Green School Stimmy
This week something really exciting happened.
Jamaal Bowman announced support for a Green New Deal for Schools initiative, focusing on infrastructure and pandemic safety.
I played a small role in an awesome team working on this proposal, which was led by Akira Drake Rodriguez at the climate+community project at University of Pennsylvania.
The ccp also put out a report called A Green Stimulus for K-12 Schools detailing the proposal, which is available for download. Check it out!
The basic idea is that we can create a lot of good-paying jobs to build and update school infrastructure in a way that decreases carbon emissions and improves the everyday lives of the diverse working class in the US.
You know I’ve been writing a lot about school infrastructure finance. This report’s position is for the federal government should provide block grants for school infrastructure, which is way better than credit markets and lending generally.
My contribution to this report was to point to ways of increasing Title 1 funding for these grants, which would be done not just by increasing the amount of Title 1 funding (like all the presidential candidate promised), but rather the proportions in the four formulas used for calculating grant amounts.
Pushing on what could be a new ruling class attitude about federal spending, this initiative is one of several ‘good’ short-term plans for socialists to get behind; that is, it’s a reform that’s nonreformist because has the potential transition our society into a better structure.
There’s more happening on this initiative soon, so keep an eye out!