Half liberatory
The historian of education Esther Cyna invited me to give a lecture in Versailles, France at the UVSQ last week.
The lecture was the keynote for a small conference called Education in the United States: Critical Approaches and New Directions for Research.
I called the talk "Half Liberatory: Critical School Finance and the Inflation Reduction Act." This week, I'm sending along an audio recording of the lecture and the powerpoint presentation I made for it if you want to follow along.
In the presentation, I ask what the Inflation Reduction Act looks like through a critical school finance lens, covering (1) what the critical school finance lens is; (2) what the Inflation Reduction Act is and has for schools, specifically direct pay investment tax credits and green bank capitalization; (3) what are leftists saying about the law, namely debating whether it's liberatory or oppressive in Enrique Dussel's sense; and (4) doing two "imagination case studies" where I describe two examples of green school infrastructure finance and how they'd be different with IRA programs.
After all that, I conclude that the IRA--from the point of view of schools--is half liberatory, because the direct pay program mostly shoves money into private green capitalists' hands without any sticks, but the green bank capitalization democratizes the finance side for districts.
As an aside, I'm going to be in France for the next couple months working on a translation project. I'm still planning on sending out the newsletter on schedule--but if you don't see it one week, it's because I'm traveling.