by Calvin Wolf
The Deviant
1.0
The lawyer looks at me, sizing me up. “How much money have you got?” he asks. I tell him that there’s not too much left. He has already received my financial info in an email, but he’s undoubtedly hoping there’s more elsewhere. Perhaps I left something out?
“How much money could you get your hands on, if you have to?”
“Not that much. Fifty grand, maybe. My credit-worthiness took a hit with my HumCap. I’m at junk status now. My income’s been slashed, I’m on a temporary contract, and I’ll be blackballed by Educorp if this suit gets filed.”
This lawyer is a well-known local guy with a good reputation, which means he’s not cheap. This consultation is costing me next month’s mortgage.
But, like most lawyers, his ego is gargantuan. I can see in his eyes that he loves the idea of taking on Educorp. He has read my emails and has, undoubtedly, imagined the reams of press. Smiling, he presses a button on his desk and asks his secretary to hold his calls. “I’m going to stop the billing now, so take your time,” he says. He holds up a small digital recorder and turns it on.
He asks questions and I answer.
I talk about my family, upbringing, and alma maters. Private schools, Harvard, pledging a frat. Damn, I sound like a complete snob. What will a jury think?
I talk about graduating from college at 23, getting started as an office drone with a D.C.-based defense contractor, and then moving to health insurance administration at 28.
“How’d you get that job? Defense firm to insurance conglomerate doesn’t sound like a natural transition.”
“My Dad knew someone who knew someone. It was a pay raise, plus a move to New York City. They wanted an insider from a major defense firm so they could sign a contract with it. With all the government subsidies going to defense contractors, health insurers wanted their cut. Those defense firms bought up all the Cadillac plans.”
I talk about the job and how I helped ink a lucrative deal between HealthGuard and Armor, Inc.
Avoiding the sensitive stuff, I skip over the part about meeting an NYU senior at a bar in Soho and getting her undressed in the back of my Ford Explorer. We became friends with benefits, then started dating. When she went to Yale Law, I headed to campus as well. Three years later, she had a J.D. and I had an MBA. I was 32, and we got married that summer. After the honeymoon, I got a job on Wall Street.
By 36, I felt burned out. My Dad got me an interview with Educorp as an assistant principal down in Texas, where the oil boom was swelling salaries and bonuses.
“Did you have any teaching experience?” the lawyer asks, confused. He flips through his notes, and I roll my eyes. Older people are still stuck on the idea of teaching and education as some careerist, bureaucratic thing.
“No, but I did have plenty of graduate school experience. And I was always a good student.” Now he rolls his eyes. Clenching my jaw, I remind myself that I definitely need to stay in this guy’s good graces. His going rate could bankrupt me fast.
“I’m not gonna lie, that’ll hurt you with a jury. Think about how to brand yourself better,” he says, and insists we move forward.
I go over my starting job as an AP, then getting the bump to head principal at age 40. We talk at length about my job duties, my expectations from corporate, and so on.
Holding up a hand, the attorney stops me and insists that we start a new file. He swivels over to his computer, a fancy all-in-one in a glass frame, and swipes and pecks at the keyboard for a while. When he’s ready for a new file, he presses a button on the recorder and we start talking once more.
“Time for brass tacks. What was the shady stuff that corporate wanted you to do?”
He sees that I am uncomfortable, and he elaborates. “They’re gonna come at you hard and try to say that anything you did that was against the rules was your decision alone, and that they did not pressure you whatsoever. If you don’t come clean right now, you will lose this case. You. Will. Lose. And if I’m gonna take this case pro bono, which Christ help me I just might, I need to be damned sure that you’re not hanging me out to dry.”
I clear my throat and assure the good man that I will tell him the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The glowing red light on the recorder seems to stare into my soul.
1.1.1
“If you know about economics, we try to be as close to a price-discriminating monopoly as we can be. You know, charge every consumer the maximum they’re willing to pay? We were all coached by corporate to wring as much money out of the parents as possible. Education insurance, hidden fees, fines for student misbehavior, tuition increases, extracurricular charges, you name it. To get a look at their financials, we encouraged all parents to apply for scholarships, which are needs-based. We gave out some scholarships, sure, but the gold mine was the financial data. If we had a big fish on the line, we’d bleed him dry.
We kept tabs on the cars in the student parking lot, checked out the cars the parents drove, looked for which kids had the best braces and designer brands. One of the APs kept a spreadsheet on which families were probably good for more money. If a kid had a parent’s credit card already hooked up to automatically pay fines, we would nickel and dime the shit out of him. Anytime anyone complained, we always said ‘what price can you put on a good education?’
The school had all the amenities, too, to squeeze more money. A school store, fancy as any college bookstore, right up front. Most of the poor and middle class kids got plenty of voucher money, and we knew down to the penny how much the government was chipping in. As long as we kept the real payment increases low enough, few parents complained. If they said anything, we blamed the government or suppliers or anyone else.
