At Summit Elementary School in Idaho some Fifth grade teachers put together some hands on learning about old Jim Crow.
Teachers randomly assigned students green or yellow colors and one group was told not to talk to the other group. Bathrooms were also segregated.
Some students had trouble dealing with the experiment. From reading comments on the story in the online paper, the local community seems to support the school and teachers decisions.

Trisha Castillo: ” As parent of a child who was in this exercise, I felt she retained great information that she may not have otherwise retained. My daughter felt that maybe some of the children that have used racial slurs towards her may now understand how their comments effect others and was very MATURE in the way she precieved the lesson we need to give our children more credit, they get more then you think. “

Mickey Tanner: This out-cry from parents is the reason teacher(sic) are afraid to teach outside the box or to offer up new ideas about learning. Jerome school teacher’s who made any attempt to provide an educational lesson about racism or Martin Luther King, should be commended not damned.

The lesson was either very effective at portraying what it felt to be black in the south during Jim Crow or it spun into the gray area of the Stanford Prison Experiment. In that notorious experiment college students took on the roles of prisoners and guards with the experiment called off because guards became sadistic and prisoners became depressed.

The school, which opened January 7th, is home to about 450 4th and 5th grade students. The students and teachers moved to the school together, students carrying books and helping to move their desks out of their old school. This means that there are no educational statistics on Summit. But, using some old fashioned type and click investigative journalism I figure the school to be made up of a student population similar to the previous 4th – 6th grade school in Jerome.
This chart of Central Elementary in Jerome is from the National Center for Educational Statistics.

This student make-up is not at all like the school where I work. In my school the 2 students are white, 2 are Hispanic and the other 550 are African-American. Students in my school know what it feels like to be the color that no one will talk to. If that is not enough I work with an 84 year-old volunteer foster grandparent who can tell the kids what it was like before the end of Jim Crow.

What is really funny is a 36 year old white man (me) explaining to 19 African-American 4-year-olds about how the mean white man bus driver tried to make Rosa go to the back of the bus. It cracks us all up. Most of the kids don’t even realize I am white until I bring up black history for the first time.

Truthfully, I am not sure Jim Crow ever left town. I think he just changed his name. Segregation is still with us in the “local” school movement and some, but definitely not all, private and charter school experiments. Now days Jim cares more about money and less about color but the prejudice is still the same.

If there was a poor decision made in the activity it was to move a 6th grade lesson down to 5th grade lesson. Students at this age may not have been emotionally mature enough to handle the “dramatization.” But, if even one of those kids is less likely to judge another for the color of their skin the teachers’ lesson met its’ objective.

Maybe they could have taught a more modern/less emotional lesson in tolerance by allowing kids to buy their color.