Schools need money, they’re gonna need money, and we’re in a polycrisis of fascism-climate-tech dislocation that makes money seemingly scarce. I keep getting questions about what to do for revenue in this awful milieu. So here’s what comes to mind in terms of increasing and protecting public school revenue in the coming years, particularly as election day approaches. I’ve got short, medium, and long term ideas. 

Take up and take on the closure logic

In the short term you have to be ready to fight closure logic. That’s the management ideology that thinks closing schools will save money and help with utilization etc. It doesn't. Francis Pearman at Stanford found recently that closures in California, across region and size of district, are revenue neutral: it doesn’t save money. Moreover closing schools loses an average of 287 students, decreasing revenue further. Derek Gottlieb my podcast co-host ran the same test for Minneapolis and got roughly the same result. 

Change the conversation from closure to creative thinking. Dig into the numbers and find the choke points, the ways to save. This might involve state policies, particularly special education and pension contributions. It might involve restructuring debt, doing a scoop and toss. The district might not know. 

This requires getting into documents and doing what I call a document critique. Find audits and bond statements (not budgets!) and make your way through them, find numbers that look too big or small, change dramatically; read local reporting and pay close attention to what administrators say is the issue. Don’t be intimidated by boring or technical-sounding stuff. Or you can make a silly AI video.

I’ll never forget how in Ann Arbor Michigan in 2024, leadership said the budget deficit that would close schools and fire people was due to pandemic enrollment issues and lapsing federal support. While partially true, it also turned out that the budget office had made a $14 million mistake by not listing a pension contribution properly. In Seattle in 2025, the district threatened to close 25 schools. When organizers looked into it, the Washington state government was shortchanging the district of $80 million in special education funding. Once that was rectified no schools were closed. 

Tax. the. rich.

But in the longer term we need to get creative. We can’t just consign ourselves to the cyclical crises of American racial capitalism, these yearly budget crises are too exhausting. We have to change the flows of revenue themselves, not just adapt to whatever the crisis is this or that cycle. Otherwise we’ll always be on the defensive. It’s time to go on offense and make public education finance as public as possible. 

One way to do that is by taxing the rich. Massachusetts passed their millionaires tax in 2022 and it’s brought in more revenue than anticipated for education, and there’s been no capital flight. In New York City, the Mamdani administration is fighting tooth and nail to tax pied-a-terre’s to generate $500 million in municipal revenue. There are TTR campaigns in several states now, and again, it’s important to be creative: there are many ways to tax the rich and you should find ways to do it that are strategically clear and winnable. 

Fix the pipes

Taxing the rich puts more water into the pipes of school district revenue. But those pipes are leaky as hell. We need other structural fiscal transformations to stop the needless bleeding of the people’s money. One big leak is procurement. For fifty years rightwingers and moderates have made hay of accountability. Teachers and students must be held accountable. Yet private vendors are never held to that standard. They’re never held accountable. We should adopt an anti-neoliberal outcomes-based contracting policy that refrains from paying vendors unless they finish the job on time and get results. 

Pension contributions are a huge leak on state funding. As Tom Sgouros writes, we do not need to fully fund our pensions systems, at least to the extent that neoliberals clamor for. Touch requirements for high contributions are based on out-of-touch and irrational accounting rules that force districts and states to audit themselves into deficits. We need to challenge the dominant logics of contribution and peg pension savings to gross product rather than nonsensical criteria of “full funding.” We should use the principle that municipal socialists have used in the past: pay as you go. No need to give into the paranoid and illogical demands of government accounting standards board (GASB). This could free up hundreds of millions of dollars at the state level. 

The same argument above holds true for reserves. As economist JW Mason argues, we need not save ourselves into oblivion, socking away money for a rainy day that never arrives. What’s more important, than we meet arbitrary reserve thresholds or actually provide the service public dollars are meant to provide? 

Another big leak is debt. School districts pay between 8-10% of their operating budgets to service debt, paying interest to bondholders who have an unbelievable amount of power. Private banks take big underwriters fees, as do credit raters and consultants and lawyers, all so public school districts can sell themselves as investment products on Wall Street to borrow the money they need for facilities, cybersecurity, make payments on legal judgment obligations, or make payroll when tax revenues don’t come in on time. We have to address this suck on the people’s money. Moreover, it’s racist: I’ve found with colleagues that every one percent increase in white students in a district comes with a 30 basis point decrease in borrowing costs. 

I’ve proposed two ways to do this. First, we can pressure teacher pensions to buy school district municipal bonds. The pensions are vast well’s of the people’s money, and can challenge the hegemony of private banks when making the market for school district debt. To sweeten the deal and address the problem of climate change, we can get green banks involved to roll up decarbonization projects in school facilities and make them attractive  investments for the pensions, standardizing contracts, providing loan-loss mechanisms, and technical service. They may be able to lower the interest rate and borrowing costs generally. 

Finally, we need a Public Education Credit Union. As is being attempted in Alameda County, CA, such a bank would have school districts as depositor-owners who put their reserves into the bank and control it. The bank would lend directly to school districts and make the market for public school credit on public schools’ terms, hiring a team to help with technical advice and legal consulting at much lower rates than the big private firms do today.