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...
How to do critical school finance
I'm giving a guest lecture at the University of Manitoba, Canada thi week. The title of the lecture is "How to do Critical School Finance." The professor who...
nah cuz why
Scrolling through tiktok I came across a video with more than a million likes. It's just a few seconds long. Two guys stand in front of a new playground, on...
The IRA and Public Schools
The website Phenomenal World, which is a great resource for critical and left political economy, published an essay of mine gathering together thinking and...
COPs (but not that kind)
I meet all kinds of great people writing this newsletter. Recently, a researcher and organizer in California reached out and we had a great conversation....
Movements at the fiscal/monetary crossroads
I recently published a research article in the Journal of Urban Affairs with the amazing Akira Drake Rodriguez. The paper is called "Movements at the...
Pension questions
My neighbor is a longtime labor organizer and I trust her sense of things. Her husband is a teacher and unionist also. A few weeks ago we were talking about...
On WALTER
Dear readers, I'll be spending the next academic year in New York City as part of my sabbatical. If you're in NYC and want to meet up email me! The prologue...
A vacation smattering
I'm on vacation this week, so instead of a typically prosaic post I'm sending along a smattering of three interesting school finance things that happened...
Towards a technography of Title 1A
I had a doctoral student named Rob Rust who wrote a great dissertation on surveillance capitalism and educational technology. In the part where he tells...
The Pyrrhic property tax
The property tax has a strange ambivalence. On the one hand, it tethers the fate of public goods like education to the cruel vicissitudes of racial...
School finance: a critical primer, pt. 2
Here's Part 2 of "School Finance: A Critical Primer." Federal grants Bruce Klunder was a priest in Cleveland. His faith called him to participate in the...
School finance: a critical primer, pt. 1
Two years ago I pitched a primer-like essay on critical school finance to the excellent political economy website Phenomenal World. They accepted the pitch,...
Following a dollar
A professor told me once that buying private property is a great education in capitalism. I was a lowly graduate student in his political theory class so I...
Gunshots at the playground
Something unsettling happened a few weeks ago and I've been trying to make sense of it. I took our three year old Thisbe to a playground on a Sunday. The...