Archive (Page 15) • Schooling in Socialist America • Buttondown

Getting swappy

February 23, 2021

File this one under Things You Probably Didn’t Know School Districts Do Under Capitalism. It turns out two school districts in Pennsylvania lost millions of...

Fragments of Frank Moretti

February 20, 2021

I advise doctoral students and one student this year is doing a project on surveillance capitalism and education technology. I told him he should look up...

Just Breathe?

February 15, 2021

The debate around reopening schools in the pandemic is about a lot of things: getting back to ‘normal’, having adults get back to work, not letting students...

The Fed and the School

February 11, 2021

Yesterday, Jerome Powell gave a big speech about the Federal Reserve’s approach to monetary policy at this moment. Everyone was watching. People wanted to...

School districts are the cell structure of racial capitalism

February 8, 2021

I’ve been going around saying this for awhile now, but it’s time to write out why I think it’s true: school districts are the cell structure of racial...

Introduction to tax-base sharing

February 4, 2021

Whenever someone asks me what we should do about school funding inequality, I mention tax-base sharing, the regional system set up in the Twin Cities in 1971...

School funding as socialist planning?

February 1, 2021

I finally got a chance to read Aaron Benanav’s recent essay in Logic about socialist planning. I’ve been a fan of Aaron’s since I first heard him talk about...

Fun with apparatuses

January 29, 2021

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf put out his 2021 agenda yesterday. The third point from the top is “Invest in Public Infrastructure, Including School Buildings.”...

Two FEMAnds

January 27, 2021

After writing about the Biden administration’s new policy that school districts can use FEMA funds for safely reopening, I found out that Philadelphia is...

Are you my FEMA?

January 24, 2021

In the flurry of executive orders coming out of the Biden administration, it looks like schools can get Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) monies for...

Title Onedering

January 20, 2021

During the Democratic presidential primary, I noticed something weird. Bernie Sanders was obviously the leftist candidate, Biden the moderate, and Warren...

Budget Reconciliation?

January 14, 2021

In my constant search for school funding, particularly green school building infrastructure funding, the same friend that told me about the Department of...

D'oh

January 12, 2021

Last week I wrote about a possible revenue source for school infrastructure improvements at the Department of Energy. The DOE is guaranteeing loans for green...

"Education, Inequality, and School Finance" for socialists

January 8, 2021

If you want to know about school funding from a progressive point of view, you have to read Bruce D. Baker. His research over the last two decades and more...

DOE a Dear!

January 4, 2021

Well what do we have here? Apparently President-Elect Biden saved himself a juicy morsel of funding at the Department of Energy when he oversaw the last...

The Covid Vaccine and Socialism

January 3, 2021

In the flood of news about the covid vaccine, I’ve been reading about Katalin Karikó, the Hungarian scientist in Philadelphia who has been doggedly...

We need an education liquidity facility (ELF)

December 28, 2020

I was feeling pretty bummed last week. Pat Toomey all but doomed the municipal liquidity facility (MLF) as part of his demands to sign off on the CASH act,...

Shut down, forbidden, and banned

December 21, 2020

If you were chewing your fingernails and feeling generally bummed over the weekend about the fiscal relief talks, there’s now a deal. And it’s not great for...

Fiscal shit storm

December 18, 2020

It’s a big day for the MLF strategy. The Fed relief programs are at the center of a fiscal shit storm. It’s nerve-wracking. Infection rates are sky high. The...

How We Gonna Pay?

December 14, 2020

The left wants programs for people that need them. For schools, we want better teacher pay, benefits, school infrastructure updates, community school...