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...
Lifeline fracas
You may have heard about the historical court case in Pennsylvania this year. After more than a decade of fighting, the Education Law Center won its class...
Mourning or melancholia? An Althusser tour
I'm extremely lucky to be spending some time in France as part of a sabbatical this fall. I've got a whole semester off just for research--no teaching or...
Half liberatory
The historian of education Esther Cyna invited me to give a lecture in Versailles, France at the UVSQ last week. The lecture was the keynote for a small...
Autobiography of a quantitative method
I spent the last year or so working on a research paper analyzing the relationship between charter schools and super-expropriation. I used a quantitative...
Bond/failure
One of my favorite sources of school facilities news is American School and University's Schoolhouse Beat. It's an almost daily and free subscription to...
IRA debates: a view from the schools
This post is the basis for a keynote lecture I'm giving in France on June 9th. Feedback welcome, and wish me luck! I've been following debates about the...
Don’t be stupid: election reflections
I'm feeling intensely bummed. Last Tuesday was election night in Philadelphia and the left got routed. Helen Gym, the our mayoral candidate, placed third...
The tide turns for Gym
After writing a piece about Paul Vallas in advance of the big mayor's race in Chicago with my great friend Jason Wozniak, editors at In These Times asked for...
The BABs problem
I came across something recently that both answered a question I've had for a couple years, and also scared me. It has to do with the debt ceiling hullabaloo...
Give 'em Helen
Happy May Day! There's an exciting and confusing race for mayor happening in Philadelphia right now. I live there and so I'm obviously deep in the weeds on...
Drinking sea water
I'm co-authoring a research paper analyzing underinvestment in Philadelphia's school buildings between 2005-2021 with Camika Royal. We're presenting it in a...