648: Unteachable Moment

Ira Glass

So, you may have heard that last week, Starbucks closed down all of their US stores so they could do this big racial bias training program for everybody who worked at Starbucks-- the same training at every store Starbucks owns, 8,000 stores, over 175,000 people-- a very eccentric corporate move that the company embarked on after an incident in Starbucks in Philadelphia in April that you probably heard about. Two African-American men were sitting there, calmly waiting for a friend. The manager called the police, who arrested them as customers asked why.

Ira Glass

Here's what they did. They wanted to use the bathroom, but they hadn't bought anything. The manager said no. She asked them to leave. When they wouldn't leave, because they were there to meet somebody, the manager called the police.

Two days after this, the company said that what happened was reprehensible, that calling the police was completely inappropriate, that the company stands firmly against racial profiling. And then it went further and announced this training, which would shut down the stores for half a day and cost them tens of millions of dollars. That is not what companies normally do. Normally, when this kind of thing happens, companies either deny they did anything wrong, or they accept they did something wrong, and then they move on. Like, they move on quickly. Moving on quickly is the key.

But here, Starbucks was taking this incident that was bad press for them from the start and they decided to kind of own it and sit with it and live in it. And they more or less declared, we have a problem with racism in this country. And our answer to Philadelphia is that Starbucks is not only going to try to fix its own racism problem, it's going to try to help fix America's racism problem, too-- which, I have to say, is basically just inviting people from all sides to criticize them.

And then the thing that they do is the biggest implicit bias training that's happened ever in all time. People argue about the effectiveness of implicit bias training anyway. I'm just trying to say, Starbucks made a very unusual choice.

Well, Kelefa Sanneh has been examining that choice for us. And he went to attend the training itself, which we're going to get to. Our show is the only journalistic outfit that Starbucks allowed to attend one of these trainings, and we did record there. That's coming up.

Kelefa is normally a staff writer for The New Yorker. Hey, Kelefa.

Kelefa Sanneh

Hey, Ira.

Ira Glass

OK, so the thing that I personally wonder about is, OK, in a purely practical way, if Starbucks wanted their employees to not do racist stuff or racial profile anybody anymore, a training like this seems so, like, squishy.

Kelefa Sanneh

Mhm, yeah.

Ira Glass

Who knows if this even works? Why not do the most old-fashioned thing out there? If they really care about this, why don't they just fire the manager, tell everybody else, OK, here's a new rule, do stuff like that, you lose your job, and then just call it a day?

People were calling for them to fire the manager for a while. They were protests demanding that. And they didn't do it. Why do this experimental, weird thing instead? Why not just fire the racists?

Kelefa Sanneh

So I talked to Howard Schultz. He's the guy who built Starbucks-- basically the Steve Jobs of Starbucks-- about why they didn't do the simple thing.

Ira Glass

And just to be clear, the manager, at this point, is not working for Starbucks, though they will not say whether or not they fired her. The company said-- and this is a quote-- that it was a mutual decision for her to go. So when this happens, they don't make a show of firing her and setting new rules.

Kelefa Sanneh

No. Instead, the company says it's going to help lead this national conversation about race that we always hear about. I talked to Howard Schultz about this plan, this idealistic, optimistic vision of racial healing and progress. And actually, he got kind of defensive about it.

Ira Glass

Really?

Kelefa Sanneh

Yeah. Like, when I asked him what seemed like a pretty obvious question about the Philadelphia thing-- I asked him, how often does this kind of thing happen in your stores? And he didn't know. He said Starbucks doesn't keep track.

Kelefa Sanneh

Howard Schultz loves these big, dramatic gestures. You might remember in 2008, during the Obama-McCain presidential race, Starbucks buys this ad on Saturday Night Live saying, if you vote, you can come into Starbucks, get a free cup of coffee.

Ira Glass

Yeah, I kind of vaguely remember that.

Kelefa Sanneh

Yeah, he has a term for initiatives like these. He calls them "brand sparks."

Ira Glass

Brand sparks?

