Published: September 1, 2005

One-Track Minds

It’s a bright spring day at tiny Rail Road Flat Elementary School, but teacher Randall Youngblood’s mood hasn’t yet lightened. The trouble had flared up the previous week when he’d left his class of 4th, 5th, and 6th graders in the hands of a substitute. Or, to hear him tell it, the other way around.

“They savaged him,” the teacher sighs, leaning on his desk at the back of his small portable classroom. “It was brutal.” From accounts he’s been able to piece together, half the class started the day being generally nasty to one another, and tensions built steadily from there, culminating in a fistfight between two 5th graders and a loud curse that got a student sent home for the day. “This is a very dysfunctional group when they get any leeway whatsoever,” he says.

It doesn’t sound like the same group of kids who have helped make the 100-student public school, tucked into an almost invisibly small town in northern California’s Sierra Nevada foothills, one of the highest-achieving...