The Reform Plan

Felix Besserian is both comfortable and complacent in his security as a history teacher at Fillmore High School, a large inner city public school: until he finds himself—reluctantly—doubting the benefits of a proposed school reform plan. After initial personal hostility, he accepts an offer from Buck Henderson, young, brash, self-confident and rich, owner of an investment firm: and also his wife’s boss. Buck offers to help Besserian secure the vacant Assistant Principal job, and to coach him in management techniques. In that way, ostensibly, Besserian will be able to monitor the Reform Plan—devised by outside corporate CEO Peter Pritchard, the chief rival and obstacle to Buck’s financial empire—so that pressing academic, economic, social issues will be resolved in favor of students. Unknown to Besserian, both Buck and Besserian’s wife Penny, have an ulterior motive in getting Besserian involved in the proposed reform plan.

The story takes the reader behind the closed gates of Fillmore into various types of classrooms and teachers meetings; illustrating conflicting faculty motives. It introduces the reader to the inner sanctum of school and school district management. Moreover, it shows the difficulty and risk of resisting the all-encompassing political machine in education. It describes the evolution of Besserian’s character from that of safe on-looker to active proponent of his personal beliefs.

The Reform Plan shows the willingness and especially the ability of students to take responsibility for themselves when offered the chance to do so. The Reform Plan asks why American culture chooses not to give students that opportunity: why it chooses to indoctrinate, not to educate. It illustrates the various types of indoctrination.

The story reveals how substitution for critical thinking and objective analysis, by indoctrination, makes a farce of education. The story questions the overall cultural value system that demands that teachers and school administrators be cultural-intellectual followers not leaders. The result of that value system makes reform a farce and imprisons students in a world of make-believe. The story depicts the viciousness that results from individual and group unwillingness to face reality.

The Reform Plan exposes various types of codes masquerading as truth in public education. The cultural codes—the cults of self, pleasure, lack of commitment, diversity, ‘equality’—mask the reality of conformity, and the necessity of accepting cultural compliance in order to survive as a teacher, administrator or student, in the public school. The codes mask the brutality of the “me” philosophy. They mask the price of acquiescence to the politicized culture: second class citizenship. They disguise how the academic learning is reduced, through the dicta of conformity, to the lowest common intellectual denominator. Why? Education must serve the needs of the political power brokers who need the masses brought under their control.

-->As Besserian uncovers the code of the reform plan, he is also forced to uncover hidden parts of his own personality: his own reality.

-->This is a story of taking the risk to give up the safety of the domination imposed by the overall culture: both in the individual’s professional and personal life.