Kelefa Sanneh

Yeah. He defines it in one of his books. He says brand sparks are "subtle, surprising, and rare marketing events usually linked to cultural or humanitarian issues and devoid of a self-serving sales pitch."

Ira Glass

Oh.

Kelefa Sanneh

That election ad, he said it worked. He said it generated goodwill for Starbucks. He said it gave the brand a halo. But this-- he said that this racism initiative-- he said this was different.

Kelefa Sanneh

Yeah. When I suggested this to Howard, that this racial bias training thing had something to do with marketing Starbucks, he didn't go for it.

Kelefa Sanneh

This conversation with Howard Schultz, it happened right before the training. That's where I was supposed to go after our interview, which was supposed to last, like, half an hour.

So, he didn't hang up on me. We kept talking. But once we were done, my producer and I, we get a call from a Starbucks PR rep saying, basically, look, if this is going to be some sort of gotcha piece about how this whole thing is a big marketing event, we might not be interested in participating.

Ira Glass

Well, it's weird, because there's nothing wrong with marketing. Like, they're doing a thing. They want people to know. Marketing is what companies do.

Kelefa Sanneh

Sure. They never really stop doing it, right? Marketing is sort of just a word for anything that a company does to tell the world about who it is.

Ira Glass

OK. All right, here's the theory. Is it possible that he is so insistent that there's no marketing in it because, yeah, he knows that anything his company does publicly affects how the public sees his brand. Like, of course doing anything like this is a kind of marketing.

But he doesn't want to admit it because actually, underneath it, he actually is trying to do a good thing. He's trying to actually address racism. He thinks America is too racist. He wants to do something about it. And he just feels like, oh, if we start admitting that there's some marketing, or we get some brand halo from this, that's just going to muddy the message.

Kelefa Sanneh

Yeah, although what's weird is, this isn't the first time Starbucks has tried to do a good thing, right? They've had environmental initiatives. They had this voting thing, which he was happy to say the voting thing was good marketing. So in a sense, this isn't new for Starbucks.

But what is new is that this is a racism initiative. And I think he has a sense that racism is so incendiary, so sensitive, that it can't have anything to do with marketing. Like, if there's any sense that this has anything to do with marketing Starbucks, people are going to tune it out or maybe worse, right?

Ira Glass

Right, because it would be offensive.

Kelefa Sanneh

Yeah, this idea, like, you're taking America's national sin of racism and using that to sell coffee. People might consider that offensive.

Ira Glass

OK, but if he really is trying to do something good here, then to put this thing together, he worked with-- I read this in the paper, the people who you would turn to if you were serious about doing a big anti-bias training. There's, like, Bryan Stevenson--

Kelefa Sanneh

Yeah, Bryan Stevenson from the Equal Justice Initiative.

Ira Glass

Sherrilyn Iffil, I read.

Kelefa Sanneh

Yeah, she runs the Legal Defense Fund at the NAACP.

Ira Glass

And then, less than a week after this big training, this other thing happens-- Howard Schultz quits his job at Starbucks.

Kelefa Sanneh

Right.

Ira Glass

And there's all this speculation. Is he going run for president? And he doesn't deny whether or not he's going to run for President. He's just like, I'm going to do public service.

Kelefa Sanneh

Howard Schultz for president, right? Maybe he really does care more about fixing America than selling coffee.

Ira Glass

OK, well, today on our program, from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. We have this multinational corporation deciding to do a touchy-feely racial bias training session. And can you think of anything harder to try to teach people in four hours, given how complicated and charged the whole subject is? And on our program today, we have this story and other stories of people trying to teach in situations where learning is not going to be easy at all.

In one of our stories, we see kids who are trying to learn in one of the least hospitable environments imaginable. We watch what happens. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, All the Caffeine in the World Doesn't Make You Woke. So when Starbucks gave us permission to record at their big national training last week, they did put conditions on this-- all kinds of conditions. They would not let us record the training at one of their stores. It had to be at their corporate headquarters. They would select the participants.

