How can you make social problems the theme of a school story?

When you write a school story, there are many topics you can choose. One of them is the social background of the students. You will always and at every school - that's my view - find that social structure is reflected by patterns within school.

For example, take the wealthy lawyer who has his son in a class with a new teacher who is not conventional.
Such a teacher could try to consider all his students completely neutrally. He will give grades that have only one basis: the performance of the student. He will not consider frequent tendencies to grade the same student again and again with the same result. He or she will not look at the grades from the class or year before. He will not react when the lawyer calls him up after his son got a B or a C for the first time in his school career, because he is sure that it is correct.

Think about the mechanismus that might follow. The wealthy parents will call for a date with the director. He will discuss with them for two hours, and then ask the teacher to think about the grade. He will, possibly, accept, when the teacher says it is sure and he has corrected the test or the paper very carefully. But maybe he is one of the directors who play the role of rulers at school, the frequent type who likes power and tricking.

He is going to tell the teacher he has to change the grade, otherwise there might be a lawsuit, and he claims that would be very bad for the image of the school and such things. How can the teacher react? Who will help him, if this is the normal procedure the director uses when parents complain, especially those parents with some money or power?

And imagine what wiill happen if the one who complains is an employed office worker. How many seconds do you think will the director talk to him on the phone? Will he talk to him?

Henry Arnold, author of "School Stories"