December 6, 2021

A Green Freedom Budget for Schools

When Nikil Saval ran for state senate in Pennsylvania, I was part of an amazing team of researchers working on the campaign's platform. It was fun and humbling to think about what I'd want to see on a candidate's platform when it came to school funding. Of course there are a number of ideas that came immediately to mind in terms of policies he could fight for. (I pitched tax base-sharing for the Philadelphia metro region, but the campaign thought it was too spicy, hah!)

One thing that was important to me, maybe more than any of the specific policies, was rethinking the politics of school funding in general. Rather than a technical, wonky, and mechanistic part of education politics, funding is where the rubber meets the road. It's the material conditions of our dreams and demands. Financing is freedom's food.

I'd gotten this idea a few years earlier. As part of the Working Educators Caucus yearly summer reading group series, I read a fantastic book by Paul Le Blanc and Michael Yates called A Freedom Budget for All Americans. The authors tell the story of the Freedom Budget, a document put together by the same coalition that organized the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech.

The budget initiative was a genius attempt to translate the demands of that march--led by a powerful coalition of labor, civil rights, and social movements--into material reality. It also shows how deeply involved socialists and communists were in that coalition, proposing ideas and influencing the debate on many sides of the coalition, including MLK, who in later speeches explicitly advocated for a socialist economy in the US.

Those socialists were in the thick of it, thinking materially about what a socialist economy in the United States would actually entail. At the time, I had no clue about what I'd propose in that situation if I were in that room then or now. If someone asked me about schools, what would I say? What is the socialist vision for school funding? What would the freedom budget for schools have in it? The question led me to start thinking and writing the kind of stuff I feature in this newsletter. It also helped me draft my little section of Nikil's platform.

When we take on the project of battling exploitation and changing our society's relations of production, we need to engage with the nitty gritty material realities of our demands. Freedom budgeting, I realized, was one way to do this. It's not only a cool story from history, but a tactic we can use today. So I proposed that Nikil call his school funding plank Freedom Budgeting. He liked the idea. And then he won the campaign!

I tell this story now because Philly DSA's education justice committee, who I've been organizing the last few months, has put together a working group to research a budget for Philadelphia's schools. The group is using the freedom budgeting model for this project, translating our demands into a concrete budget outlining the material conditions of what we want for the schools.

But it's not just a freedom budget for Philly's schools that we're after. It's an offshoot of the Green New Deal for Schools campaign that we pushed for both locally and nationally over the last year.

As I've been writing about for awhile, the climate crisis and the toxic schools crisis are closely related. School buildings release a substantial amount of carbon and Philly's schools happen to be threatening the health of teachers, students, and staff who spend every day in them. We need new school buildings to fix both of these catastrophic problems.

We want safe, new, zero-emission green school infrastructure in Philadelphia. We want to rebuild the city's schools to meet the moment. But to do that, we need to know what it's going to cost.

So we're researching a Green Freedom Budget for Philadelphia's Schools.

So far, we've made a list of experts we'd like to consult for the project, starting with the Carbon Free Clean and Healthy Schools initiative by the Climate Jobs National Resource Center; Zac Taylor, who co-authored a report on Green Schools from an architect's perspective; and Akira Drake Rodriguez's urban planning seminar working on a People's Master Facilities plan for Philly's schools. The project is ongoing. If you're interested in contributing let me know!