So this is not going to be typical in a lot of ways. But we will get to see what the training actually is and to see whether it had any kind of impact on the group of people who we figured, given the circumstances, would be a group of employees predisposed to be into this. We figured, if this training didn't do much for them, what kind of chance was it that it was going to be any better out in the stores? And if it did work for them, well then, maybe that would be interesting in some way, also.

We honestly did not know what to expect. But we wanted to understand, OK, here's this big company that says it's trying to do this idealistic thing, take on all racial relations in America. And OK, let's take them at their word and try to understand. What did it look like when they tried to do that?

The employees at this particular training were not big, like, vice presidents, not the people in charge of the company. These were mostly mid-level managers from the supply chain, and operations, and human resources parts of the company. And most of them used to work in the stores as baristas. Kelefa now explains what he saw at that training.

Kelefa Sanneh

This was happening in 8,000 stores. And they couldn't hire 8,000 racial bias experts to lead the sessions. So the course was designed to be self-directed, with no official leader.

Kelefa Sanneh

I was in Seattle in a conference room at Starbucks headquarters, eight upbeat employees sitting around a table. Two were black. Most of the rest were white. And there was one very quiet PR person sitting in the corner.

Kelefa Sanneh

Everyone had their Starbucks drinks-- a hot coffee, a nitro cold brew, a cold brew with milk and one pump of toffee nut syrup.

Kelefa Sanneh

There was a huge, 68-page booklet printed on broadsheet newsprint in sections, like a Sunday paper--

Kelefa Sanneh

--and a timeline running along the bottom, telling you how long each task should take.

Kelefa Sanneh

Kind of ingenious, really.

Kelefa Sanneh

Some pages told the group to watch videos. Those were preloaded on an iPad. Some of them asked people to reflect and write things down. Everyone got a 40-page workbook.

Kelefa Sanneh

There was even the racial equivalent of a Surgeon General's warning.

Kelefa Sanneh

If that happens, you're supposed to pause, share your feelings, and then have a short group conversation about how you felt.

Kelefa Sanneh

So yeah, there were some moments where it felt like I'd stumbled into some sort of beachfront spiritual retreat.

Kelefa Sanneh

Like, here's Common, the rapper and actor, on the iPad, doing the opening meditation.

Kelefa Sanneh

All of this was inspired by the incident in Philadelphia. But the only time the materials mentioned the incident itself was to explain why the training was happening. Instead, the training zoomed way out, tackling racial bias and discrimination more generally. The guidebook implied, but didn't quite state, that what happened in Philadelphia was racist.

Kelefa Sanneh

The first exercise started small-- very small. People were asked to pair up and then list their differences. And even here, at this meticulously planned racial awareness workshop, where everyone knows they're there to talk about race, everyone came prepared to talk about race, it turns out, it's still really hard to get people to talk about race.

Kelefa Sanneh

These are two people who sit near each other in the office, but never talked till now-- Whitney, who's white, and Rodney, who's black, though somehow, that fact is not getting a lot of play.

Kelefa Sanneh

The other groups were like this, too-- I'm a man. I'm a woman. I'm a Leo. I'm a Virgo. I'm from Arizona. I'm from Indiana.

Rodney and Whitney are the only ones who call out their own races. And as soon as they do, they drop it.

Kelefa Sanneh

And, like, of course people, especially white people, are hesitant to talk about race, at least at first. It feels rude to sit down with someone and jump into race, as if that's what's on your mind, as if that's how you see them. But there's a training for that, and we're at it.

So here's how it worked. It was basically broken into three sections. This format was created with help from the Perception Institute, a group that does this kind of anti-bias work. There are three sections of the training. First, acknowledging that we're all different and talking about what it takes to make everyone feel like they belong.

Second, recognizing bias in ourselves. Here's how they defined it-- implicit bias, that's the automatic stereotyping we do. Structural bias, that's the way systems and institutions perpetuate inequality.

Third, Starbucks policies. This was more about the nuts and bolts of actually running a coffee shop. In response to Philadelphia, the company made some changes, like the bathroom policy. Now, everyone can use the bathroom at Starbucks. You don't have to buy anything.

