Stewards of students and capital
I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I’d appear on the education podcast Have You Heard. The episode came out last Wednesday and you can listen to it here. It’s a great portrait of me and what I’ve been up to.
I’ve also had a few other things come out recently. The Conversation, a venue that popularizes academic research, asked me to write a summary of my paper with Camika Royal on toxic finance and Philadelphia’s school buildings. I got an angry email from a finance guy about it, which I think means it worked.
The Debt Collective put out a recording of the workshop we did on school district Cliffs and Crises, where I talk about how to do this critical school finance work on the organizing front.
Finally, I was quoted in a couple great pieces of journalism recently. Nora de la Cour wrote in Jacobin about K-12 school budget struggles and featured a quote of me, and Chris Lehmann at The Nation asked for my perspective on Josh Shapiro’s strangely rightwing waffling on school vouchers and Gaza.
Now to this week’s post!
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A reader recently asked me to elaborate on a premise I’ve written about a couple times: the extent to which school district officials (like superintendents) represent capital in the struggle between labor and capital. It’s a great question and I thought I’d send along my response here, which I’ve edited and expanded.
I wanted to start with a scene from one of my favorite education policy movies, Bad Education. I highly recommend it if you haven’t seen it. It’s about a very extreme case of school district corruption but it paints an excellent portrait of American school districts’ political economy.
Ray Romano plays the president of the school board. In one scene, the board finds out that the chief financial officer played by Allison Janney has embezzled more than $200,000 from the district for her own personal use. In a crisis meeting of the board, right before they’re about to call the police, the superintendent, played by Hugh Jackman, demands that they put the phone down.
“Think of the impact an investigation would have,” he warns, “we’d see police, FBI, the IRS. It’d be reported in the papers. The next time our budget comes up for a vote, what till the taxpayers say? And if our reputation gets hurt, think about what happens to property values.” Romano puts the phone down, the board looks at each other muttering “property values.”
Throughout the film, the school district is revealed as a key contributor to the real estate market and subject to the power of private property owners. The district officials are caught in a nexus of forces, stewards of educating young people but also stewards of real estate values; what they do contributes and is subject to this potent kind of capital.
I like the film and this anecdote specifically because I think it illustrates how school district officials have to toe a line set by capital and, given their authority, can tend to become (though by no means must be) representatives of or servants to capital, specifically the local ruling class and bourgeoisie.
Their district budgets depend on revenues brought in from taxing assessed property values and their success in educating young people comes to bear on the fluctuations of those values (good schools mean valuable homes and vice versa). They’re subject to votes and elections and pressure from the local ruling class and, I’d say, due to their authority, are part of that class, if in a supporting way.
So when it comes to teacher labor, I think it’s clear that district officials, with whom teacher unions negotiate for their contracts, are on the capital side of the situation. They tend to hew to the tax base, fueled and led by that local ruling class to whom they’re accountable but of which they’re sort of members.
I’m thinking of one way you could disagree with this assessment. Louis Althusser wrote that there are two kinds of workers in the working class: toilers and goons. The toilers do the grunt work, have their hands on the machines and work the shop floors and are generally digging and fighting in the trenches of production (to use a war analogy). The goons are bossing those toilers around, getting them to meet production goals, making sure they follow rules and then punishing the toilers if they step out of line.
You might argue that school districts officials are actually working class, not part of capital or the ruling class, because they’re the goons of educational labor. They keep teachers and staff and students all in line, compliant, and make sure schooling happens efficiently, effectively, equitably, etc.
There’s a bunch of theory stuff I could go into so I’ll spare you (if you’re interested I can write more), but one neat concept from Marxian state theory is that the state is a condensation of class relations. I think the district is a hyper local part of the state, it’s a local government, and it’s a condensation of antagonistic class relations between the diverse working class and the big and small bourgeoisie within its boundaries.
To the extent that district officials are in charge of the district, I think they’d be on the bourgeois side structurally. I say structurally because it wouldn’t matter what the intentions or background or ideology might be of any given official, the way society is laid out would tend to put them in that situation, just like the officials in the movie example.
Of course it’s possible to push against that arrangement, and I obviously believe it’s crucial that officials understand this reality (which is why I like my job) but it’d be very difficult to change and is generally the goal of my newsletter to figure out what that can look like.