How school districts can take advantage of IRA programs
Last Thursday, the Philadelphia School Board had a public meeting. I submitted the following testimony into the public record urging the board to encourage...
SVB and education
A reporter recently interviewed me about something I tweeted on teacher pensions amidst the recent Silicon Valley Bank banking crisis, and it got me thinking...
Welcome to Carmel High
A video went viral recently that caught my eye. Students at Carmel High School in Indiana were giving a tour of their building as part of an after-school...
Organizing a millionaire's tax
I went to an amazing workshop on radical pedagogy at Yale a few weekends ago. It featured a mixture of discussion, report backs, and analysis of the present...
Why is my neighborhood school a charter?
A lot of my friends in Philly have kids. The kids are toddlers now, but soon they'll be going to school. So we're all thinking about where to send them to...
The science of reading: a socialist take
Over the last year, I kept hearing rumbles about something called "the science of reading debate" and stuff about the "reading wars." I didn't know what it...
Notes on possible next steps for a student housing struggle
In a previous post, I wrote about some of the recent financial and political history behind the student housing crisis happening at West Chester University...
Philly's asbestos crisis
Maybe you've heard the hot goss: the School District of Philadelphia is suing Philadelphia City Council. At stake is who controls school facilities safety...
A profound sense of unease
This newsletter focuses a lot on school facilities finance. It's an under-examined aspect of school finance and education policy generally, but it's an area...
Is the Inflation Reduction Act non-reformist?
I hit a wall last year. After getting excited about the Inflation Reduction Act and teasing out the particulars of what it would mean for school districts to...
The debt and the wolf
I've been putting together a literature review on school facilities finance and came across something curious. In a great working paper on state credit...
Chatbot GPT on socialist school finance
You've probably heard of Chatbot GPT by now. It's an advanced form of artificial intelligence that responds to queries you give it based on vast banks of...
The cat litter thing is true, but not how you think
Right wing politicians were going around in their stump speeches and campaign conversations talking about cat litter in schools. For them, it’s a dog whistle...
A parent trap
Something has been making me mad recently. I'm parenting a toddler, two and half years old, so I've been at it now for a couple years. I love Thisbe dearly,...
Planned scarcity in public university housing
When I first got to my university in 2016, I was surprised when I moved into my office. It was a dorm room with a professor's desk in it. There were shelves...
The Sandia Report: numbers and struggle
In school, I was taught that there are two kinds of people: math people and non-math people. The math people are smart and the non-math people aren't. The...
Tax-base sharing and racial capitalism in school finance
Three years ago, a friend and comrade Julie McIntyre sent me a call for papers, soliciting proposals for a special issue of The Journal of Educational Human...
Kudos to Verona: a look at Wisconsin
A friend passed along a par
As public as possible
I've been thinking about what the overall argument or statement of this newsletter might be. What's holding it all together? One idea I'm working with is...
A school bond that was actually a bond
This week I'm revisiting a post I published close to the beginning of this newsletter. The readership has almost tripled since then and I think about this...