Parts of the training felt generic, like a run-of-the-mill corporate diversity seminar. And some parts were super specific to Starbucks, tackling forms of bias that no one outside Starbucks has ever considered. Here's a scenario from one of the videos.

Kelefa Sanneh

I guess that's an example of beverage bias, or maybe frappuccino shaming. There were also videos about baristas assuming patrons were homeless. One was about gender identity. One was about a barista who suspected that a group of black kids was plotting to steal the tip jar. One was about a guy with an accent so thick that the barista couldn't spell his name on his cup.

Kelefa Sanneh

But other parts were surprisingly ambitious and more provocative, like a video by Stanley Nelson, the documentary filmmaker--

Kelefa Sanneh

--which argued that African-Americans have been systematically excluded from public spaces.

Kelefa Sanneh

His film included violent footage from the Civil Rights era.

[GROUP SINGING ON FILM]

Kelefa Sanneh

And it also included footage of a police officer choking a young black man in a prom tux. That's from just last month. It happened outside a Waffle House in North Carolina.

Kelefa Sanneh

Everyone in the room--

Kelefa Sanneh

--seemed pretty affected by it.

Kelefa Sanneh

A couple of people even had tears in their eyes. And despite the uneasiness at first, there actually was some blunt talk about race in the group discussions, mainly because there was one person there who seemed totally comfortable talking about it. Her name was Adrienne. She's an engineer working on the global supply chain.

She's African-American, grew up in Atlanta, moved to Seattle six years ago to work at Starbucks. And she admitted that for her, Starbucks wasn't always a super comfortable place to be. At one point, everyone broke up into small groups and talked about the company. And she remembered coming into work in the summer of 2016, after Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were shot and killed by the police.

Kelefa Sanneh

When people are discussing racism, or trying to, there's this thing that happens. The black people in the room become the de facto discussion leaders. And of course, that's understandable. White people especially have been taught that when it comes to racism, their most important task is to be good listeners.

Some of that happened in this room, too. One of the questions in the book was about what it was like to come to work with natural hair. OK, so whoever wrote this question was probably hoping there'd be somebody like Adrienne in the room, somebody who could give an answer like this.

Kelefa Sanneh

Rodney jumps in, the other black employee in the room.

Kelefa Sanneh

That's Whitney saying, it's the same with pregnant women. She's the white coworker who was paired with Rodney in the exercise at the beginning.

Kelefa Sanneh

There weren't a lot of moments like this, where people chimed in, added to each other's stories. Generally, everyone listened respectfully but quietly, like when Adrienne asked the group, why do white people care so much about black people's hair? Everyone laughed, but no one gave her an answer. In this group, it seemed like Adrienne was the only person trying to answer questions like that.

The closest they got to really discussing the Philadelphia incident was near the end. They were talking not about Philadelphia, but about something else-- something less charged, but kind of similar, that happened in one of the stores. There was a video of a store manager telling a story that sounded kind of like a confession.

Kelefa Sanneh

This is Adrienne again.

Kelefa Sanneh

The training manual had talked about unconscious bias. But Adrienne thought that what this guy did, it sounded more like conscious bias, an intentionally racist act. Whitney, the white operations manager-- she wasn't so sure.

Kelefa Sanneh

And she suggested, very politely, that Adrienne might be wrong about this guy-- that maybe this guy didn't realize in the moment what he was doing.

Kelefa Sanneh

Then Rodney joined the conversation, even though he wasn't really sure how he felt.

Kelefa Sanneh

Rodney really believes in Starbucks. But at this moment, it felt like he was bumping up against the limits of this corporate initiative, like maybe he had finally encountered a problem that wasn't going to be solved by a friendly, non-judgmental listening session.

