How the School Reform Commission Ruined My Dystopian Novel (part 3)

The heroine of my novel, Blank Slate, is hunched in an air duct; her knotty muscles are taut. She’s a dark-eyed, intense—pretty-in-a-living-off-the-grid-way. (As evidenced by The Hunger Games, if your heroine is a survivalist, her hot bod is a given.) She looks down into a boardroom: burnished table, ergonomic chairs, muted wall-to-wall carpeting. The people arrayed around the table have hair coiffed into fancy, futuristic curlicues; they wear suits that were tailored by the pincers of tiny robots.

            A man stands, right below her, at the head of the table. He’s got white hair and a grandfatherly mien; he’s half docile geek, half benevolent cosmopolite. You could imagine him graciously ushering a movie star through his art collection, or calculating stock options with the quick whir-tick of his brain. This man is a philanthropist, an altruist. He lavishes cash upon the most needy students in the country. No ghetto has gone un-capitalized by him. No photogenic low-income youngster has been missed by his infinite largesse. He’s the cerebral cortex of education think-tanks, the magnanimous patron of our inept, antiquated American education system.

            If you’re thinking, “This guy couldn’t possibly be the villain of Blank Slate!” you clearly have never read a dystopian young adult novel—or any dystopian novel, for that matter. Despite my limited imagination, dreaming up a bad guy was the easiest part of the writing process for Blank Slate, since both the genre and the audience pretty much scripted that role for me.

Dystopian novels are inherently distrustful of authority and power. And young adults are naturally—often rightly—distrustful of authority and power; I know this because I’m a teacher, and hence, I occasionally am the authority and power that kids distrust. The Hunger Games sold a bazillion copies because of its (read with my intended tone of resentment and envy) fast-paced, breathless, energetic plot. But it also sold a bazillion copies because kids know instinctively that not everyone in the hegemony—no matter how benevolent they seem—is actually interested in equity. They know that not every grownup is looking out for their best interests, and yet they’re forced to rely upon grownups. And in this way, kids experience daily what most of us grownups—with our mortgages and our bank accounts—forget.

            If only the citizenry of Philadelphia had the cynicism and suspicion of the 16-year-olds sitting in my classroom. Then maybe we wouldn’t have fallen for the same destructive agenda—not once, but four times over.

When I was working on Blank Slate, I actually didn’t model the antagonist on the millionaire Eli Broad, who runs an elite “academy” for superintendants—specifically superintendants of struggling urban districts—out of his California mansion. However, I should have, since the policies that he inculcates have directly—and catastrophically— impacted the School District of Philadelphia for the past ten years. From the controversial Vallas to the dictatorial Ackerman to our current leader, the bland and cipher-like Dr. Hite, our last four Superintendants have been “graduates” of Broad’s “program.” Every time Philadelphia gets a new Superintendant, it’s billed as an overhaul of the existing system. But in actuality, each of these “new visions” is merely a different face for the same ideological agenda: standardized testing, school closure, and privatization.

            Let’s return, though, to the tension-filled scene, as our heroine is on the cusp of a disastrous sneeze. (Indulge me here, as this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to writing an “action” scene for the book…) The villain, who never had a name in the novel, but whom I will now subtly call Scheli Schbroad, slides a device that looks like an i-pad across the table.

            “Ladies and gentlemen,” he says. “The final phase is complete. I present to you: the perfected Slate!” Now, I had no idea what the “final phase” was, nor did I have a clear outline of what the previous “phases” could’ve possibly been. But I knew what the latent purpose of this “efficient, modern, self-directed” technology would be. Standing in the boardroom, Scheli Schbroad would deliver a not-so-latent Big Reveal. This would be the archetypal Big Reveal, typical of arch villains—from Bond bad guys to comic book nemeses—everywhere. Not only would it provide a (laughably spurious) way to move my (tenuous) plot forward, it would also give me a chance to insert some lecturing exhortations about my specific paranoias. Schbroad’s confession would be something like the following:

            “This electronic delivery of educational materials seems visionary and cutting-edge. Everyone believes that it delivers equal educational opportunities and eliminates bullying. In fact, it will actually impede critical thinking skills, fragment communities, and—extra bonus!—create additional cash-flow to the private sector! MWHAHAHAHA!”