This stuff wasn’t in the official employee handbook, you know. This was word of mouth from above. Educorp pays for performance and pays bonuses. It’s practically either up or out if you’re an administrator. Help bring in revenue, or they start looking to get you out. There were still a few old school APs, from back when the schools were public, when I joined Educorp. They didn’t like the new system and didn’t last long.”
1.1.2
“How did this go on? The public schools still exist, you know. But they’re like purgatory or something. Or hell, maybe. The city only has three campuses still: An elementary school, a middle school, and a high school. Educorp and all the other providers get to pass off the nonpayers, the troublemakers, and the kids with bad test scores to those campuses. Then the parents stop getting the vouchers. We fight tooth and nail to keep the public schools from getting any more government money. The worse those schools are, the better we look. Parents pay through the nose to keep their kids with us. They know Educorp is a better deal than those last few public school campuses.”
1.1.3
“Hiring and firing? We and Intellicorp work together to hire up any and all talent coming out of the universities. We start ‘em as low-level as we can. Once you hire someone, and they start their career with you, it gets hard for them to leave. We string ‘em along, make ‘em teachers’ assistants, then teachers, then senior teachers, then master teachers. We made a bunch of different grades and ranks and stuff, each with a tiny pay raise, to make employees think they’re moving up fast enough. In reality, we’re willing to spend extra to hire just enough talent to prevent the public schools from getting good teachers. Plus, it makes our stats look good. Low student-to-teacher ratios, you know? Rich parents pay extra for that.
If we do want to let a teacher go, we go out of our way to make ‘em look bad so that they won’t be a win for the public schools if they go that way. Put stuff in their files, you know. I heard rumors that they would even do some honey pot schemes, try to catch teachers fraternizing with each other. You know, pay a female teacher to seduce a male teacher. Blackmail and extortion and all that cloak-and-dagger shit. Teacher gets caught fucking around, gets a note in his f
ile, and now he’s a liability to any other employer. He has no choice but to devote himself to Educorp. They own him now. He’s a slave.
And if they do fire, they make damn sure they don’t have to pay out on benefits. Say goodbye to health insurance and retirement fund!
Do I have any of that on record? Some, yeah. Anything from corporate? Nothing explicit, no.”
1.1.4
My lawyer clicks the recorder off and looks at his notes for a minute, murmuring quietly to himself. Outside, thunder rumbles as a July storm looms in from the north. The seasons have become more extreme over the past several years, for some reason. I wonder what my wife is up to. She doesn’t really want me to be here, knowing how much this consultation costs.
I wonder what Madison is up to. We haven’t told her about her school yet.
“I’ll take your case for a flat fee to cover some fixed costs,” my lawyer says. “It’s not as good as pure pro bono, but it’s the best I can do.”
He quotes me a price of fifteen thousand, which will cover everything from legal research to subpoenaing Educorp executives. He says he can bring in two other attorneys to assist, and both are quite skilled.
“I will file suit against Educorp and your listed supervisors tomorrow afternoon,” he tells me as I struggle to process everything. “Tomorrow morning, you get all information you can from your office computer.”
He pulls a flash drive from a desk drawer and hands it to me. “This thing will become encrypted after its first insertion into a computer, and only I know the password. It holds almost five hundred gigs. You think you need a second one?” I shake my head. The flash drive is bright red and feels cool to the touch.
“How much trouble could I get into for this?” I ask, suddenly very nervous. I imagine myself being bankrupted by a lawsuit. Or, worse, being in a prison cell. I have never been arrested. The closest I’ve been to incarceration is watching reality TV.
“Educorp is Goliath, and you’re David. If you really want to take them down, you’ve got to strike first. When we file, they’ll delete everything and send in the digital cleaners. They’ll delay, delay, delay, and by the time I’ve gotten what I want they’ll have edited it until it’s no longer even slightly incriminating. I need as much data as you can get me before we file, before they have a chance to wipe things clean.”
I’m still scared, and ask my lawyer if Educorp will know for sure how he got the info. He suggests using the flash drive on a computer other than my own. “You don’t like your boss, right? See if you can lure him out of his office for a long while.” My lawyer smiles and announces that he will use one of his own employees for the ruse. A meeting will be set up, under some sort of education industry pretense, and my boss will be busy for hours. If Educorp suspects any corporate espionage, it will be from my boss’s computer.
I wouldn’t mind letting that fancy-suited stooge sweat corporate for a while.
Smiling and nodding, I put the flash drive in my pocket.
“You sure you want to go forward? As soon money changes hands, I’m a bulldog. I’ll tear Educorp a new one, and there will be no going back.”
Fifteen thousand dollars is the last of my liquidity. I leave the office and go out into the lobby, which is thankfully empty. I call my wife and tell her how much it will cost. I ask her if she talked to Intellicorp and whether or not Madison could get in for the fall semester. My wife says no. Public school is our only option, then. The same public schools that Educorp has destroyed. I put the phone back in my pocket and walk back inside the lawyer’s office.
I pull a wrinkled check from my left hip pocket and a ballpoint pen from my right. I sign over the last of my savings.
