Two public school solar financing policies: public and private
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
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!
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?
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
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
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
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
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...
Earhole 2023
Happy new year! For this post I thought I'd do something a little different. I'm really into music, both playing and listening, but I rarely get a chance to...
Taking care of careworkers, free education, and the 529
When it comes to tax hacks, we usually hear about how the ruling class is constantly exploiting loopholes in the tax code to keep their money from the...
Billions
I'm constantly on the hunt for narratives that can explain the complexity of the relationship between private finance and public education. I think if people...
NYzantium and the politics of weights
I've been living in Brooklyn the last few months as part of my academic sabbatical. The school district here is wild, serving just under a million students...
Fund the facilities! A teacher pensions policy for the polycrisis
Last week I summarized a debate about public pensions between socialists Henwood/Featherstone and Sawicky. This week I want to make my own proposal based on...
Twoers and Seveners
You can learn a lot when leftists disagree in public. The cover story for the January 2018 issue of In These Times was "Wall Street Isn't the Answer to the...
Is there a public pension problem?
A general question I've come upon in my project on pensions: is there really a teacher pension problem? If so, what is it and what do we do about it? So far...
Six things about teacher pensions
Here are some things I've learned so far in my attempts to understand teacher pensions. 0. The first thing is a rule of thumb. If someone says there's a...
The ideology of 322%
Call for participants! I'm helping put together a workshop on capital expenditure, debt, and K-12 education that will use critical frameworks to talk about...
Force decides
How do we know what's really going on with teacher pensions? It's a big problem. Andrew G. Biggs, writing in 2022 for a special issue of the research journal...
Who's clapping?
At his blog teacherpensions.org, the neoliberal economist Chad Aldeman has made some disturbing claims about teacher pensions. I've been writing about the...
Less cowbell
A few weeks ago I wrote about teacher pensions. I was readying the ground to dig into them as an organizing strategy. Basically, since union elections hinge...