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 ripe for socialist analysis: the very structure in which education takes place happens to constitute one of the most egregious and shady touchpoints between school and capitalism in the United States.
As I've been writing this newsletter for a more mainstream audience, I've also been doing more in-depth research to see what people have said on the question of facilities financing and social-political critique. Dr. Marialena Dawn Rivera is of the people who's work I've been really impressed by. After she defended her dissertation a few years ago she published a couple articles on the privatization of school facilities finance, as well as a report contrasting five states' facilities financing policies from a critical perspective.
I hadn't read Dr. Rivera's dissertation until recently, and wow, it's amazing. There's one particular part that I can't stop thinking about: a couple pages in the Introduction where she talks about how she came to her research questions. I'm going to excerpt it here at length because the details are so astounding and on point for what I've been exploring in the newsletter and my research. Enjoy!
Inspiration for this Dissertation Project and Conceptual Framework
by Dr. Marialena Dawn Rivera
In the summer of 2010, I had completed my first year of graduate work at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Policy students were required to hold a 10-week summer internship, and having been a public school teacher for two years before entering the policy program, I had searched for an internship in education policy. My goal was to work for a school district or education policy research organization, but instead, I wound up interviewing with a small financial advisory firm in the San Francisco Bay Area. The financial advisory firm, like many others in the state of California, provides a wide range of services to school districts around the state. They primarily assist districts with navigating the complicated bond financing process that districts go through to raise money to construct and modernize facilities. During the summer, I travelled to districts around the state, including in the Bay Area and in northern and southern California. These trips included visiting large public school districts, small rural districts, medium-sized suburban districts, and a charter school.
As I traveled around the state, I was surprised by the disparity in the quality of school facilities. I would later learn as a result of this dissertation project that California school facilities have dramatically improved over the last twenty years, largely as a result of state facilities policies, but I was still shocked to see such wide variety in facilities conditions. For example, when on a trip to Napa Valley, along with other private contractors and consultants on the facilities team, including architects and polling 11 consultants, we visited a school with many outdated portable buildings. A teacher talked about how she lost some of her school supplies when rain leaked through her portable classroom’s ceiling. That school was sharply juxtaposed to the stunning new school facilities we passed in American Canyon while driving back to the Bay Area. This pattern—of touring or hearing about leaky portables and then visiting new, state of the art facilities—repeated itself throughout the summer. While it was evident that many school districts has been able to use financing mechanisms to leverage state matching funds and improve their school buildings, it was clear that many other districts had not benefited under the same policies.
Much of my summer experience revolved around helping school districts prepare for school facilities bond elections. The districts’ abilities to build or modernize school facilities for their students rested primarily on whether voters in their district approved the bond measure. The firm with which I interned provided a variety of services to increase the likelihood that the bonds would pass. These services ranged from election strategies to voter mobilization on Election Day. For example, as an intern I spent time on the phone, cold calling voters, urging them to vote “yes” on their local bond. One day my supervisor was concerned that polling results were lower than anticipated one week before the critical bond election. He directed me and another staffer to drive two hours to the rural school district holding the election and knock on doors. Our task was to inform voters that the election was happening, distribute flyers, and encourage them to vote in the affirmative. Unfortunately, I was not dressed for the occasion, and I spent the afternoon trying to climb over chicken coops in high heels, while being yelled at by residents for trying to raise taxes. It was an eye-opening day, to say the least.
I was also intrigued by the amount of money that seemed to flow through the school facilities industry that did not actually go toward the bricks and mortar of the school facilities themselves. Much of these “soft costs” were fees to contractors and consultants. It was evident that many of the individuals working for the financial advisory firm were well paid. In addition to stating as much, they drove luxury cars, wore high-end suits, and lived in expensive homes. This fact is not necessarily problematic, and it is not the purpose of this study to dictate the earnings of private consultants and contractors. However, it was something I noticed at the time, and my concern about the level of soft costs in the school financing industry grew from a niggling sense of unease to one that frequently raised its head whenever I encountered low quality facilities. The bothersome thought of low-income school districts cutting checks to multiple high-paid consultants, at the same time many were cutting teachers’ salaries, propelled my research interests.
Procurement processes also stood out to me that summer. I was struck by the power of personal relationships and the lengths the financial advisory firm went to maintain and build relationships with school district decision-makers. A member of the firm had a box at the Oracle Arena in Oakland and frequently invited school district leaders to attend events. I was invited to attend a concert with my then fiancé and network with district leaders who were there as guests of the financial advisor. One day, I was asked to drive the company car out to a school district an hour away on my lunch break to deliver concert tickets to the superintendent. It bothered that these tickets and gifts were purchased with profits from contracts with school districts, and that the same dollars, if kept in the school districts’ coffers, could have been used on the facilities.
My internship left me with a profound sense of unease. While it was always clear to me that many school districts have benefitted from facilities policies and improved the quality of facilities in their individual districts, it was also quite clear that not all school districts—and not all schools within a given district—benefitted equally under the laws of the land. The inequity of school facilities was apparent even to someone like me, with an untrained eye and lacking experience in school facilities planning, financing, construction, and maintenance. It was also clear that the private consultants and contractors school districts hired, played an important role that influenced school facilities outcomes. I kept coming back to the idea that the many private actors involved in the facilities process influenced the extent to which inequities exist. Over the years, my concerns evolved into this dissertation project’s research questions.