Healthy School Finance
Something exciting is happening this week.
In the short-term, I’m co-leading a workshop for public education advocates called Healthy School Finance with a bunch of friends and comrades, through a coalition between Public School Strong, Debt Collective, and Climate and Community Institute. It’ll happen on May 7th at 7pm EST. Sign up here.
(I know my name is with an I, it’s a typo!).
The concept behind the workshop is a different way of thinking about school finance as we organize to strengthen and protect public education. We make a distinction between toxic school finance and healthy school finance.
Toxic school finance relies on two bad things: (1) extractive debt policies that force districts to pay exorbitant bond issuance costs to Wall Street every year and (2) use of that extractive debt to finance infrastructure that’s bad for the environment, both socially and physically.
We propose a framework called healthy school finance, whose goal is public financing for public education through democratic fiscal structures like green banks and derisked pension investment in green school bonds. We call it carbon-free bonds of democracy (which sort of fits with the tune of Hakunah Matatah, when they sing “it’s our problem free philosophy”). We present this framework as a way to approach campaign organizing around schools and money.
The workshop uses case studies from districts that Public School Strong members requested to illustrate how this can work, juxtaposing extractive debt with climate risk and emissions. We look at Chatham County, Ga; Hillsborough County, FL; and Wake County, NC.
I mentioned at the beginning that this workshop is a short-term thing. It’s actually a pilot for a much larger, long-term project to start a school finance training institute with this framework at its heart.
The coalition putting it together is working towards longer in-person trainings that provides resources to education leaders, organizers, and community members to fight for healthy school finance. If you want to be involved let me know!