In practice, this epic social experiment, this attempt to lead a national conversation about race, this grandiose parting shot from Howard Schultz as he left this company that he built, did it help? It's hard to tell. Starbucks said it wasn't measuring outcomes. But in this one conference room in Seattle, it seemed sincere, maybe even helpful. It felt like Starbucks was trying to give people what they say they want after an incident like this-- accept responsibility, change your corporate culture, fight systemic racism all at once. And if it was kind of unwieldy, kind of incoherent, with a couple of moments of insight, what do you expect? It's a weird assignment.

Kelefa Sanneh

The day of the training, May 29, while the group had been impaneled, the national conversation about race had been proceeding in the real world, although not in a way they would have predicted. While they were watching their videos and filling out their workbooks, Roseanne Barr, unbeknownst to them, was being condemned for a tweet in which she compared an African-American woman to an ape.

So by the time the session in Seattle was finished, Roseanne, not Starbucks, was the biggest story in the country. ABC did what Starbucks didn't do. They fired Roseanne, they issued a brief statement, and they tried to move on as quickly as possible. Starbucks, having hoped to harness one viral moment, had found its careful plans overshadowed by a different one.

On Twitter, people joked about how Roseanne could use some of that Starbucks sensitivity training. The company's big, idealistic vision became a punchline after someone else's racial screw-up. There are going to be more trainings for Starbucks employees over the next year, but the stores aren't going to shut down for them.

Starbucks has gone back to selling coffee. Wherever you are, chances are, there's one nearby. Go there right now if you want. Order a frappuccino. They'll try not to judge you.

Ira Glass

Kelefa Sanneh-- he's a staff writer for The New Yorker. Coming up, the kid who made the other kids in his school wonder if studying is just a waste of time. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

This American Life-- I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, "Unteachable Moment," stories about people who are supposed to learn some stuff that is really hard to learn, and then what happens instead of learning. We've arrived at Act Two of our show-- Act Two, Throw the Book at Them.

In New Orleans, the district attorney prosecutes a ton of kids as adults. Between 2011 and 2015, for instance, he sent approximately 80% of 15- and 16-year-olds into the adult criminal justice system in cases where he had the option of charging them as juveniles. That's according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

These kids end up at the Orleans Justice Center, which is the jail that any adult in New Orleans Parish is held while waiting for trial. And in part because there are so many kids, and in part because some of them are in jail for so long, waiting for their court dates, they decided to open up a high school in the jail back last year in August. It's a real school, actually part of the New Orleans School District. You can get a real high school diploma there. And it looks like nearly any high school, too.

Ira Glass

In the hallway, there are motivational posters and student essays on the theme of power posted. There's a "Where are they now?" display with former students' pictures and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s mugshot from when he was in jail. But one big difference from regular school? The students are all in orange jumpsuits, stamped "INMATE" in all caps.

Ira Glass

At any given time, there are about 50 students enrolled in the school, which is named the Travis Hill School after a local musician who was incarcerated himself as a teenager. I should say that some of the students are 18 or over. So technically, they are adults.

But Travis Hill is different from schools in juvenile detention facilities because these kids, all of them, are charged as adults. They're all facing adult sentences, lots of them really long-- 10, 15, 25, 40 years-- and a lifelong criminal record. And all this raises a very particular problem for this school. Eli Hager, who reports on criminal justice issues at the Marshall Project, has been visiting the school.

Quick warning that we have un-beeped a few words here in the podcast version of the program. A beeped version is at our website. Here's Eli.

Eli Hager

The problem is, being a student and being an inmate are opposites. Everything about adult jail is telling you to be hopeless, that you have no future and no worth, which makes school feel utterly beside the point. Of course, there are always kids in the back row of any classroom asking the question, when will we ever use this in real life? Especially in places where there truly isn't much opportunity, like at the mostly black schools that the kids at Travis Hill all came from.

But it's just more vivid here, the students' sense of the senselessness of school-- more total and more justified. Take this one kid, Ju'ron. He's 17 years old, and he's facing 15 to 104 years in prison for allegedly stealing a cell phone from a woman and firing a gun in the air. He says he didn't do it.

His mom can't afford bail. So until his trial, he's stuck in a place that's not safe. The death rate at the Orleans Justice Center is four times the national average for jails. Ju'ron calls his mom every day, but in-person visits aren't allowed here.

