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...
Occupy, Education, and Me
In May 2010, I was sitting in my apartment in the Floresta neighborhood of Quito, Ecuador and I was angry. I'd just seen James Cameron's Avatar in a theater...
Education in the Wake of the War
[CW: war stuff] I was in my high school's band room on September 11, 2001. It was 8:30am and we were all waiting to go to class, like normal. Then the band...
Ventilation and Structural Ignorance
I started teaching last Monday. My university has a mask mandate but no vaccine mandate. They've been doing pretty well in the pandemic, both in terms of...
School Funding Basics: A Left Perspective
On August 21, the Buxmont Democratic Socialists of America invited me to give a short presentation on school funding for their lunch debt campaign. They're...
Socialism and School Infrastructure Finance
I've been getting more involved with a campaign you should know about: the Democratic Socialists of America's Green New Deal for Schools campaign, put...
The Deal with the Infrastructure Deal
Electric school buses. Broadband access for all schools. Money to fix water systems in school buildings. And theater of the oppressor. All these can be found...
Accumulating Through Dispossession: The Case of Tax Increment Financing
A student recently asked me something interesting. Did tax increment financing impact her school in northwest Philadelphia? We did some sleuthing and learned...
A Value-Added Tax for Schools
There was a brief moment when school funding in the US could've gotten better. It was the early 1970s. After decades of court cases challenging Brown v....
Notes on CRT and Antiracist Socialism: The Terrain
What’s a socialist to do about the rightwing craziness around critical race theory? One thing to consider is the terrain of this situation. Antonio Gramsci...
The Thing About 'STEM'
When I was young, I got the impression very early that I should go into science and be good at math. It's actually one of my earlier memories: if I could be...
Peru's New President is a Socialist Teacher
You might have seen huge pencils in your feed recently. Or heard about the big hats. They're symbols of Peru's president-elect Pedro Castillo, a left...