            With snappy dialogue like that, it’s hard to imagine why the book was a failure. I know that my allegory is completely subtle, but the virtual, Slate-based education system is meant to represent the burgeoning business of cyber charter schools. How did this idea dawn on me? As I began writing Blank Slate, the banner at the top of Thesaurus.com was constantly generating ads that pictured grumpy-looking teens glowering from behind their rebellious haircuts, with slogans like “No More Bad Grades!”

            Again, just as any teenager can tell from the get-go that President Snow is up to no good, it’s patently apparent that, behind their gargantuan advertising budgets, there’s something shady about cyber charter schools. It’s well-documented that cyber charters provide sub-par instruction, abuse their employees, and (ironically) lack the “accountability” that corporate reform types constantly tout. Additionally, they are rife with corruption, relentless in their lobbying efforts, and clearly beholden to special interests. Who are these special interests? Well, primary among them is the Walton family, otherwise known as the heirs to the Walmart fortune. The fact that the anti-union, poverty-creating, relentlessly opportunistic Walmart corporation is actively bankrolling these charter schools induces Phillip K. Dick levels of paranoia in me. However, as demonstrated by recent events, reality can often be stranger than—or at least a mirror of—paranoia.

There’s one question that Blank Slate couldn’t answer, that this series of posts can’t conclusively answer either: Why are capitalist moguls suddenly so interested in determining the future of the urban poor? In Blank Slate, our heroine (her eyes watering as she swallows that sneeze) might glimpse a convenient pie chart or PowerPoint that answers this question. But I’m not entirely sure what would be on that graphic display of Machiavellian intentions. I’ll end, though, with two possibilities.

1) The least diabolical explanation is that people like Broad and the Waltons simply adulate the private sector. They might just believe, in their hearts, that free-market competition is the solution to the country’s current “education crisis.” After all, the private sector worked for them. For these millionaires, the private sector has been a kind master, rewarding them for all of their hard work. Now, they feel an obligation to serve this master by feeding the children of America to it.

2) Alternately, when funding programs and individuals who make catastrophic decisions for children, these folks know exactly what they are doing. They know full well that their pet projects will erode critical thinking and stifle vibrant learning communities. How else will people be duped into buying the crappy tract housing and equally sub-par plastic shit that built their empires? How else will they create blind and easily-exploited workers, and the 99% that enables their 1% existence? If fewer people are educated for critical reading, critical writing, and critical thought, who will be left to criticize the monstrous behemoth of unchecked capitalism?

            Who—like the unnamed heroine of Blank Slate—will be crouched in an air duct, ready to take these bastards down? 

How the School Reform Commission Ruined My Dystopian Novel (Part 2, of 3)

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Last year, when I was teaching Fahrenheit 451, one of my 9^th grade students proffered the following insightful criticism: “This book is a terrible novel, but it’s a great essay.” The same, apparently, is true of the dystopian young adult novel—entitled Blank Slate (Tabula Rasa, for you pretentious Latin fans out there)—that I’d started writing last summer. Shockingly enough, my skepticism about the so-called “Educational Reform” movement didn’t exactly generate the intrigue that’s typical of New York Times best sellers. It turns out that public school closures and the proliferation of cyber charters don’t exactly make for a scintillating page turner.

One of the problems with the book, besides its lack of—what’s that thing that sells books, again? Oh yeah, plot—was that I wasn’t quite sure how my dystopic world had actually evolved. Most dystopic novels include some neatly-encapsulated synopsis of how our comfortable, normal society mutated into the horrific vision portrayed in the book. In Fahrenheit 451, for example, Bradbury includes a lengthy, didactic diatribe in the voice of Fire Chief Beatty, which serves to explicate the shifts that produced his anti-literate world.

If I’d just waited a few months, Philadelphia’s School Reform Commission (SRC) could have charted the genesis of my book’s dystopia for me, in what they euphemistically called the “Facilities Master Plan.” The following is an outline of how the back-story of my dystopic novel has been put into motion over the past year. The similarities are quite remarkable, making me think that perhaps SRC chairman Pedro Ramos somehow got hold of the notes I’d jotted for the book.

