Schooling in Socialist America
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Deep discount
December 9, 2024
A few weeks ago I mentioned a book called Discounting the Future by Liliana Doganova. I was chatting with a friend who’s a historian of engineering (he’s...
Notes for a critical history of Philly's school buildings
December 2, 2024
Every year, Philly schools have to close when it’s hot. That’s because they don’t have proper air conditioning. But for some reason, this year, when the...
Messing with the books in Newberg-Dundee
November 25, 2024
This post was written with the amazing help of Alan Gao, a long-time reader of the newsletter who answered my call to help put together critical workups of...
Blocked
November 18, 2024
Last week I wrote about a bunch of conservative education policy proposals. I thought I’d do a follow up post, since over the last few days, the idea that...
MAGAed?
November 11, 2024
It’s hard to believe that Donald Trump will be president again. Even though I’m having all the feelings associated with Kamala Harris’s loss, and I’m sifting...
Public education in the US today
November 4, 2024
It’s election day tomorrow and the vibes are tense and sweeping. But I’m not going to write about the election. I’m going to do something else instead. I...
Why're you hitting yourself? (Capping in Seattle, part 2)
October 28, 2024
I recently found out that the paid subscription link for this newsletter wasn’t working, but the fine people at Buttondown have addressed the issue. If you’d...
Capping in Seattle, or: b(ii) brute?
October 21, 2024
I’ve gotten a number of messages from separate people in Seattle about the budget crisis there. After chatting with them and doing some digging, I learned...
The despair of $3.7 million
October 14, 2024
I talked with a school district official from Beloit, Wisconsin recently and in preparation for our call I put together some notes. I found an enraging...
How to do a critical workup on a school district
October 7, 2024
A number of readers have offered to pay me for this newsletter and I’ve decided to open up paid subscriptions as an option (mostly to throw some revenue...
MEABF culpa
October 1, 2024
I’ve been thinking about the situation in Chicago, and it’s a great opportunity to meditate on how we can use this unstable moment to create structural...
MEAPF culpa
September 30, 2024
I’ve been thinking about the situation in Chicago, and it’s a great opportunity to meditate on how we can use this unstable moment to create structural...
Not wrong to be wrong
September 23, 2024
I got something wrong recently in my research, and in this week’s post I want to lay out some corrections I’m making to the findings and thinking behind that...
Good news in Springfield, Ohio?
September 16, 2024
Given all the fashy hubbub about Springfield, Ohio recently, I got interested in the extent to which Springfield City School District might be benefiting...
Municipal finance and divestment
September 9, 2024
Since I last wrote about university anti-genocide organizers’ disclose and divestment demands, the New School agreed to some of those demands and will vote...
Organizing for green schools on the ground
September 2, 2024
An old friend who’s been doing work at the intersection of organizing, school finance, and climate change recently sent me a panel that they’d organized with...
Get your fix at Roosevelt 66
August 26, 2024
I’ve been taking requests to look at school district budget crises recently, making short videos on tiktok and writing posts here about what I find. Every...
Stewards of students and capital
August 19, 2024
I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I’d appear on the education podcast Have You Heard. The episode came out last Wednesday and you can listen to it here....
Carrots for progressives
August 12, 2024
I went to a book event recently and asked a question during the Q&A that I’ve been wanting to write about. The event was a dual book launch for Zone Books’...
MSPERS of War
August 5, 2024
I’m appearing on the amazing Have You Heard podcast later this week. The hosts asked me to look into a specific school district’s budget crisis. This time,...
Space and debt capacity near Cape Fear
July 29, 2024
Another tiktok request, this time in New Hanover County School District (NHCSD), near the Cape Fear River, around Wilmington, North Carolina. The request I...
New research: Toxic Finance--Underinvestment in Philly's School Buildings, 1993-2021
July 22, 2024
I'm so excited to announce that this paper with Dr. Camika Royal is out in the world as part of a special issue of the Journal of Educational Administration...
Cliffs and crises: How to understand and fight post-Covid school district budget struggles
July 15, 2024
I’ve been doing more and more organizing with the Debt Collective. One of the big initiatives I’m working on right now is creating spaces and resources for...
On Chevron deference: nothing is guaranteed and chaos is a ladder
July 8, 2024
The Supreme Court of the United States and its super-conservative majority are at it again. There was a slurry of decisions that ‘came down’ last week that...
