Five things to read
Over the last month, articles by comrades and colleagues have come out that I want to put on your radar. Here’s a link and the abstract for each:
Indebting Children: Context, Consequences, and Contestation of K–12 Educational Debt
by Frances Negrón-Muntaner & Jason Wozniak
“This article argues that the neoliberal era (1970–present) has intensified the phenomenon of indebtedness, including that of children. Inside schools where a majority of the students are predominantly BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color), and have limited access to resources, teachers who themselves are buried in student debt teach students who are being acculturated into indebted life, an existence shaped by and designed to service debt. We investigate the context, consequences, and contestation practices of debt financing in K-12 schools and introduce the Instructional Harm Index (IHI) to measure and visualize how debt undermines educational experiences and harms children. The IHI also reveals that debt affects children differently; for some children, it leads to educational extraction and inadequate conditions; for others, it results in educational extravagance and increased social capital.”
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naming discrimination in school finance
by Esther Cyna
“Inequalities in US school finance have attracted the attention of scholars in education, economics and public policy, yet the description of “gaps” between the most and the least advantaged schools often obscures active discriminatory practices. Analyzing policies that contribute to unequal schooling through historical methods and reflecting on how to narrate them, can help further understand causality and highlight the actors who choose to challenge, perpetuate or exacerbate disparities in school budgets despite their consequences for millions of children. Following the scholarly tradition of Critical Race Theory, the emerging scholarly subfield of Critical School Finance adopts analytical language around discrimination and theft in a more active framework that sheds light on the role of public policy and governmental actors. Through an analysis of primary sources and a synthesis of the secondary literature, this article argues that discrimination and dispossession along class and racial lines are built into school funding systems.”
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Discipline and Punish: How Wall Street’s Grip on School Finance Deepens Inequality
by Claire Cahen
“Public school districts are bracing for cuts after the Trump administration’s decision to withhold $6.8 billion of education funding. But the financial squeeze is not new. For years, private finance has quietly shaped public education budgets. Schools have become deeply reliant on Wall Street debt to finance everything from basic infrastructure and classroom upgrades to day-to-day operations. The deeper schools fall into debt, the more they are bound by a set of financial rules that prioritize investors over students and teachers.
School districts turn to debt financing when they face costs that their immediate budgets cannot cover. Typically, these are costs associated with expensive, long-term capital projects; however, debt also occasionally covers run-of-the-mill budget shortfalls. Districts will issue municipal bonds, which investment funds purchase, effectively lending schools the money in exchange for a promise to repay the principal, plus interest and issuance fees. As Concordia University education scholar Eleni Schirmer notes, “debt is offered as a lifeline.” In the short term, it keeps the lights on. In the long term, it is too often a trap.”
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Mortgaging Out: FHA Credit Policy, Segregated Rental Housing, and the Remaking of Metropolitan America
by Brent Cebul and Michael R. Glass
On a hot afternoon in July 1954, Fred C. Trump sat as a witness before the Senate Committee on Banking and Currency. He had been subpoenaed for an investigation into profiteering on apartments underwritten by the Federal Housing Administration (Fha). In a three-piece suit and with his clipped mustache, Trump spent hours dismissing the accusations with a mix of impatience and entitlement. To build the Beach Haven Apartments, a sprawling complex of 1,860 units in Brooklyn, New York, he obtained a mortgage insured by the Fha under its “war housing” program. His buildings were so “well-constructed,” he boasted, that “Built by Trump” denoted “a mark of quality.” But Trump also detailed how he personally benefited from a program that was supposed to provide affordable housing for veterans. When applying for Fha insurance, he inflated the mortgage value by marking up land values, overestimating construction costs, and tacking on fees. After securing an outsized loan, he built the apartments quickly and cheaply. The funds leftover at the end—a sum totaling $3 million—stayed in his bank account as profits, and residents paid higher rents to defray the inflated mortgage. This was all standard real estate practice, and nothing he did was technically illegal. And so, Trump insisted, any suggestions of wrongdoing were “completely untrue and very unfair.”
Beyond Capitalism — 1: Groundwork for a Multi-criterial Economy
by Aaron Benanav
Benanav is a communist economic historian with a flair for the magisterial, and his latest project is to survey what’s needed for a communist economics. In this long first installment, he goes over historical attempts to articulate what would actually be needed for a communist political economy, focusing on the notion of “multi-criteriality,” that is, an economy that doesn’t just have the single-criterial focus on profit. He lands on the key concept of investment, and what a communist investment process would be like, which perhaps includes profit as one criteria among others such as justice, provision, equality, etc. I’ve been following Benanav’s work since he started writing about the socialist calculation debate and this seems like a full flowering of that project. I’m hoping to think through how Benanav’s multi-criteriality gels with educational provision (one of the several things he lists throughout the piece that should be provided to everyone). Looking forward to part 2!