Critical theory and K-12 capex
Announcement: The American Educational Research Association (AERA) organizes the biggest education research conference I know. Within the conference are many special interest groups, or SIGs. Each SIG has a business meeting where they invite speakers to give lectures of interest to the group. The Marx-SIG (yes it exists!) invited me to give such a lecture on my work, both on Althusser and school finance.
You're invited! It's happening in Philly this Saturday, 4/13, at 6:45pm at the Philadelphia Downtown Marriott, Level 4, Room 408. Come by if you want to see me give my talk, which will be a kind of methodological 'behind the music' of this newsletter. We'll be going out to drinks after!
Now for this week's post.
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A few colleagues and I recently organized an online workshop called "Exploring the Contours of K-12 Capital Funding: Policy, Practice, and Critique." It was a great event with a bunch of fascinating participants, many of whom were readers of this newsletter. We structured the workshop with six "lightning talks" from a series of experts and policymakers, with the idea that the workshop could turn into another meeting. I gave one of these talks and I'm sending along the edited version of what I said below. It was a quick summary of the questions I ask, frames that I use, and things I've been thinking recently. If you want to join the group and see a full recording of the call, let me know and I can add you.
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The title of my little lightning talk is "Critical Theory and K-12 Capex: Policy for the Polycrisis." I'm trying to make it punchy, haha. And I'm just gonna introduce two things today. Basically, I'm gonna start with critical theory. And when I talk about critical theory, what I mean is something like what Max Horkheimer, one of the founders of the Frankfurt School, wrote about in an essay called "Traditional and Critical Theory."
The aim of this activity is not simply to eliminate one or other abuse, for it regards such abuses as necessarily connected with the way in which the social structure is organized. Although it itself emerges from the social structure, its purpose is not, either in its conscious intention or in its objective significance, the better functioning of any element in the structure. On the contrary, it is suspicious of the very categories of better, useful, appropriate, productive, and valuable, as these are understood in the present order, and refuse to take them as nonscientific presuppositions about which one can do nothing.
Okay, so what might this have to do with capital expenditure in in schools? And, by way of introducing myself and my questions and the frames that I use to ask them, I've tended to ask the general question: how is school facilities finance toxic? We have a lot of toxic school buildings in this country. But how'd they get that way? Specifically, how is the financing and provisioning of these facilities toxic?
The themes or frames that I use to ask this question include framework of racial capitalism, using critical policy analysis. And most recently the concept of polycrisis.
But another question I ask is, what kind of policies do we deserve? So it's not just a critique, but it's also a proposal, like, what are what are policies on our terrain in the landscape right now that we can propose? Using that critical theory framework that Horkheimer put forward, what would we recommend?
Horkheimer has another line there where he says that critical theory can be defined sometimes by fantastical thinking, or thinking that seems a little out there. And so sometimes the policies that we propose might feel like that, but they're policy proposals nonetheless. The frames that I use when answering this question about the policies policies we deserve are democratic socialism and the Green New Deal.
So to finish my lightning talk, I wanted to put forward an idea that I had recently after studying teacher pensions. I'm influenced by a bunch of people that I don't have enough time to to mention now, so I'm just going to get right to it.
Some of the problems that we're facing here in this space are inequitably toxic school facilities and financing regimes. But we also have teacher pension tensions where people are kind of always debating whether the pensions in crisis--are they not in crisis, are they in crisis?--and we have overlapping climate, racial, care, and economic crises that are definitive of this polycrisis.
So here's a policy I've been playing around with. In lieu of something like a national investment authority, or bigger and better green banks, both of which I support, I've been thinking about what if we re-upped the Build America Bonds program (BABs), the old program from 2010s. And what if we tried to de-risk public pension investment in diverse working class school bonds that also have a green infrastructure component.
So in this sense, the the Treasury or the Federal Reserve are covering losses of pension funds that invest in these kinds of school bonds. This is sort of a question I'm posing, like, could we try this?
If the Treasury bundles school bonds into a financial instrument and sells the security to teacher pensions through this renewed BABs program; if the pensions buy a certain amount of these bonds; the policy sets a minimum baseline for pension returns. Let's say the minimum baseline 6.8%, on the low side.
If the teacher pension invests 45% of its portfolio in those bonds and only makes 5% back, the Federal Government covers costs incurred by the lost 1.8%, and the pension would get even more money if the bonds are green or the bond revenues go towards green infrastructure. So that's just an idea. It's like a question I'm asking in the spirit of critical K-12 capex in the polycrisis.
Thanks!