Education. It's like the weather: everyone has an opinion but nobody does anything about it. That's how Livina Jones feels about her son Tom's new school, Eleanor Roosevelt High. With its old textbooks, crumbling classrooms, and racist treatment of kids just like hers Livina believes Roosevelt is exactly the sort of school that can benefit from a little free-market common sense. The nanny-state government has failed to see students as individuals, and failed to give them the real-world skills they'll need to get ahead. So who says it isn't time for some big money, for-profit schooling?

Ethel Orocuru, for one. She's the long serving history/civics/American government/basketball coach at Eleanor Roosevelt, and she's willing to fight for her version of education as long as her reconstructed hips will allow. But is she fighting for a system that can be fixed, or is she just too blind by her past to see how times have left her and her school behind? And when an efficiency expert, Mr. Babbit, is assigned to improve her class is it a sign that Ethel is behind the times, or a sign of something more sinister? And with privatization on the line, and a Wall Street heavy hitter lined up to fold the entire district into his conglomerate, suddenly the next School Board election is more about a hidden agenda than the open curriculum. And when did the hall monitors start wearing brown shirts and arm bands?