Cryptobonds!
A Trump tweet inspired blockchain-based mini muni bonds. This sentence isn't something I ever thought I'd find myself writing, but here we are. Apparently,...
Twitter, school finance ideology, and racial capitalism
Twitter is an interesting place. There's a lot that toxic about it, but when it comes to intellectual debates and the life of ideas there's nothing like it....
Open dystopia
As I'm writing this post, there's a stormy debate about whether keep schools open in the omicron surge. By the time this post goes out, there may have been...
Unearned and uncollected
Libertarians can be funny sometimes. A piece from the Commonwealth Foundation, a Koch-funded think tank focusing on Pennsylvania policy, opens with a riff on...
Ode to Saule
It sounded like a 1950s red scare moment, but it happened in November 2021. Republican Senator John Kennedy, in a southern twang, told a Biden nominee during...
Extended Testimony to the Children and Youth and Finance Committees
On 12/15, I testified before the Children and Youth and Finance Committees in Philadelphia's City Council. The hearing, focusing on how to fund a school...
Land of the fee
In 2011, the city of West Haven, Connecticut issued a school bond for $45 million. At the time, a couple years out from the great financial crisis, the...
The dialectic of school board elections
Organizers in Philadelphia have been exploring if/how to make the city's Board of Education an elected body. Right now, the BOE members are appointed by the...
A Green Freedom Budget for Schools
When Nikil Saval ran for state senate in Pennsylvania, I was part of an amazing team of researchers working on the campaign's platform. It was fun and...
How to privatize public school buildings
In response to a previous post about the socialist position on school bonds, reader Jennifer Kates made an interesting comment. I've been critiquing...
Fast 4 Interest Rates
In May 2004, 50 education activists including students, teachers, and parents marched 70 miles from San Pablo, CA to Sacramento. They wanted justice for...
Game of Superintendents: The Mayor's Office of Education
The weird thing about school districts is that they're their own governments. They're not departments or offices in local governments, like they are at at...
The Socialist Position on School Bonds
I chatted with an organizer in the Democratic Socialists of America's Austin chapter recently about a new school bond in that district. That conversation, as...
Compliance!
Generally speaking, I think socialist strategy around school finance should be revenue + accountability. Poor districts need provisions but they need to...
Notes on CRT and Antiracist Socialism: Ideas for Organizing
I wrote about the terrain of CRT for antiracist socialists awhile ago. But what should we think about CRT itself? The Black Agenda Report published an...
Anatomy of a New School District Bond
A couple week ago, some organizers were surprised to see a Philadelphia Board of Education 'special action meeting' pop up on the Board's facebook page. The...
New Bond Issuance and the Problem of Capacity
I've heard through the grapevine that progressives in the city might be interested in campaigning for a big bond issuance to fix up Philadelphia's schools....
Infrastructure Leadership Confusion
A couple weeks ago I woke up at 4am and couldn't get back to sleep. I decided to use that weird time to follow up on a question I'd been wondering about: who...
Chinese Communism Takes on the Tutoring Industry
The first tutoring I remember was Kumon, the Japanese company. My parents would take me to a basement storefront in a strip mall and the tutors gave me timed...
Strategy = Revenue + Accountability (Special Friday Edition!)
Let's say your school buildings need fixing up. Let's also say this problem has been the case for decades and there's a machine-like city government, a...