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...
Public resources for public stuff!
I was asked to give a two-minute speech at the Public Banking rally on Friday, October 7th. Here's an extended copy of some remarks I prepared. A couple...
The structure of indiscriminate school shootings
I met badass critical geographer Kate Derickson earlier this year at a workshop on urban climate finance. She and I got to talking after the school shooting...
Actually existing green schools: Manchester, Connecticut
I had a conversation recently with someone who's very deep into green infrastructure finance for schools. They gave me a ton of resources to sift through...
The life and death of bonds, or Bill Gross's scalp
I've been trying to understand how bonds work, specifically municipal bonds, so I can better understand school finance. But the subject is notoriously...
A new way socialists might fight the right
As the rightwing continues winning around the world and threatens to win even bigger next month in the US, I've been thinking about stuff socialists can do...
Let them eat ITCs
I've written a few posts about the Inflation Reduction Act, focusing on how schools could take advantage of the green banking provisions in the law to get...
Althusser and Education
Before I started studying school finance from a socialist perspective, my research focused on educational theory. Specifically, I focused on the French...
Microbial growth: a state/county apparatus in North Carolina
In my attempt to understand school facilities finance better from a socialist perspective I peruse a headlines in American Schools & Universities pretty...
Why not build?
A few weeks ago, editors at the African American Policy Forum asked me to write something about how the left broadly speaking could counter the rightwing...
Expertise is ideology
I got mad reading Forbes the other day. Marguerite Roza published an article taking several school districts to task for lacking "expertise in finance" as...
Solidarity with school facilities workers!
There was a big strike vote in Philly last week. The union representing school bus drivers, custodial staff, and building engineers--SEIU 32BJ District 1201...
Who's driving? Green bank dialectics in Philly
I've been writing the last few weeks about the Inflation Reduction Act's national green bank. The question is whether and how monies from this provision of...