Math, Science are far more objective fields than Drama. In Drama rather than encouring real talent, teachers (especially middle and high school) give too much importance to marketing or prettiness (unjustified). Thats’ where the Drama field is failing. If teachers are more logical or rational, I believe Drama will see better days, better talent and better audinece.
I tell my kids, if you want better life stay with Science and Math and keep Drama , Signing as side dish/hobby. Getting job in Drama is so difficult and the baised producers make it more difficult.

It isn’t just a ‘halo’ effect. A fully-meritocratic selection of actors would still contain a greater than random proportion of pretty ones.

The harsh fact is that good looking people really are, on average, better at things-in-general than ugly people (why is why we evolved to be attracted to good looks – ‘good looks’ is the look of vigorous, healthy, able people). And this does make it harder for the exceptions – ugly people who are really good at stuff.

Which means that you have to market the program the traditional way.

(One could test this by examining whether non-public drama exercises suffer the same bias.)

As well, I think there’s a very good chance that pretty “leads” also function to market drama to the participants themselves. I think there’s a very good chance that even “ugly” participants feel more positive about a production led by “pretty” people (except for those directly cut out of the lead) because (1) the production will be more popular with the outside world, and (2) there’s the halo effect of working around “pretty” people.

That story sounds something like this: someone (by pure random chance, or as a function of non-inherent beauty markers like being able to afford high-quality clothing) tells KidA (s)he’s pretty, so (s)he dresses better, works out more, stands with better posture, acts more confident, etc. etc., so (s)he’s perceived as prettier by more people, who reinforce it still more, etc. etc., and before long we have the high school theatre stat. Another kid, equally physically attractive controlling for clothes posture etc., didn’t have the benefit of the random praise and consequently doesn’t make the attractive choices along those dimensions. Things start to look pretty arbitrary and unjust for that kind. And maybe that kid ought to be promoted to lead in the school play, just so (s)he can have the opportunity to have attractiveness reinforced too.

(If this sounds a lot like the “poor people and minorities are just as smart, but were held back by social factors” argument for affirmative action, well, good reading!)

Education is about using tricks, and protected “unreal” situations to prepare the kids for the real world (and possibly to implant values). We need to be very clever about this – similarity to the real world is not automatically the optimum route to teach about the real world. So in this case, the issue is not “are biases in school drama close to those in industry” but “are the biases in school drama useful or detrimental for this preparation”?

The main advantage of choosing pretty leads is that it reveals to kids the pro-beauty bias in acting (and in most of society). The main drawback is that it boosts the confidence of those who will probably do well anyway, and dimishes the confidence of those who won’t.

Now, from a anti-Biasing point of view, this seems beneficial – true information is imparted, and the cost is only in people’s self-image. But the information imparted is utterly trivial, and will be learnt quickly out in the world anyway, while the self-image cost is difficult to reverse. So I think that on balance, over-promoting pretty leads is a bad idea.

Keith, interesting suggestion.