As a schoolteacher, she became known for her "Blue eyes/Brown eyes" exercise, which she first conducted with her third-grade class[a] on April 5, 1968, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Invitations to speak and to conduct her exercise eventually led Elliott to give up school teaching and to become a full-time public speaker against discrimination.
[7] On the evening of April 4, 1968, Elliott turned on her television and learned of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. She says she vividly remembers a scene in which a white reporter pointed his microphone toward a local black leader and asked things like "When our leader [John F. Kennedy] was killed several years ago, his widow held us together.
At the moment she was watching the news of King's death, Elliott says she was ironing a teepee for use in a lesson unit about Native Americans.
[sic]"[9] She wanted to give her small-town, all-white students the experience of walking in a "colored child's moccasins for a day".
The "inferior" classmates also transformed – into timid and subservient children who scored more poorly on tests, and even during recess isolated themselves, including those who had previously been dominant in the class.
[6] The compositions the children wrote about the experience were printed in the Riceville Recorder on page 4 on April 18, 1968, under the headline "How Discrimination Feels", and the story was picked up by the Associated Press.
After she spoke about her exercise in a short interview segment, the audience reaction was instant as hundreds of calls came into the show's telephone switchboard, much of it negative.
When her oldest daughter went to the girls' bathroom in junior high, she came out of a stall to see a hateful message scrawled in red lipstick for her on the mirror.
[6] A Class Divided was turned into a PBS Frontline documentary in 1985 and included a reunion of the schoolchildren featured in The Eye of the Storm, for which Elliott received The Hillman Prize.
[12] This documentary was intended, according to the producers in their agreement with Jane Elliott, to create an awareness of the effects of racist behavior.
[14] She is listed on the timeline of 30 notable educators by textbook editor McGraw-Hill along with Confucius, Plato, Booker T. Washington, and Maria Montessori.
[16] She has done such training for corporations such as General Electric, Exxon, AT&T, and IBM, as well as lectured to the FBI, IRS, US Navy, US Department of Education, and US Postal Service.
[6] Elliott left teaching in the mid-1980s to devote herself full-time to diversity training, redeveloping her classroom exercise for the corporate world.
For this corporate exercise, Elliott divides a multiracial group based on the color of their eyes and then subjects the blue-eyed individuals to a withering regime of humiliation and contempt.
[17] Companies found the idea of offering such training attractive, not only because in the 1970s and 1980s there were increasing numbers of people of color in their organizations, but also because of U.S. court rulings and federal policies to promote multiculturalism brought about by pressure from civil rights groups during the same two decades.
Ex-principal Steve Harnack commented she was excellent at teaching academics and suggested she would have had fewer problems with the community if she had involved parents.
"[6] Academic research into Elliott's exercise shows moderate results in reducing long-term prejudice[20][21] but is inconclusive on the question of whether the possible psychological harm outweighs the potential benefits.
[22][23] Two professors of education in England, Ivor Goodson and Pat Sikes, argue that what Elliott did was unethical, calling the exercise psychologically and emotionally damaging.