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John H. Bishop, Matthew Bishop, Lara Gelbwasser, Shanna Green, and Andrew Zuckerman present a chilling analysis of the way student culture punishes the nerds in American high schools. The interviews and other data in the paper make a powerful case that this culture undermines learning by making students pay a high social price for becoming visibly engaged and successful in academic pursuits. The pattern they describe is particularly frightening, both because it depicts a kind of antischool, where learning is for losers, and because it is too familiar to dismiss as an empirical fluke. In an effort to explain this pattern, the authors view the antinerd culture as a rational response to the incentives and disincentives that students encounter in school. The popular students set the norms for student culture. Given that academic achievement costs time and effort, all else being equal, they have an incentive to lower the overall level of academic work required of students. When students are graded on a curve—that is, relative to each other's performance instead of to a fixed performance criterion—punishing students, such as the nerds, who perform at a high level makes sense. In such a system, nerds are rate busters, so the culture punishes them to lower the curve for the collective benefit of the other students.

In some ways, the analysis may overstate the seriousness of the nerd problem. As Laurence Steinberg and several others pointed out during the discussion of this paper, nerds are targets because of their weak social skills as much as for their academic prowess. A student can be both popular and smart as long as he or she is good at playing the social game with peers. But this does not eliminate the depressing picture Bishop and his colleagues paint of schools as places where being a good scholar carries negative weight and needs to be counterbalanced by athletic ability or good looks. Another point that came up in the discussion is that one simple and obvious answer to the problems in student culture is for teachers to assert stronger control. But evidence suggests that this is possible only within narrow limits. As Willard Waller and many others have long shown, students are in a powerful position to resist the impositions of teachers. This is particularly true in ordinary nonselective public schools, where teachers do not enjoy the advantage of having a student body made up of individuals who selected themselves and were selected by the school on the basis of their agreement with the school culture.⁷⁰

The response to the nerd problem that the paper raises (and Bishop and others develop more fully in a paper presented at the 2001 Brookings education forum) focuses on the mechanism for school reform that was also brought up by most participants at this conference: setting firm standards for student performance.⁷¹ Bishop argues that, especially when standards are enforced by curriculum-based external exit exam systems (CBEEES), they can change the incentives for the student players in the game. CBEEES shift the basis of student evaluation from relative norms to fixed criteria, move control of assessment outside the classroom and school system, and assess the full range of knowledge gained instead of just minimum competency. This forces the leading crowd to raise its level of academic effort to avoid failing, and it removes the zero-sum quality of academic achievement, providing incentives to study for all students and not just those near the cut score. Add to this exam system other elements of the standards movement, such as restricting course taking to core academic subjects and pushing students toward more advanced levels in these subjects, and a formula may emerge that begins to reverse the antinerd culture in schools.

I focus here on some of the deep-seated characteristics of American school and society that support the student culture of punishing the nerds and on the ways in which a standards approach might and...