In my would-be novel, Blank Slate, Philadelphia's public schools are ubiquitously closed, and the city is filled with abandoned school buildings, known as Hulls. These Hulls are vilified by politicians and residents, as the remnants of an old system that was antiquated, dangerous and—horror of horrors!—inefficient. In my drafts, I included long, florid passages describing what I imagined the insides of the destitute Hulls would look like. They would be distressing scenes of dereliction and waste, uncannily combining war-like ravages with comforting, familiar academic images. I imagined an eerie juxtaposition between icons of education—desks, books, computers—and consuming mold, peeling paint, and ominous graffiti.

When I sat down to write Blank Slate, I couldn’t decide what policy decision could have possibly precipitated this austere and draconian turn in the city’s history. After all, public schools are the bastions that defend urban neighborhoods against the ravages of blight; they are sites for shared history and shared discourse, places where fragmented communities can still come together with a common cause.

It turns out, however, that I could’ve placed a pin in my dystopian timeline, sticking the point at the exact date of March 7, 2013. This is when the SRC voted to close 23 of Philadelphia’s public schools, despite the fact that there is no conclusive evidence of school closures saving money or improving student outcomes. Two of the closed schools include Germantown High School, which my mother graduated from in 1961, and Bok Technical High School, which was one of only four technical education programs in the district.

If I’d known how simple and streamlined this process could actually be, the convoluted and labyrinthine history of my dystopia would’ve been a lot easier to plot out.

Imagine the lecturing, pompous voice of some stock character recounting the following, in order to provide the book’s readers with necessary exposition. (This, by the way, would’ve been the obviously-contrived passage that most readers would’ve skipped over, looking for the point at which something more interesting was going to happen.)  

Once historic institutions like Germantown, and vital programs like Bok’s, began closing, more schools were starved into failure by a lack of funding from the local and state governments. First, a cabal of corporate interests and avaricious politicians got together and emptied public schools of everything that makes them communities. Claiming economic necessity, they reduced—and then eliminated—sports, libraries, counselors and clubs. Next, schools became nothing more than brick-and-mortar boxes, enclosing a random collection of disengaged, demoralized kids and grownups for 8 hours a day. Finally, the same diabolical crew that created this untenable situation stepped in, and declared schools to be nothing more than useless buildings—nothing more than vacuous Hulls that voraciously consume public resources.  Once schools were defined in this reductive language, it was easier to shut them down. Schools ceased to be schools, and were simply bullet-points on an austere “Facilities Master Plan.”

This speculative slope of history would bring readers up-to-date with the dystopian  world depicted in Blank Slate. In this Philadelphia, Center City was thriving with the pulse of electronic commerce; it was a glittering refraction of glass, a nexus of economic success. Dozens of skyscrapers had sprouted up (cough, cough, facile metaphor for hierarchical society), their ziggurated and pyramid-like forms juggernauting the sky. Meanwhile, the surrounding neighborhoods of North, South and West Philly had attenuated into bizarre wastelands, arid landscapes of cracked concrete and rubble. This atrophied city, this dread geography, was the sort of thing today’s urban planners have nightmares about.

When I was writing Blank Slate, I’d just read The Road, and, as a result, I was considering populating my already-depressing world with ruthless, drooling cannibals. However, I got really stuck on how to connect the eating of human flesh with standardized testing and educational reform. Without roving bands of gorging, Kurtz-like savages, I wasn’t quite sure who my antagonists would be. Would I go for a diffuse ideological entity like Big Brother, or a creepy, death-breathed figure like President Snow?

Given my natural distrust of insatiable corporations, I had some inclination that my MWHAHAHAHA-ing bad guys would be executives who sat in swivel chairs and looked out on panoramic views of the city that they had consumed. But how, I wondered, would ravening Capitalists be able to pick up their knives and cut out hunks of public education? And, moreover, what would motivate them to do so? It seemed untenable, and I was afraid of stretching my readers’ credulity to the breaking point.

But—as with every other aspect of this story—the spurious and staggering events of my paranoid imagination proceeded to play out in Philadelphia’s increasingly implausible public policy. Not only has the line between essay and novel been blurred in a Bradburian fashion, the line between novel and newscast has also been collapsed. However, since I am apparently attempting to make this series as long as the actual book would have been, I’ll save the bad guys for my next and (I promise!) final post.