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“This Guy's Dead”: Seeking The Origins of the Dystopian Narrative of the American High School in the Popular Culture

As much as we might like to believe the classroom is a pure space set apart from the biases of American political rhetoric, we know that this is not the case. Our work as educators is impacted by the political narratives constructed by politicians and legislators The manipulation of cultural archetypes, including the representations of schools and teachers, in order to create compelling narratives in support of policy is also part of the context within which we work as educators. The past 25 years have been laden with reform efforts, but the monumental changes in educational policies and practices that have occurred over the last two and a half decades were enabled by a sense of urgency manufactured and sold to the American public. This paper will explore the wide-sweeping, high school reform efforts of the past two decades and the compelling, dystopian political narrative that helped authorize them. We hope to problematize the dystopian educational narratives constructed in the 1980s and how these narratives, which presented public education as a broken system with hopelessly incompetent inhabitants, was reified and perpetuated through film. By focusing our attention on two products of the same socio-cultural backdrop, A Nation at Risk and the film, Teachers, we hope to explore how these complementary texts offer provocative insight into the practices and perpetuation of political narratives about schools. Dystopian Narratives When we discuss dystopian narrative, we are combining terms from two different traditions. The term "dystopia" is most often referenced in literary studies and has been used to refer to the dark counterpart of utopia in imaginative literature, particularly science fiction. "Dystopia" often serves as a device to explore the consequences of policies or practices considered by the author to be ill-advised (Matter, 1983). Our use of the term "narrative" references contemporary political discourses used by Peggy Noonan, Mike Murphy, Chuck Todd which situate narrative as a storyline that is packaged and offered to the public as an interpretation of situations and/or events (Noonan, 2008). The "dystopian narrative," then, functions as a manufactured set of highly negative beliefs intended to interpret and explore the consequences of ill-advised practices. Historical Context Typically, we trace the contemporary origins of this narrative to the publication of A Nation at Risk (NCEE, 1983). This document decried the state of public education and focused public attention on what its authors claimed was a highly dysfunctional public high school system. In fact, the opening paragraphs of this document, viewed at a distance of over 25 years, are a powerful example of alarmist rhetoric: Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. This report is concerned with only one of the many causes and dimensions of the problem, but it is the one that undergirds American prosperity, security, and civility. We report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride in what our high schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur-others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments. (p. 5) If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. …