Spider in the web
I'm a member of the Education Justice Committee of Philadelphia DSA, a group of parents, teachers, former teachers, and policy nerds. We've been active participants in the Our City Our Schools coalition in the city, a big-tent group of organizations that is a powerful force. Part of our committee work is supporting the coalition's ongoing fight around school facilities in the School District of Philadelphia. I'm going to take this opportunity to brag a little. We recently did operational and logistical work with Parents Home and School Coalition to put on an Environmental Art Show outside City Hall (we secured easels and helped with set up/take down, eg). We're helping put together a Green New Deal for Schools platform for Paul Prescod's primary campaign. We're organizing parents, students, and teachers to measure carbon dioxide in classrooms to reveal the depth of the school infrastructure problem. We're doing advocacy around facilities-related policy issues like lead in school water, oversight of school facilities, and the ways school funding ties with the nascent Philadelphia Public Bank. We also organize watch parties for school board meetings on Twitch, helping members write and then give testimony. We've had open meetings featuring local parents' research on Penn's relationship with elementary schools, as well as a socialist watch party for the sitcom Abbott Elementary. I'm so proud of our group.
I can't emphasize enough how important it is to join an organizing group. I don't think you can properly understand issues and work to change them if you're not actively going to meetings, helping with campaigns, and "doing the work." I'd say you should join a nearby DSA chapter or start one in your area. But there are a ton of other groups to DSA's left and right that do good work--find one and join!
In praise of reading groups
One thing I like about organizing is reading groups. While they can sometimes feel small, niche, and esoteric the themes that come up when learning new concepts and arguments, particularly as they apply to terrains of organizing, can make a big difference. A new perspective on a tiny idea can have big implications for strategy, tactics, and solidarity. This challenge to deep ideas among people in the struggle is a key part of political education. I had an experience recently in a small reading group in the Democratic Socialists of America that is having that kind of impact on me.
One of our committee's goals is to think about and advance socialist analysis of education injustice in Philadelphia. In our campaign work we try to be clear about what a socialist would say and do about particular education issues. Part of my work with the committee is research: getting to know the ins and outs of the terrain to think through what's happening as we organize. As an academic I have time and resources to devote to studying the complicated, wonky, and obscure features of apparatuses in our terrain, but also put together ideological positions on these that could lend themselves to organizing. So I was super excited when historian Destin Jenkins published his much anticipated book The Bonds of Inequality.
The book is a racial capitalist historical analysis of municipal debt in San Francisco from the 1930s to the 1970s. There haven't been any researchers who look at municipal finance through this lens so I thought it'd be a great opportunity to do some studying in our committee (check out this great episode of The Dig where Astra Taylor interviews Jenkins about the book). We started a reading group around the book in January and we've been reading a chapter a month. We're about halfway through. At our most recent meeting a debate came up applying some of the book's insights to Philadelphia school building finance that has got my mind spinning.
Spider webs without spiders
We were on chapter four of Bonds, which focuses on housing, but the debate was sparked by Jenkins' claim there that "most historians who note the ways in which urban renewal displaced scores of African Americans fail to explain why it happened... At best they hint at some connection to markets. The imperatives of the bond market helped to make middle-and upper-income housing in San Francisco racially exclusionary." He also says explanations for certain urban realities of segregation that rely on racism can be "an anemic way of directing attention towards unidentifiable actors and away from real estate agents, banks, and homeowners; a lame telling of opening and closings, without identifying who closed what doors and how; spider webs without spiders."
In the Introduction, Jenkins says that he's providing an alternative way of thinking about how social processes have happened in cities. Instead of relying on metanarratives like neoliberalism or deindustrialization, he uses municipal debt--his spider in the web. To be clear, this is very provocative! Rather than using big concepts like neoliberalism, deindustrialization, or even racism, Jenkins (if I'm understanding him) is saying that racial capitalist analysis means looking into the nitty-gritty apparatus of like muni finance. We can't rely on big picture stories that talk only about webs without properly pointing to the spiders in those webs.
Again, if I'm not misreading, he's saying big concepts like neoliberalism can be anemic, and lead to "lame retellings of openings and closings." This line in particular got us into a heated debate about how to understand and explain school closings in Philadelphia.
Lame retellings of school openings and closings?
In 2012-2013, the School District of Philadelphia closed a significant number of schools. In 2012 they closed six. In 2013 they closed 24, totaling 30 schools closed in one year. There has been lots of research, analysis, and organizing around this seismic injustice. Recently, two histories by Camika Royal and Erika Kitzmiller take up these events as part of larger inquires. I still have to study these (future reading groups?).
