Competitive school culture
Stop the toxic competition.
Fighting for participation points. Gossip about who deserved the internship. Here's how to end it, without anyone falling behind.
Change the culturePicking up where you left off.
We'll look up the people at your school and district who decide grading policy, counseling staff and what gets said at assemblies, and put their names on every template below.
School not in the list (middle school, private, outside the US)?
Spend a week paying attention
Competition hides inside normal conversation. For one week, notice and write down:
- How many times someone asks “what did you get?” within a minute of a test being handed back
- Whether anyone hides a grade, or lies about a grade, in either direction
- What gets said about a classmate after they announce good news
- How many classes grade participation by hand count, and who gets called on
- Whether anyone has said out loud that they're not okay, and what happened next
You want a sentence like “in AP Lang the same five people get the participation points and everyone else has given up” or “three people in my grade have been told they didn't deserve their internship, to their face.” Then come back and pick whichever of the four above is closest. Step 3 lets you work on more than one.
Nobody does all of this. Pick what you have the energy for; you can come back and add more later.
A culture is what people think other people think. Nobody at your school decided that asking “what did you get?” is normal, or that an A- is a failure. Each person does it because they believe everyone else does. That belief is held up by a surprisingly small number of people: the ones whose reactions everyone else checks. Psychologists call them social referents.
Same school, same message. Who says it first?
Every dot is a student, and the lines are who they talk to. The bigger dots are the social referents. Pick who starts saying “stop asking what people got on tests” and watch how far it spreads.
- 56 middle schools, 24,000 students, one year. Researchers at Princeton mapped who students paid attention to, then trained a random group of 20–32 students per school to take a public stand against conflict. Schools that got the program saw about 30% fewer disciplinary reports of conflict. The effect was strongest in schools where more of the trained students were social referents. Paluck, Shepherd & Aronow, PNAS 2016
- Their friends didn't get a lecture. The students designed their own messages: posters with their own faces, wristbands, a hashtag, a short conversation. Nobody outside the group had to attend anything. The culture moved because the people others watch were seen doing something different.
- It isn't the loudest or most popular kids. Referents are the center of any friend group, and every group has one: the captain, the group mom, the guy who's somehow friends with everyone, the most dramatic drama kid, the person who already has the internship and never brings it up.
Step 1. Name yours
Ask five people who don't hang out together: “Who at this school do people listen to?” The same names come up. Write them here; they stay on this device and go into your scripts below. Aim for one per friend group, not just the popular table.
Step 2. Decide what you're asking them to do
One behavior, public, easy. Not “care about mental health.” Pick from these, or write your own, and every referent gets the same ask so it reads as a norm and not a personality.
Step 3. Talk to them one at a time
Never at their lunch table. Their friend group is exactly the audience that makes it hard for them to agree to anything. Catch them alone, be honest that it's a slightly weird conversation, and ask for the one thing.
Do it properly Run it like the study did: a group, not a favor
The schools in the trial didn't rely on one organizer having twenty awkward conversations. They ran a small program, and you can copy the shape of it:
- Nominate. A one-question form to the whole grade: “Name up to five people at this school you pay attention to.” The top names are your referents. Invite them plus a handful of people who volunteered, so the group isn't only the popular kids.
- Meet every two weeks with a teacher or counselor as the adult in the room. Twenty to thirty students. Pizza helps.
- Let them pick the problem and the message. Your job is to bring what you know about the school. Theirs is to decide what they're willing to say and do in public. Messages they wrote themselves are the ones they'll repeat.
- Make it visible. Posters with their names and faces. A short assembly moment. A pinned post. Wristbands, if that's your school. The study's point was that referents had to be seen taking the stance.
- Hand it down. Recruit sophomores into the group in the spring so it survives your graduation.
In a competitive school the person who is struggling most is often the one who looks like they're winning, and nobody checks on them. You do need to know what to say and where to hand it off, and several nonprofits have already written that down well.
What it looks like here specifically
- Hiding grades, or a sudden refusal to talk about school at all from someone who used to.
- “I'll kill myself if I fail this” said as a joke, more than once. Treat it as not a joke once.
- Sleep that has stopped. Awake at 3am texts, falling asleep in class, energy drinks as a personality.
- Quitting the thing they loved because it “doesn't help” for college.
- Going quiet after decisions come out (December and late March are the two worst weeks of the year at a school like yours; put them in your calendar).
- Being mean about other people's success, which is usually pain pointed outward.
The kit
Each of these is free, built for teenagers, and takes under an hour to learn.
What to say
Three steps, from Active Minds' V-A-R. Validate, appreciate, refer. It works over text.
If a friend talks about hurting themselves, you don't handle it alone, even if they ask you to. Stay with them, tell a trusted adult that day, and give them 988. Keeping that secret is the one promise you're allowed to break.
Make it the school's, not yours
The email below asks the school to bring one of these programs in for a whole grade, so that knowing what to say becomes normal rather than heroic.
A teacher who grades participation by hand count has built a race into every class period. It isn't anyone's fault, and it can be changed by asking the right person in the right way.
One class: ask the teacher
Teachers are the good guys in this. Most of them hate the arms race too and have never been asked, by a student, for a specific alternative. Pick the one change that fits the class and send one email. Just ask to talk.
Every student at your school has gone through this alone, and most of the unkindness came from stress. The letter says that out loud, once, with everyone's name on it. It won't stop anyone from pushing too hard. It does two things a letter can do: it makes the commitment public so it's harder to break, and it asks the colleges to say the thing they already know is true.
How to get it signed
- Referents first. Get ten names people recognize before you show it to anyone else. A letter with the soccer captain and the newspaper editor at the top gets signed; a letter with three names gets screenshotted.
- One Google Form, one week. Name and grade only. Set a public goal (“half the school by Friday”) and post the count every day.
- Read one paragraph out loud at an assembly, a class meeting, or the start of a club. The “every student has gone through this alone” paragraph is the one.
- Tell your counselor before you send it. They know your school's regional admissions reps by name and can forward it in a way a student email can't. The template below asks them to.
we're writing an open letter from our whole school to college admissions officers. it says we'll stop competing for competition's sake and stop tearing each other down over grades and apps, and it asks the colleges to confirm there's no quota from one high school
[form link] — name and grade, takes 20 seconds
every one of us has gone through this alone. sign it so nobody after us has to
Where to send it
Three places, in this order: your counseling office, who forwards it to the regional reps for the colleges your school sends the most students to; the admissions offices themselves, by email, with the signature count in the subject line; and your school newspaper or Instagram, because the letter is also for the freshmen.
Culture change takes a year or two. Someone whose job is to talk to students takes a budget line, and the budget gets decided on a date. The argument that moves a board is not that students are stressed. It's a ratio: national associations publish how many students one counselor, social worker or psychologist should carry, and almost no school meets it.
Get these from your school's staff directory or the front office. Leave blank what you can't find.
In a competitive school the counselors also carry the college process, which is a second full-time job. That's the sentence to add: “our counselors are also our college counselors, so the time for a student who isn't okay is whatever's left.”
Competition looks different at every school. Let's work out yours.
Who the referents are, which teachers will move first, whether the letter or the social worker is the right lead: none of that is the same at two schools. We will come to your school, listen to your concerns, and run workshops to help make change.
- Map your school's referents with you and plan the first ten conversations
- Pick the teachers and the one grading change most likely to land
- Draft the letter with your class and get it in front of the right admissions reps
- Get you ready for the principal, the board, or the assembly
Free for public schools.
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