-emptied auditorium while the judges conferred. They said they had to check their “official sources” and that they would email Strattville by the end of the day. The email never came.

On the bus ride back to school, the team members concocted excuses for their narrow loss. “People shouldn’t have been applauding; we couldn’t hear.” “We couldn’t hear anything because we were the table all the way at the end.” “Our math bonus was calculus, but everyone else got Algebra 2 or geometry questions.”

The coach broke in. “There’s no reason to place all of the blame on anyone else,” he said. “You all had at least one question you should have answered right and you know it, and that would have made us the winners.”

He’s right, Eli thought, recalling a few of the questions. Eli felt better. Strattville had placed second in the Academic Bowl championships, had trampled its rival, and performed well enough to deserve first place. Leading his school to its best ever season was not a bad way for Eli to end his career.

The Strattville administration never once acknowledged the victory.

______

HOW SCHOOLS MAKE THINGS WORSE

In nine classes at a Midwestern summer-school program, researchers randomly divided elementary school-age students into yellow and blue groups and gave them corresponding T-shirts to wear. Six of the nine classrooms (three classes formed the control group) displayed posters supposedly of the prior summer’s attendees. Posters about athletic contests and a spelling bee showed that five of the six event winners wore yellow shirts. In three of those classrooms, over the course of the summer, teachers did not mention the groups. In the other three classes, teachers were instructed to make use of the color labels and organize activities using those groups, without favoring one group over another. By the end of the program, the only children who developed stereotypes and biases were the kids whose teachers referred to the yellow and blue groups. Even when surrounded by posters conveying implicit messages about color group status, the children didn’t categorize the groups unless the teacher acknowledged them.

Students are not solely to blame for creating cafeteria fringe or for the selection of which students are treated as such. Whether intentionally or not, many administrators, teachers, and school policies or traditions foster the same results as the teachers who distinguished yellow from blue. Over the last several years, students have shared with me ways in which this discrepancy occurs at the academic level. A Massachusetts “flirt,” for instance, said that at her public school, “The honors students use their rigorous academic record as justification that they are better than the [non-honors] kids. The school encourages this distinction. My math teacher once said, ‘The same amount of energy