New research published: Critical School Finance
I’m really excited to share a paper I co-authored with the historian of education Esther Cyna called “Critical School Finance.”
It’s the result of several years of thinking, including work I’ve done with this newsletter. In the paper, we sketch a framework for understanding school finance with critical theory broadly speaking.
The paper was a great opportunity to re-examine the basic concepts of critical theory, which can be a little confusing sometimes, and then apply those concepts to a realm of educational research that hasn’t seen such critique before: school finance. We propose five central concepts for this framework: dispossession, kleptocracy, extraction/super-expropriation, and racial capitalism. We argue that school finance must be studied using these ideas.
For instance, rather than inequity in the distribution of educational resources, we should talk in terms of racialized theft.
Not only do we sketch the framework for a critical school finance (CSF), but we go on to illustrate that framework in a largely under-studied realm of school finance, facilities and infrastructure financing. We talk about Maria Dawn Rivera’s work on the privatization of facilities finance; communist philosopher of education Derek R. Ford’s writings on school infrastructure; and Robert Hockett and Saule Omarova’s proposal for a National Infrastructure Bank.
I hope the paper provides a language with which we can produce knowledge about school finance in the fight against oppression and exploitation to ultimately create what Horkheimer calls “reasonable conditions of life.”