By Thomas Ultican 7/5/2026
Like the above title indicates, I was quite taken by Thomas Courtney’s book, Dystopian School Tales. I liked it so much, I went to Amazon to write a glowing report for the book and found that they will not accept book reviews on it. The book is published by The Educator’s Room out of Atlanta, Georgia which is a relatively small publishing company with a teacher friendly positive history. Why Amazon has locked the book from anyone commenting on it is a bit of a mystery. I would not expect any fraudulent malarkey to be perpetrated by this writer-educator or his publisher.
The book is subtitled “12 Visions of an American Education, Dismantled.” Courtney has been an elementary school teacher for the past thirty years and is a surprisingly gifted and creative writer. He has written 12 fictional stories that are scenarios depicting possibilities that could develop in the next few years. At the end of each of these stories, he documents what has happened, what is happening and what might happen in a future related to the sketches.
I found this structure to be very imaginative. The stories are short engaging tales which at their conclusion allow the author to cite Supreme Court actions, news accounts, history, plus local, state and federal actions relating to the yarn.
Mrs. Foster’s Loyalty Test
This is the title of the second of the twelve dystopian stories. In order to give readers a sense of the book, I picked one story to write about. The main reason for picking this story is a comment in Courtney’s notes at the end of the book. He discusses how difficult it was to finalize the collection writing, “On several occasions, I had to rewrite entire portions of these tales, because what I’d thought was dystopian, had already happened.” (Page 259)
Courtney continued:
“For example, I wrote the story, Mrs. Foster’s Loyalty Exam while I was on a fellowship in Costa Rica. At the time, I had no idea that there could actually be such a thing given to teachers. I had no idea that such an exam had begun to be used for teachers new to the state of Oklahoma from places like my state, California.” (Page 259-260)
Mrs. Foster is depicted as a woman interviewing for a teaching job in Oklahoma. Her interview is conducted by a woman from the Oklahoma Department of Patriotism and Family Values (ODP). When inquiring about who sees her responses to the ODP questions and how they are maintained, she is curtly informed that in Oklahoma they protect children from wokeness. The ODP examiner declares, “Since 2025, the great state of Oklahoma has screened potential teaching candidates from woke states like California and in your case, New York.” (Page 20)
“Question twelve, Mrs. Foster, do you recognize the ten commandments as a source of societal good?” (Page 18)
“Question thirteen, Mrs. Foster, should you be selected for employment, are you willing to state under oath that there are only two genders, male and female?” (Page 20)
The final inquiry says, “Please give an example of radical leftist ideology that you have reported to the New York Department of Education before arriving here in Oklahoma.” Mrs. Foster says she never filed a report in the seven years she worked there. (Page 21)
“What about DEI, or gender confusion?” No. (Page 21)
“In all of the years you taught in New York, you never once saw a Title nine violation of gender confusion in your school? You never once saw a Title 1 violation of DEI?” No. (Pages 21 to 22)
Past: Courtney shares that the loyalty test tale is more that dystopian it is also an experience from American history. He recommends as a reference Many are the Crimes; McCarthyism in America by Ellen Schrecker amongst other books. (Page 23)
Another data point from Courtney is the Waldorf statement. In 1947, the heads of the motion picture industry met at the Waldorf hotel in New York city to denounce the Hollywood Ten who were being held in contempt by the US Congress. They said in part, “We will forthwith discharge or suspend without compensation those in our employ, and we will not re-employ any of the 10 until such time as he is acquitted or has purged himself of contempt and declares under oath that he is not a Communist.”
Present: Courtney notes that Politicians wanting to circumvent constitutional rights can do so with oaths or by requiring exams. These can be used to filter out non-Christians, liberals or homosexuals. In 2025, Oklahoma hired PragerU to create a test designed to eliminate “radical woke ideology.” (Page 26)
Future: Without a Department of Education to enforce the rights of students and teachers, aren’t more exams like those in Oklahoma inevitable? With the failure of the Supreme Court to uphold student rights, states are free to use these types of application questions to simply deny those teachers whose politics they don’t like. Today, that means those that who are: not MAGA enough, not Christian enough, not straight enough. (Page 28)
Final Thoughts
I read most books about education. Often teachers and former teachers like myself write about terrible education policies like the billionaire financed privatization of public schools. They describe the harm being done to communities and students all driven by either a profit motive or a religious agenda. The books are important and they highlight important things but they are often quite grim.
I give Thomas Courtney high marks for his clever approach to the issues plaguing public schools, students and teachers. His twelve fictional stories are entertaining and far from grim and they add levity to the undermining of public education. However, in reality, the attack on free universal public education is also an attack on American democracy.
Ronald Reagan began the attack on public education with the publication of the polemic, “A Nation at Risk.” This set the table for more disingenuous attacks. At the same time, Reagan gave the fringe lunatic, Milton Friedman, legitimacy. He had written a mostly ignored 1955 essay calling for the privatization of public education and for government to get out of the education business.
Courtney’s book takes on the education policies pushed by the soap scammers from Michigan in a way that I hope the public can read and digest. Without mentioning Charles Koch or the Walton family, he uses his creative short stories to bring their destructive agenda to light.
I think everyone who reads Dystopian School Tales will enjoy it and get a much deeper understanding of the crisis facing America.
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