Public education in the US today
It’s election day tomorrow and the vibes are tense and sweeping. But I’m not going to write about the election. I’m going to do something else instead. I participated in a sort of roundtable event recently on the current state of education in the US and the facilitators asked participants to think about three questions. In preparation I wrote responses and I thought I’d send along an edited version of what I wrote, since it ended up being a kind of snapshot of big-picture thoughts, which feels relevant at this crossroads moment. The questions are in italics and my responses follow.
What keeps you up at night about American education, on either the K-12 or college level?
There’s a wave of K-12 school closures (and higher ed closures too actually) happening now, and that keeps me up at night, but specifically, what keeps me up is what I’d call the line that racial capital and its representatives take on the school budget sounds reasonable when announced and reported to school communities: enrollment decline, expiration of federal covid relief money, space utilization. They have numbers that look, and actually are, unto themselves, not untrue. But these numbers are happening in the context of a larger web of policies that very few people understand, including school board members, superintendents, labor leaders, and teachers, parents, etc. When I do tiktoks about school budget crises, sometimes I get hundreds of comments asking me to look at other districts, which to me indicates that a majority of districts might be in some kind of budget crisis right now.
What keeps me up though is that the political-economic, structural forces, and the technical policies in public finance through which those forces work on school districts and communities, are obscure and difficult to understand. Yet racial capitalists have time and resources to study these, take advantage of them, and out-maneuver communities.
Meanwhile, local journalists are basically stenographers for capital, rarely raking any muck on the capitalists at all, just taking school leadership at its word. All these local places that intellectuals with a national focus haven’t heard of, wouldn’t think to think about, go without the critical analysis they need to fight back. What we could call the diverse working class educational communities in places you’ve probably never heard of are left high and dry as these forces work against them, closing schools and worse.
This is all happening of course against a backdrop of school shootings, the incursions of various media technologies into the traditional classroom space, the genocide in the Levant and its attendant issues for speech and expression, various and well-documented right wing onslaughts, etc.
There are too many examples of this dynamic, so I’ll just tell you about one that I just heard of in Beloit, Wisconsin. Apparently, in this diverse working class school district, there’s lower than average home ownership, and there are a group of slumlords who buy up cheap houses, flip them, and charge extremely high rent. As they increase the rent, the median price of housing in the area goes up. As that median price goes up, the slumlords can charge the federal Housing and Urban Development office higher and higher rates for reimbursement.
Okay. But perversely, these slumlords have an interest in the public school district being ‘bad’, that is, having a bad reputation. Why? Because as demand for housing goes down in the district, they can continue buying the houses, increasing rent, getting reimbursements from HUD, and—here’s the kicker—the landlords can make the case that the school district doesn’t deserve more resources because it’s doing a bad job. They demand that the district make cuts, close schools, fire people, which then reduces taxes the landlords have to pay. They wage campaigns to vote down referenda that would permit the district to float bonds, decreasing taxes even more. The reduction in their property taxes increases their profit margins on the housing scheme. And you can guess what their racial profile is, and their political ideologies, so this whole situation further gentrifies and segregates the city.
Among the ranks of these slumlords is Diane Hendricks, a rich Trump supporter whose foundation, the Hendricks Foundation, started a charter school in the district that receives millions of dollars from the public school district. White middle class people in this district align with the narratives Hendricks creates, viewing the communities of color in their district with disdain, both overt and covert racism, as they push for more cuts to a district led by a Black superintendent. But when the district is trying to deal with its shortfall, what do the white people on the subcommittee tasked with dealing with the problem say? They say the district has to fire people, close schools, etc. The people on that committee are affiliated with the landlords.
What keeps me up is that the whole cabal of landlords and their influence works out of sight from movements, and they’ll just continue undermining public education. And this is happening, in some form, in every school district: the ruling class and its fractions are exerting all kinds of force to undermine public education and communities have very little command over how they’re doing it, much less how to fight back. And as a postscript, what also keeps me up at night is that this fraction of the ruling class has a vision for education in America. It’s a christian techno-capitalist authoritarianism, very close to fascism if not outright techno-fascism or technofeudalism, very dystopian, and they’re fighting for hegemony in public education—and they might win.
