Imagine you run a public high school with a middling reputation. You struggle with getting poor kids to engage and graduate as well as convincing rich families not to make use of private alternatives. It’s either come up with a low-cost gimmick or risk being labeled an unemployment factory and expose your belly to the talons of charter school “reformers.” Staying the course is not an option.
At one high school just outside of Washington, D.C., they chose the gimmick — a theme for the school that’s buzzy and also represents the only category of federal jobs still growing: terrorism and the prevention thereof. For her book A Curriculum of Fear: Homeland Security in U.S. Public Schools, University of Illinois–Chicago education professor Nicole Nguyen embedded in the school’s homeland security program, chatting up administrators, teachers, and students under the guise of studying their innovative approach (rather than their scary warmongering, which is closer to the truth). Nguyen didn’t expect to like what she found, but I can’t imagine there’s any critic of American education or the United States military who wouldn’t still be surprised by what’s happening at the school Nguyen pseudonymously refers to as Milton.