Don't be mean, Bloomfield Hills!
July 1, 2024
I’ve been getting a lot of awesome feedback and comments on my work looking into district budget crises by request on tiktok. This week I’m looking at...
New research published: Critical School Finance
June 24, 2024
I’m really excited to share a paper I co-authored with the historian of education Esther Cyna called “Critical School Finance.” It’s the result of several...
Race, class, and high school volleyball
June 17, 2024
We've been spending the year in Brooklyn and while I knew that our neighbor Mike was a high school teacher and a volleyball coach, I only found out recently...
The art of closing
June 10, 2024
Imagine waking up one day to an email saying that your 130 year-old college is closing in a week. That’s what happened recently with the University of the...
OPEB in Braintree
June 3, 2024
A couple weeks ago I looked at a budget crisis request I got on tiktok from Hingham, MA, and learned a lot about the Massachusetts terrain. I got another...
District dialectics in Olympia
May 27, 2024
The tiktok requests are coming in fast these days. This time, someone asked me to look at Olympia, Washington. What I found is a great example of the...
Debt Collective: a very brief youtube history
May 20, 2024
On Wednesday this week, the Debt Collective is organizing a national action in Washington, DC called FUND EDUCATION NOT GENOCIDE. I’ll be headed there on the...
Notes on disclosure and divestment
May 13, 2024
As the student movement against genocide in Palestine continues around the world, one of the key demands made by activists and their coalitions has been...
As Public As Possible: the book!
May 6, 2024
I have some exciting news: I wrote a book using the material from this newsletter, and it has a cover with a web page, release date, and everything. You can...
Patricia Ann Conway
April 29, 2024
[Content warning: this post is about self-immolation and protest] I taught a class this semester on power and privilege in higher education. One of the...
MOU money MOU problems in Hingham
April 22, 2024
This is my second school budget crisis request from TikTok. It’s from Hingham, MA. Apparently, as of March, the size of their budget deficit issue is at most...
Educational erosion in Long Beach
April 15, 2024
I got a request on TikTok to look into a budget crisis situation in Long Beach City School District in Nassau County, Long Island. Apparently the budget vote...
Critical theory and K-12 capex
April 8, 2024
Announcement: The American Educational Research Association (AERA) organizes the biggest education research conference I know. Within the conference are many...
Students over bondholders!
April 1, 2024
There's an interesting situation with the University of California's bonds going down that I wanted to pass along. Basically: bondholders are having a...
A question I don't know how to answer
March 25, 2024
I've always picked books up off the street when people are giving them away. It's one of the many small joys of life. In college one time I picked up a book...
Higher education finance?
March 18, 2024
I work in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE). It's a network of old normal schools and land grant colleges peppered throughout...
Just say no to performance-based budgeting
March 11, 2024
A bunch of colleagues and I published an op-ed today in the Bucks County Beacon about Governor Shapiro's vision for public higher education in Pennsylvania,...
The money-changers at Temple
March 4, 2024
Organizers at Temple University got in touch with me recently to ask what I thought of their campus's supposed 'budget crisis'. I did a little digging around...
Two public school solar financing policies: public and private
February 26, 2024
The other day policy researchers from the Center for Public Enterprise (CPE) got in touch with me. I'd met one of them on twitter and at that time he told me...
On being well-endowed
February 19, 2024
As a preface to this post, for higher education finance resources and organizing help you should check out Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education,...
No austerity for Minneapolis!
February 12, 2024
A labor organizer reached out recently to talk through something. The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) is in the midst of a contract negotiation with...
Conn men?
February 5, 2024
Announcement: I'm giving a lecture at Teachers College, Columbia University this Thursday at 5:30pm titled "Education Finance, Statistics, and Philosophy."...
What to do in Denver when in debt
January 29, 2024
While researching a seemingly never-ending paper on the Philadelphia School District's relationship with the municipal bond market between 1993-2021 and its...
The politics of reserves
January 22, 2024
One thing I've learned to do in trying to understand school finance is watch out for big pools of capital. Wherever there are pools of capital, there are...
Underfunded by design
January 15, 2024
Late last year I did a mini-project on teacher pensions. I wanted to understand what their deal was. I ended up concluding that project with a proposal for...
The war at school
January 8, 2024
Nothing's the same after October 7th. I've thought a lot about how to get this newsletter involved amid the horror and I finally figured something out, at...
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