On Wednesday, January 14th, I was invited to address Community Education Council 4 (CEC4), one of the nearly 35 CECs that make up the New York City Department of Education.

I’d made contact with a member of that board and she was interested in a short presentation, based on my book, to get people on the CEC thinking about how to make NYC school finance as public as possible.

Here are some notes I prepared for that brief talk. At this point, based on my understanding of NYC’s school finance terrain, there are four possibilities I wanted to bring to the CEC’s attention.

1. Property tax reform. I’ve written about this recently, and I’ve come to the provisional conclusion that following previous comptroller’s recommendations, as well as those from tax reform groups in the city, would make school finance in NYC more public. Why? A few reasons. The property tax is the only tax that the city controls outright, as opposed to sharing levy control with the state, and 56% of school revenues come from that tax. Right now, the effective tax rate on homeowner’s in the city is highly unequal, where owners of large properties don’t pay their fair share. The leading proposal to remedy the disparity is to create a new level of property taxation by breaking up Class 1 properties into two kinds and taxing the higher value ones at a higher rate. Of more than $1.58 trillion of taxable real estate value in the city, only about $309 billion is currently taxed.

2. Rethinking hold harmless, city and state. NYC schools get their revenue from two main sources: city and state. Each of these streams of revenue are allocated through formulas that have been progressively reformed recently. The city’s Fair Student Funding formula and New York State’s Foundation Aid formula have been made more sensitive to disparity’s between the city’s schools. In each case however, a choke point (common in US school finance) prevents these weighted formulas from operating at full strength. That choke point is called hold harmless which, while it appears to be a helpful policy, actually could be much better for the diverse working class. Hold harmless means that a school’s allocation can’t sink below a certain threshold, largely what it received either the year before or some other year. Despite changes in enrollments, needs, and other shifts, hold harmless holds schools’ money harmless: its leaders can rely on getting a certain amount even if they have fewer students, for example. But while this sensitivity to previous years’ revenue is better than just doling out money based on whatever fluctuations occur, there are more justice-oriented ways to think about how to fiscally compensate for changes in school realities. I think taking a compensatory approach to hold harmless—which could take the form or more reparative (repairing past funding harms), redistributive (ensuring everyone has what they need according to what they can contribute), recognitive (letting weighted allocations take precendence over previous-year allocations, or other frameworks—would go some way towards compressing the disparaties we see between schools in the city. This is something I want to explore more in the future for both the state and city formulas.

3. Pooling Parent Money. One of the most glaring ways in which NYC school finance isn’t public are the revenues and expenditures associated with parent associations, the groups of parents who come together to fundraise, donate, and provide all manner of programs and opportunities for their childrens’ school based on the fiscal capacity of the neighborhood zone. These funds are raised, reserved, and spent on a completely individual basis, rendering some public schools into de facto private schools due to the wealth and income within the catchment. My daughter’s school, PS20, for instance, has a parent association that runs its own subsidiary after-school programs as a small business, with a substantial budget. This is not a solidaristic policy, but rather leaves certain catchments and communities without high wealth or income in dust, while others thrive. Sometimes right next door to one another. There have been efforts to take up and take on this disparate structure in the past that have involved pooling parent association money and then redistributing it. I would propose a donation base revenue sharing scheme, based on the Twin Cities’ fiscal disparities programs, that shares a portion of the growth in parent association revenues according to fluctuations in those revenues each year.

4. Green Fiscal Mutualism. Finally, in my book, I advocate for a framework to take up and take on the municipal bond market regime when it comes to school infrastructure finance. The framework is called green fiscal mutualism and I think NYC school finance could use this approach in financing it’s buildings. Basically, the Teachers Retirement System (TRS) would purchase the city’s Building Aid Revenue Bonds (BARBs) with the city’s green bank (I think NYCEEC would be more nimble, but NYGB through NYSERDA would be good too) acting a market-maker: providing portfolios of school project financing pooled together, technical advice on how to make sure the infrastructure is green, and loan-loss provisions for the pension fund. Mark Levine has already announced an intention to devote 1% of the pension’s portfolio to public housing investment. Why not do the same for public schools? We’d save on the borrowing costs on the front end and then save in the long term when the green infrastructure creates efficiencies.

I circulated this document before the talk. The questions and discussion that emerged were fascinating. After folks on the CEC got a sense of what I was talking about, two main points came up that really got me thinking.

First, one of the other CEC members (this was a room full of women of color who do this essential but unrecognized work of leading their district’s CEC) asked point blank: when it comes to the parent association money being shared, why would parents in an association with a lot of money want to share it with their neighboring schools who don’t work as hard to raise it? Why should they be made to give up their hard-earned money to others who don’t do as much for their schools?

It went right to the heart of what I write about in the book and this newsletter and the whole project of socialist school finance in the United States: why should people working hard to scrape what they can (or amass as much as they can) feel any obligation whatsoever to share those resources with others who they perceive to be—or actually don’t—work as hard?

I’m not sure I answered it well, but I said something like: if we want a new city that’s for everyone, we’re going to have to change our mindsets to a more collective mode. Instead of thinking that our neighbors are lazy and we shouldn’t share with them, that we have to keep whatever we make for ourselves, we have to think about resources as always socially produced with others—that it’s not laziness but rather the result of unjust pressures, obligations, and inequalities that lead to other schools not having as much.

The second question was a little wonkier. Someone asked whether these four proposals should happen in a certain order, whether it would overwhelm the system to do all of them at the same time, and whether it would overwhelm the people trying to do them if we pursued them all at once. The question was, if that’s true, which one should come first?

Again, I’m not sure my response was good. Speaking to the sense of these proposals’ being too much for the system, I said that it’s a time of radical uncertainty and we should pursue all options to transform the systems that are broken. I referenced an image from Kierkegaard I think about a lot. There are two kinds of historical moments, the Danish philosopher said: one kind of moment is where you don’t go out onto the frozen lake to get the treasure chest that’s there, and other moment is where you go out and risk it to get the treasure. We’re in that second moment and we should everything we can to get the world we want.

At that point, I had to go do childcare—but they left me thinking a lot and I think I also got them thinking together. The segment was supposed to be twenty minutes, but we’d been talking for forty by the time I left.