Spinning plates
There’s too much going on. Beyond the massive shifts happening sort of everywhere, I’ve also got my eye on some other vectors that are under the radar, so this week I’m sending a long a curated list of issues with links for further reading across education finance, in no particular order.
—A guy named M. David Barker (strangely close to my name) is a school facilities finance fraudster in West Virginia. “Court documents show that from around November 2019 through December 2023, Barker conspired with Jesse Marks, owner of Rush Enterprises, to overbill the Boone County Board of Education for supplies such as hand soap, trash can liners, face masks, face shields, and hand sanitizer. The court says this scheme involved Barker approving invoices on Rush Enterprises’ behalf that “significantly inflated the number of products that were actually delivered to Boone County Schools.”
—A story I’m following closely is whether the new reactionary EPA can claw back money allocated for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the green bank capitalization program from the Inflation Reduction Act. If so, one of the most promising aspects of the IRA can be undone. A lawsuit was brought by the big players in US green banking: Climate United, Coalition for Green Capital, and PFC. “EPA’s termination of each Plaintiff’s grant is ‘arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law’ under the APA in several respects,” counsel for Climate United, CGC and PFC wrote in their motion for a preliminary injunction. “EPA violated Plaintiffs’ right to due process by freezing and then terminating Plaintiffs’ grant funds without notice or an opportunity to be heard.” The most recent reporting I can see is that Tanya Chutkan, a district judge, put in place a temporary restraining order until 4/15, last week, to determine how to proceed. Judge decided to unfreeze the funds last Wednesday, then an appeals court refroze them again for the EPA to look at them.
—Another story I’m following is whether the IRS’s adopted rules for elective pay tax credits under the IRA are in place, being administered, etc. I can’t find any news about this specific program, but it looks like the IRS is losing 20,000 workers, which hobbles its ability to do anything, including process these arcane tax credits for school districts looking to take advantage of reimbursements for green infrastructure. Back in March, the continuing budget resolution did a rescission of IRA money to the IRS to the tune of $20 billion too. So I have to imagine everything’s on pause, including the greening of schools, even if technically the rules are in place and enforceable. They’re just not being enforced because of the auto-coop.
—The nascent National Center for School Infrastructure sent out its first newsletter recently. Sign up for it here.
—Elite universities are pushing back against Trump, which is good. Maybe more interesting, Charlie Eaton notes, is that this resistance is most likely supported by Wall Street power brokers who sit on these institution’s boards of trustees.
—In a reversal, spouses will be included in income-driven repayment plans according to the new Education Department, but not spousal income, whatever that means.
—Right wing shake ups at the University of Virginia, where Glenn Youngkin removed one weirdo from the Board of Trustees, Bert Ellis, and put another weirdo, Ken Cuccineli in his place. Ellis was up to all kinds of hijinks with UVA’s capital programs.
—In a similar vein, Ron DeSantis is trying to appoint natcon Idaho political scientist Scott Yenor to the Board of Trustees of University of Western Florida, but even right wing politicians are asking him not to. Yenor went viral in 2021 for a talk he gave at a conference about how American women shouldn’t go to college and should have more babies instead, a growing position on the right.
—Jennifer Berkshire has been publishing bangers, including a great newsletter “connecting the dots” on the right wing’s larger educational vision, which includes the above point about girls and women not going to school (very Taliban!), but also going into a bunch of other channels of interest: child labor, for instance. Worth a read. (And another one on the tariffs.)
—”Success sequence” bills are passing through state legislatures in red states. The solution for poverty, these bills say, is to make three choices: graduate from high school, get a full time job, wait for marriage to have kids. Notably, this doesn’t involve going to college.
—In the rare category of “Hopeful News in Higher Education,” multiple university faculty senate and unions voted to create a Mutual Academic Defense Compact in the Big Ten conference, which would include a mutual defense fund where universities band together to support one another in the onslaught from the new fascism. Here’s the resolution.Since the original resolution passed, four more faculty senates in Nebraska, Indiana, and Massachusetts have passed similar resolutions. Other universities are doing things to stand up to the Trump administration, even now the elite ones that looked like they’d just cave.