Sometimes, he gets locked in his cell for 23 hours a day and gets his feed up, as the guards call it, through a slot. He goes to sleep on a hard slab. And one day, on his way to art class, he walked past the man charged with killing his father just a few months earlier.

Eli Hager

So last summer, the experiment began at Orleans Justice Center. Could a violent adult jail contain an aspirational school? Every day, its students, all of whom are black, would grapple with whether they're defined by their classroom or their cell.

In the first year of Travis Hill's existence, there were two moments in particular that illustrated how the kids there deal with this bewildering code switch-- inmate to student, student to inmate. The first was this story that kept coming up in almost every interview I did. It was about this kid, Quincy, also 17 years old-- the kind of legendary kid who everyone at a high school still talks about, even though he's no longer there. Ju'ron lived on the same tier of the jail with him.

Eli Hager

Jose is slang in Louisiana. It sort of means joke, like mess around. Though Quincy didn't really do much school work himself, he'd stand up in class and imitate motivational speakers from YouTube, telling the other kids to do their work. That kind of thing left a big impression on the staff.

Eli Hager

Quincy wasn't at the jail anymore by the time I visited, so you're not going to hear from him. Part of the reason everyone knew him so well was that he'd been waiting behind bars for two years to get a trial. When he was 15, he was charged as an adult with attempted murder for shooting a gun at state troopers in an unmarked car, along with a group of other teens.

Every time he had a court date, he got a ride over to the courthouse in a van. The older kids have to take a school bus, of all vehicles, even though it's only like 500 feet away from the jail. He'd wait in the van in shackles to be called into the courtroom, only to have his case continued again. And then he'd just roll back to school and try to do trigonometry, or whatever.

Eli Hager

This is Travis Hill's dean of students, Kenneth Dorsey.

Eli Hager

The day that Quincy finally got to stand in front of a judge was a major event for the entire student body. There had been so much buildup. And in the group claustrophobia of a school in jail, one student's court date feels like everybody's court date. Ju'ron told me and my producer, Sean Cole, what it was like on the juvenile tier beforehand.

Eli Hager

Quincy had come back from court and just threw his food on the table. They were all at lunch.

Eli Hager

25 years for someone charged at 15 years old. It was the longest sentence handed down in Travis Hill's short history.

Eli Hager

This is another student, Marlin.

Eli Hager

Ju'ron again.

Eli Hager

DCI is the Dixon Correctional Institute. In the days before Quincy got sent off, even though this goes against the whole point of their school, the teachers decided that he was facing too bleak a future to try to get him to study. So they just let him listen to music, and sat and had conversations with him, talking about how he'd be as old as they are when he got out.

Eli Hager

A lot of the other kids felt the same way. The math teacher, Ms. Burr, and the other teachers, say that even months later, their students still haven't fully come to terms with Quincy's departure. They still bring him up.

Eli Hager

I was at the jail visiting around the time Quincy and another student were sentenced. And I sat in on this one science class where their friends were downright despondent. One was walking around the room, groaning and knocking his head against the door.

The teacher was trying to teach a lesson about the properties of living organisms. A living organism needs light, she said, and energy. A living organism needs to live within a community. A living organism responds to stimuli or messages from the environment around it. A living organism has the capacity to grow.

When Quincy was shipped upstate, it was probably the lowest moment for the kids. Their most hopeful moment came just a month later. It had to do with another student who nearly everyone at the school talked about and another first at Travis Hill, but of a very different kind.

It was the first graduation-- a graduation ceremony for one, one student. A whole ceremony was held for him. The graduate was a kid named Tristion. But people don't call him Tristion.

Tristion has the word "fireman" written in Sharpie on the collar of his orange jumpsuit and down its leg. In addition to fighting fires, he wants to start a storm evacuation business. He grew up in the Lower Ninth Ward. And like most of the kids at Travis Hill, he's one of the babies of Hurricane Katrina.

