Aside from Spirit Week, tensions within and between grades are perhaps no more palpable than during Intensive Learning (IL) selection, a days-long process in early October where Upper School students choose their IL experiences. We can observe a special intersectionality of relevant conversations and controversies within the MFS community when upperclassmen lament that underclassmen have taken spots from their peers on international trips due to language-priority rules or when one finds that they have (“yet again” or “for the first year I can go international”) found themselves at the bottom of their grade’s selection list. Questions of fairness are of particular interest to a community based upon Quaker principles, and as a tradition of equal relevance to our school identity, IL serves as both a perfect paradigm from which issues can arise and an ideal lens through which they can be examined.
A frequent complaint among the student body revolves around the lottery system used to determine selection numbers. Within each grade, students are divided between those who have and have not previously selected an overnight trip and get, within those groups, plugged into a randomly generated sequence determining the selection order. Gradewide priority is (except in what are now arguably not-so-niche cases that will be discussed later) granted through seniority alongside distinctions made within grades regarding previous attendance of overnight trips. This organization functions such that a senior who has not gone on an overnight trip will have selection priority over all seniors who have, and all seniors will be given priority over students junior to them.
A defense of this system could point to the fact that, simply because some sort of selection order must be established for something like IL to function logistically, the process is rendered fair in its randomness. It is true that some students will be placed at the bottom of the list, but they had just as great a chance to be placed at the first and last spot of their respective groups as any of their peers. It is, for them, simply by an unfortunate (but wholly unprejudiced) turn of fate that the sequence resulted in such an outcome — it is, should we understand equality to reflect an absence of bias, as fair as possible within the constraints of how IL selection must work.
The issue here lies in a striving towards equality where equity is far more appropriate: IL selection should be biased. This is an issue of unique pertinence to students who find themselves at the bottom of selection lists for consecutive years, particularly sophomores and juniors, of whom the majority has not yet gone on an overnight trip and therefore represent the largest lottery makeup with the reasonable potential of selecting overnights. As a result of the system’s impartiality, there is no way of distinguishing students who (although having not attended an overnight experience) have previously (perhaps consecutively) found themselves at the upper portion of the selection list from those who have previously found themselves at the bottom of this list. It is entirely possible, then, for a student to find themselves granted low priority in their sophomore year, potentially barring them from a local trip of their choice, and again in their junior year, where the large class selection pool in tandem with the unique rules applying to language-based trips in which underclassmen can be granted priority over upperclassmen in selecting certain experiences, rendering them unable to attend certain trips while their peers are given consecutive top picks and can, generally, attend a trip of their choosing several years in a row.
In some sense, the way IL selection currently functions already acknowledges the need for measured prejudices to make the system more equitable: distinctions are rightfully made between students who have and have not previously attended overnight trips, and separate selection pools are created accordingly — it would be unfair for a student who has already attended an overnight experience to find themselves at the top of a selection list that includes students who haven’t yet gone overnight. In this same vein, it would be equally unfair to have the entire Upper School encompass a single random list in which freshmen could take priority over seniors for an overnight experience selection. The most obvious answer to the above dilemma is unique perhaps in the sophistication with which it would need to be implemented, but does not break form in terms of how it would identify and adjust for the need to organize trip selection in a manner reflecting deliberate equity. We can very well imagine a situation in which, much like previous attendance of an overnight trip, previous placement on selection lists is also a factor in the outcome of the selection sequence — not necessitating the creation of new “high up” / “low down” categories, but allowing for granular distinctions within the existing groups such that students previously in the top portion of the list had a lesser chance of being so consecutively and vice versa for those at the bottom. Such a design would most likely result in the creation of a novel generator specifically designed by MFS for IL selection. This model is perhaps imperfect, but it unquestionably places us leagues ahead of our current position in making IL selection more equitable for the student body. Such an initiative, approached appropriately, would do nothing but improve the overall IL experience for everyone as more students would be able to go on trips of their choosing. This principle extends beyond IL: in engaging with questions of equality, equity, and fairness there are steps that can and should be taken by the entire community to understand and grapple with such dynamics — if not for immediate remedying, then at least to gain a deeper understanding of the interplay between our abstract communal values and their practical applications in the day-to-day school setting.
