Weak link policies
If you didn’t see it already, sign up for this Back to School Finance Workshop that’s happening this week! I’ll be co-leading a training on how to start looking for what I call "weak link policies” below.
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My friend, colleague, and comrade Dana Morrison at West Chester University co-edited a special issue of the journal Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor. The theme of the issue is “Teachers’ Work in Contentious Times,” which is super timely.
I have an article in that special issue that I’m sending along this week.
The material comes from notes I developed in this newsletter and elsewhere, and builds out an idea I’ve been thinking about for awhile: there are policies that, when you push on them, they make the entire structure of a situation shake, like one of those precarious pieces in a Jenga game.
I use that concept to talk through school district situations in North Carolina, Michigan, and Massachusetts that I’ve observed over the last couple years.
Below is the abstract for the paper, and here is the link for a free download since the journal is in the creative commons.
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Underneath the culture war headlines so familiar to educators in the United States in the 2020s is a more complex class war over the material conditions of schooling. As the post-pandemic economy settled in, a wave of budget crises erupted in school districts, leading to closures, mass firings, and program cuts. Teachers have had to work under these conditions, with the constant threat of loss of livelihood, yet the threat can feel opaque: the public finance policies determining the struggle are often hard to understand, even for the district officials tasked with making the decisions which could potentially shutter a school, throw whole departments out of work, or put much needed programs on the chopping block. The same is perhaps more true for teachers. Faced with one of the most significant challenges to public education in generations, it thus became more important for teachers to know about policies at the heart of budget crises in their districts to be able to push back, defend, and expand public education in the United States. In this chapter, I give three examples (from Michigan, North Carolina, and Massachusetts) of what I call weak link policies, esoteric load-bearing policies in the struggle over school resources. These policies, while hard to understand, massively influenced teachers’ working conditions in these districts. While demands to change these policies could mean the difference between large-scale firings or retaining staff, closing a school or keeping it open, the policies were not widely understood in such a way as to organize successfully around them. Using a framework of critical school finance and integrated social reproduction theory, I argue that teachers and allied movements must surface and reframe such policies to fight wonky in the class struggle over educational resources.