In what ways has the COVID-19 pandemic transformed American education? Have there been any positive outcomes or learnings from it?
I like what Arundhati Roy said about the pandemic: that it was a portal. I think the pandemic was a portal for American education too, and in terms of positive things coming out of it, we actually saw the emergence, however briefly, of an entirely different financial regime for the funding of public education on both the fiscal and monetary side. I’d maybe call it a post-neoliberal or neo-social democratic political economy of public education.
On the fiscal side, we saw the federal government spend billions on education relief, monies with which districts could hire, build, and actually do their work. The relief packages were a portal into what federal spending could be, what the federal government could do all the time, rather than the paltry and confused 8% of total public education funding right now.
But maybe more exciting, and just as obscure, was the Federal Reserve’s pandemic response program called the Municipal Liquidity Facility. This was a special vehicle created by the Fed that had the power to loan directly to local governments on whatever terms the Fed determined. The stated reason they created the facility was, having learned from the 2008 financial crisis, they realized they needed to create backstops (or safety nets) during the pandemic crisis to prevent all the capitalists from pulling their money out of markets due to fear of losing it in a crash. They basically said, “hey, you don’t have to worry about losing your money because we’re here now to make sure the market doesn’t crash. We the government can be a lender of last resort.” One of those markets is the municipal bond market, where public school districts get money for all kinds of things, both operating and capital costs. And it worked: the markets didn’t crash.
But the fact that this facility was created, that it was deemed legal and then implemented at all, was a portal to a new political economy of public education in the country. This facility showed us that the federal government, with its bank and currency, can actually provide direct loans to local and state governments on whatever terms it decides using monetary policy, outside the legislative process, due to the federal reserve’s independence.
The Fed could give long-term zero interest loans, due according to whatever time period, without having to deal with rapacious conservatives. A lot of modern monetary theorists peed their pants with excitement. Why? Because public school districts along with other state and local governments have to sell themselves as investment products on Wall Street and get private credit with high interest rates and fees for all kinds of reasons, eating into their yearly budgets to the tune of 8-10% every year.
The MLF showed us it doesn’t have to be that way. And in the debates resulting from these programs, we saw the Build Back Better legislation emerge in Congress, part of which was Jamaal Bowman’s massive and amazing Green New Deal for Schools, which provided a trillion dollars of grants for social and physical school infrastructure. Total game changer. The legislation got more signatures than any piece of BBB legislation, a crown jewel of the progressive caucus’s brief experiment with exerting power during the first two years of Biden’s presidency when he had a trifecta.
The GND didn’t make it into the BBB, and the BBB didn’t make it into the budget reconciliation, but—influenced by the pandemic portal and the MLF, influenced others—and we ended up getting the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure bill. The former has elements of that transformative political economy of public education in its direct pay tax credit and greenhouse gas reduction fund, as well as other reimbursement programs for decarbonizing infrastructure that school districts can take advantage of.
We still have those programs and they’re certainly on the ticket right now. And there’s a big debate about the significance of what’s called Bidenomics. These specific programs have been critiqued on the left for being not-populist enough, too technocratic, mere derisking, and, recently, for being part of a larger imperial military project, a new Great Power politic, rather than some kind of post-neoliberal generosity. In any case, it’s a new paradigm for school finance and when it comes to schools it’s positive from my point of view. And I think Harris would keep them but Trump would cut them.
In any case, that pandemic portal opened up space for this new, post-neoliberal political economy of public education, the residue of which we benefit from today: there are hundreds of public schools starting to take advantage of the IRA programs and decarbonize their schools.
How are changes in culture and policy (e.g., end of affirmative action; bans on critical race theory and other uncomfortable histories) changing teaching practices?