I'll share one study I know well. My former student Cristina Utti wrote an ethnography of her own experience as a teacher in one of the schools that took in students from shuttered buildings, a receiving building. Her story is vivid and instructive. When a district closes schools, those students have to go somewhere. They usually go to nearby schools and tensions emerge from the influx. Students from the various schools had been fighting more and the lock on Dr. Utti's door needed fixing. Due to facilities slowdowns, it still wasn't fixed when students from the hallway--not her kids--came into her room in the middle of class and started a fight. She couldn't lock her door to stop them from coming in.
Trying to stop the fight, a student pushed Utti. She fell and broke her neck, putting her in the hospital for months. She left the district in dismay. Her dissertation reconstructs the school closings' impact on people in her network at the time: teachers, principals, and students. She talks about the themes of death, depression, uncertainty, race, class, neoliberalism and dislocation caused by the closures.
Indeed, many of the themes in Utti's research (and others I've seen) rely on the metanarratives against which Jenkins is pushing. Neoliberalism and racism, for instance. The racism explanation says that school closings happen because of racist policies, practices, and actions. Kitzmiller and Julie McWilliams offer a one such (great) account of the slow violence of racism in Philly school closings in Teachers College Record, for example. The neoliberalism explanation is similarly ready-to-hand. Probably the best work on this is Pauline Lipman's study of Chicago. She argues that school closures, brought about by privatizing/marketizing neoliberal urban policy, constituted dispossession by accumulation (which I've written about here).
To me it seems like Jenkins' intervention is to say: wait a minute, these explanations relying on the racism and neoliberalism metanarratives miss the influence of municipal finance, which helps to structure the whole situation. And that intervention isn't necessarily wrong in the Philly case. At least one could argue, if we follow Jenkins, that municipal finance is one if not the spider in the web here.
In the early 2000s, financial advisors convinced school districts to use complex financial instruments like swaps for financing capital expenditures. Philly went in for these too. When the market crashed in 2008, the district lost $331 million. This loss impacted capital expenditures for school buildings. According to the district's own numbers, there was a staggering 12x decrease in capital expenditure between 2008 and 2014, from $374m to $31m. Tom Sgouros suggests in his work on predatory municipal finance that this loss led to the closing of the 30 schools in Philyly.
So how do we explain the school closures that followed? And what implications does that have for organizing? If we explain the closings with neoliberalism (school leaders were neoliberals, eg) does that mean a de-emphasizing of municipal finance as a cause and thus a target? More simply (and possibly reductively), what should we focus on more viz. the school closures: beliefs, ideologies, and ideas in the heads of school leaders or the market structure of school financing?
For socialists in the Marxist tradition, this brings up questions of materialism and base/superstructure too. What's the more materialist explanation for the school closures--that the school leaders had certain beliefs or that municipal credit markets tanked and didn't recover in the wake of the 2008 crisis, reverberating through large urban districts who were already scrambling for money? Could Hite and others have closed those schools if there were a National Investment Authority from which the district could get big, public, no-cost, long-term loans for its facilities rather than racial capitalist municipal bonds? Could they have closed the schools if the federal government provided local school money through a value-added tax? Or if there was a tax base-sharing program in the Philadelphia region? Would Utti have had a working lock on her door? Would there have been fewer tensions in her building?
The argument seems compelling to me, but long-time teacher and public school advocate (and erstwhile reader of this newsletter!) Lisa Haver disagreed. She said and maintains that the school closings weren't a financial issue, but rather that Hite and other neoliberals wanted to close public schools and open more charters. On the ground, this was what happened she said. It wasn't the money. She cites other cities who closed schools as well, like Chicago (though Chicago has its own toxic swap story as Amanda Kass and colleagues tell). We debated the question for some time and I don't think a clear middle ground emerged. Which is the lame retelling of the opening and closing, the one that focuses on racist neoliberal ideology or the one that focuses on racial capitalist market structure?
Who to yell at
Obviously there's no either/or here: racism, neoliberalism, and municipal finance are all part of the story. But it is interesting and provocative to ask which of these explanations is the best one--and then think about how that changes movement demands on the ground. In the reading group, we characterized the stakes this way: depending on which position you take, you will want to yell at different people.
If you take the metanarrative/ideology position then you may want to focus on holding school leaders accountable at the district level. If you take the materialist/racial capitalist analysis from Jenkins, you may want to focus more on the municipal bond market and state/federal government programs that could provide districts revenue. The question actually comes back to the revenue/accountability question I've written about before. While I think socialists should demand both revenue and accountability in school funding fights, Jenkins's work presents organizers with a situation where we can't have both.