Pop Quiz for  Is this a photo of A) a junior varsity basketball
team; B) the latest hip-hop group to break the top 40; C) a
gang; D) Illinois' best high school chess team, second by half a
point in last year's National Scholastic Chess Championships?
Advertise on MotherJones.com  Murray and Herrnstein, eat your
words: The correct answer is D. The students, hailing from
Chicago's inner-city Rezin Orr Community Academy, vied for the
national title with New York City's considerably more affluent
Stuyvesant High to take second place by the slimmest of margins.
Out of 850 players from 30 states, brothers Darnell and Cornell
Faust (first and second from the left in the back row) took
fourth and sixth place, respectively. So for whom, exactly, does
the "bell" toll? Not for Orr's whiz kids.