I think our culture and its policy changes, at this moment, in education and elsewhere, are part of a larger decline in the US empire, and this is directly impacting teaching practices. I think, to some degree, education is what Martin Carnoy called a mediator between tendencies in political economy. It tries to smooth things over. I was a peer mediator in middle school, education works like that in society: the forces of politics and economy come into the school, and they’re having fights in various ways, and education is trying to accommodate, calm things down, which sometimes works and sometime’s doesn’t.
Structure forces go to education to solve the various contradictions wreaking havoc in the wake of September 11th, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2008 financial crisis and its botched recovery, the intensification of police violence in communities of color, increasing impacts of climate catastrophe, the election of Trump and the conservative judiciary he brought with him, along with the delegitimizing of government and giving energies to the power of despair, disappointment, the pandemic response, the post-pandemic recovery, etc.
The instability of the social formation as a whole then comes to bear on the school, which tries to accommodate the various ideologies at play by putting certain policies in place or undoing other policies (book bans, laptop programs, doing DEI, undoing DEI, adopting ceasefire resolutions, firing teachers who talk about Palestine, etc). But right now there’s very little room to breath, metaphorically, in terms of what teachers need to watch out for in terms of talking about gender, sex, race, Palestine, etc. and the backlash that can happen by posting something on instagram or making a side comment during a history lesson or supporting a child’s mural painting that happens to have trans flag colors, as well as the ever-present fear of school shootings—what teachers have to do now, to worry about and attempt to account for in their daily lives, they’re training at firing ranges, wearing bullet proof vests, having to learn to use whiteboards that turn into bullet proof barriers, in existential. I saw a tiktok where a teacher was trying to teach, but pronouncing every word looking over her shoulder, hoping it’s not interpreted in some way that would elicit complaint or firing.
I actually think school shootings are a kind of summative phenomenon here, a synedoche of the whole problem: the empire in decline and its repercussions in education, and the business end of the guns are pointed right at teachers and students in the schools as the empire falls. It’s like the school shooters, these young white males, are aware somehow unconsciously that schools are the places where society goes to reproduce itself, that schools represent the future of the society, and that the society has so drastically failed, that the society doesn’t have a future, or shouldn’t have a future, and find this deep material thread of settler violence in this country’s gun compulsion and train that compulsion on the society’s institutions that try to maintain its continuity: they go and shoot up the school, destroying the future in the most Americanly violent way possible. In them, the dying white supremacist patriarchal colonial capitalist American empire has generated its own recursive, destructive process on itself, its own stochastic counter-insurgency within its own borders from the ranks of its own white male children against every child and teacher (who are mostly women), against the empire’s own social reproduction.
The ways this impacts teaching practices are many: active shooter drills, training on equipment that will block bullets in the classroom, learning how to create a tourniquet out of fabric to stop the bleeding of a student that’s been shot. They’ve even kept cat litter in the kindergarten students’ closets to give kids a place to go to the bathroom if there’s an active shooter and they can’t leave the closet. In a kind of dystopian ideological swirling, right wingers then brought up this cat litter issue as a transphobic dog whistle, saying that teachers were letting students identify as cats rather than boys or girls.
Teachers are suffocating with all this.
Incidentally, this suffocation of the teacher is also literally happening as heat waves, storm surges, blizzards and dropping temperatures occur within and against dilapidated school infrastructure in the climate collapse. Meanwhile, in the wake of the austerity of the post-2008 period, one of the enticing features of being a public school teacher—getting a public pension—is eroding significantly for new teachers. Some teachers can’t get vested for more than ten years, and meanwhile states give them the option for a 401k or 503b which is just so much worse, a breakdown of material solidarity, a refusal to take on the social risk of aging, related actually to the school shooter, who threatens natality, but rather than the beginning of life, this declining to care for the elder teacher happens at the end of life, bringing about a more difficult orientation towards fatality.