A little fiscal mutualism, as a treat?
Michael Glass and Sean Vanatta, in their history of 1940s municipal finance in the New York suburbs, coined the term fiscal mutualism. This is a cool idea so...
What happened in Vermont
Carol Brigham’s family stopped talking to her. The superintendent of her school district got his tires slashed. A father, reporting on what was happening,...
How did I get here?
In my history of school funding seminar last week, students asked me something personal. We were talking about how hard and wonky school finance is, and they...
Cooperation Analysis of the Twin Cities Region
So much focus has been on Minneapolis in the wake of the Derek Chauvin trial. The city's been on all of our minds. Coincidentally, the Twin Cities is also...
Making Schools Safe: A Different Angle
So much of the literature and organizing on school finance comes down to a two-word demand: more money. If we get the revenue, we can provide better...
Rescue me
The American Rescue Plan is coming to your town soon if it hasn't already. The dollars are flowing. This includes $122 billion for school districts. How does...
Debt Reveal Day (and hi to buttondown!)
Hi everyone, I started a Buttondown newsletter account! Here's my first post on the new platform. Thanks to Jezza and Katherine for suggesting it. Check this...
This is (not) a school
This is part 3 of a series on String Theory Performing Arts Charter School in Philadelphia. I did a basic history of their massive 2013 bond issuance here....
String Theory Development Corporation
I went down a significant rabbit hole trying to understand a Philadelphia charter school bond issuance last week. It almost ended me. I was reading it before...
School district revenge fantasy
The amazing Dr. Camika Royal gave a lecture on her research to my program recently. She’s an historian of urban education focusing on Philadelphia and has a...
WTF is local school funding?
Schools get funded two ways: grants and loans. I wrote about Yonkers school district’s recent bond issuance, focusing on a recent loan they took out. Carlos...
Yonkers' Bad Neighbors
I mentioned before that I was going to focus on a school district I know very little about. That school district is the Yonkers City School District. I’m...
Yonkers City Council took out loans to pay for kids' textbooks, gave millions to corrupt firm
Yonkers School District is taking out a loan for textbooks. The district was facing a $22 million hole left by the pandemic and its economic crisis. Yonkers...
Green School Stimmy
This week something really exciting happened. Jamaal Bowman announced support for a Green New Deal for Schools initiative, focusing on infrastructure and...
How to understand school districts and capitalism
If I want to get to know a school district’s relationship to capitalism, specifically its funding structure and apparatuses, there are a few places I’ve...
Talking points for no-cost loans
I’ve been organizing with the Action Center on Race and the Economy and Lilac to demand no-cost loans for local governments from the Federal Reserve. (Sign...
A school bond that was actually a bond
I’m feeling lucky. A couple posts ago I wrote about how Black civil rights organizers Ann Atwater and Bill Riddick turned KKK leader C. P. Ellis from Exalted...
Cancel Wall Street and Fund Our Schools!
Online event on March 11, 4:30pm. Register here. Facebook event page. If you’ve been following this newsletter, you know I do a lot of writing and thinking...
What happened with bond yields last week
Something happened last Thursday. A little line on a little graph went up a little more than people thought it would and capitalists held their breath. A...
A Klansman joins the struggle
One of the biggest questions on the left is unity in difference. How do you collaborate and struggle together when there are so many things keeping people...