—Speaking of the new fascism, I can’t help but think in world-historical terms about the tariffs that dropped, and are currently roiling global capitalism. If you’ll allow me a grand speculation, it’s a kind of Great Undoing, on the model of Polanyi’s Great Transformation, indicating a riven global ruling class, a war of maneuver within global capital itself. I have to think that a left analysis isn’t just “this all sucks!” Actually, Trump et al are “clobbering the stockholding class” as Joe Wiesenthal says, interested in bringing manufacturing back to the US, which the unions support, and leftists have been critiquing globalization sine the WTO protests in Seattle—a world system they’re dismantling…The stock market seesaws back and forth with every dopey move cast retroactively as genius, while the bond market calls the shots. The US ten year treasury yield is moving up, which means demand for it is lower. There’s a “Sell America” movement in markets, marking increased uncertainty in what was once the hegemon. For a recent interesting read on the situation, look at Adam Tooze’s review of Malcolm Harris’s new book, “What’s Left.”
—This seesaw is hitting pensions big time, including this reporting on Chicago’s pension funds. Looks like libertarian anti-solidarity think tank Equable is going hard on the Chicago situation.
—Meanwhile, the tariffs will certainly cost public education millions if not billions of dollars.
—Speaking of losses, EduProgress has a helpful set of reports projecting how much each state will lose in the right wing’s gutting of the federal department of education. It’s bad folks.
—Teenagers 16-17 years old will vote in Newark’s school board election for the first time.
—I’m keeping my eye on the Republicans’ attempts to get a budget reconciliation package through. It’s weird. They released an initial framework, which calls for up to $1 billion of cuts to education and related initiatives on the senate side and $300 million on the House side (these are different committees). But they want to raise the debt ceiling. Nothing about vouchers, income tax, or tax exemption of municipal bonds in the document that I can see.
—One way to interpret the tariff fiasco is that Trump wants to get rid of the income tax, which, if he did, would certainly get rid of the tax exemption for muni bonds. I imagine the bondholder class will fight tooth and nail to protect this exemption, which would certainly be better, in the short term, for school districts—though perhaps the accelerationist in me is hoping the bandaid will be ripped off. When a representative from Arkansas who’s the chair of the finance committee in the house is rooting for something, you kinda don’t want to root for it too.
—Speaking of reconciliation, there’s a fun back and forth between Republicans the Senate parliamentarian about whether they can use an accounting mirage/sleight of hand called “current policy baseline” to make it look like their tax cuts won’t have any impact on revenues viz. spending. The right gets to do creative finance stuff, why can’t we?
—A transphobic school leader in Anchorage, Alaska is losing.
—The Knight Institute files a lawsuit suing tech companies for massive surveillance through computers-in-schools programs.
—Office space vacancy is up 20.4%, the lowest point in recorded history. I’m imagining this’ll be bad for local tax revenues in school districts across the country.
—The Trump administration wants to move student loan servicing to the Small Business Administration, which they’ve gutted, and there’s question marks. (I’ve seen videos about how you can use this uncertainty to hack your loan payments, but I can’t find a good source.)
—I’m interested also in the lawsuits against the administration’s firing of department of education people, one of them brought by the NEA.
—Jewish students at Columbia chained themselves to the front gates of the university demanding to know which one of the Board of Trustees gave ICE information about kidnapped student Mahmoud Khalil, as Khalil’s wife is about to give birth. (Here’s a helpful thread listing all the ICE actions against students, including revocation of visa.)
—A lawyer representing a student protestor from University of Minnesota was detained and told his story here.
—I’m cooking up a new series analyzing the school finance regime in New York City. Right now, my angle is to try and do a “green fiscal mutualism analysis” of schools and money in the city, tracking debt flows, teacher pensions, and infrastructural networks. If you have any sources for me please send them along!