Like Ju'ron, he fled to Texas until the water went down. He says his high school class was going to be the first to graduate from a brand new school building that had just been built. But then he came to jail.

When Tristion was a juvenile, he coerced underage girls online to send him naked photos. He says he knew it was wrong when he was doing it and that he stopped about a year before he was arrested, at age 18. Tristion is not at all the typical student at Travis Hill. He came to jail before the school existed and was already studying to get his GED, already motivated.

Eli Hager

Tristion said school was like having a huge breakfast waiting for him in the morning, with eggs, and grits, and biscuits, and sausage, and orange juice. Meanwhile, his actual breakfast the first morning of school was cereal. It was cereal the next morning, too, and the next.

Jail is dispiriting like that, demotivating. And Tristion was bent on staying motivated. So instead of fixating on being in jail, he takes another approach.

Eli Hager

This is the way that Tristion deals with going to school in jail-- by pretending he's not in jail. Some of the other students engage in a similar kind of useful delusion, especially during what one teacher calls the honeymoon phase of jail, when the kids are still telling themselves, and anyone who will listen, that they're getting out tomorrow or next week, against all evidence to the contrary.

The school does it, too, by having intentionally condensed units and semesters, with award ceremonies at the end of each one, to at least give the students a feeling of accomplishment or completion.

Eli Hager

Tristion is obviously a pretty enthusiastic guy in general. But when I asked him about his graduation, he talked for seven minutes straight--

Eli Hager

--not just about the event itself, but the moments leading up to it, acting out every part like he was in a one-man show, from getting ready in the morning--

Eli Hager

--to the lunch break that day, hours before the ceremony.

Eli Hager

And he didn't have to do any fantasizing at all when it came to the ceremony itself. It was the real deal, with balloons, speeches. His family was there. All of his classmates were in attendance. And unlike them, instead of orange, Tristion was decked out in a dark green cap and gown.

Eli Hager

Ms. Burr, the math teacher, said she heard the same thing from the students.

It took this kid, who lives in an imaginary version of jail, to make the school inside of the jail feel real. But after Tristion's graduation, he had to go back to his cell, diploma in hand. His family had gone home.

Eli Hager

Tristion was sentenced the very next day after his graduation. Last year, he'd asked the court to delay his sentencing until he finished his degree. Now he's at another facility and will be incarcerated until 2021, according to the Louisiana Department of Corrections.

One of Travis Hill's staff members, Alexi Gaddis, told the students during a, quote unquote, "life skills" class this spring, that it's already not easy for human beings to dream. It's already a vulnerable thing to believe in yourself, given all the ways the world can crush that. Getting these particular kids to give dreaming another chance, absurd as it can feel in some ways, given what this country thinks of them-- in the end, that's the core curriculum of this school.

Ira Glass

Eli Hager-- he's a reporter for the Marshall Project. Since his visit to the Travis Hill school, two more students have graduated in the jail. One of them said seeing Tristion graduate really inspired him. You can read a print version of Eli's story on the Marshall Project's website, MarshallProject.org.

Ira Glass

Act Three, Those Who Can't Play. So our program today is about people trying to learn something it is just hard to learn. And with the World Cup coming next week, I will point out, it's really hard to learn to be a great soccer player.

Daniel Alarcon, the executive producer and host of Radio Ambulante, has this story about his dad. Growing up in Peru, Daniel's dad, Renato, played soccer around the neighborhood, like all the kids did. But he was never anything special.

Ira Glass

What he was thought of, from a young age, was being beyond unusually bright.

Ira Glass

He was an incredibly verbal kid, loved poetry and words, great talker. But again-- soccer?

Ira Glass

Daniel's dad would also make up games-- like, whole professional games. Like, all the players, both sides, all the action-- starting, Daniel says, when he was 10 or 11. He would do it just for himself, as a thing to do, though the whole family knew he could do this.

Ira Glass

They're the local favorite from the province. And in this game that he made up on stage, they played the big fancy team from the capital, Lima.

Ira Glass

Daniel Alarcon-- he first told this story on his show, Radio Ambulante.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.