Archive (Page 14) • Schooling in Socialist America • Buttondown

Yonkers' Bad Neighbors

March 25, 2021

I mentioned before that I was going to focus on a school district I know very little about. That school district is the Yonkers City School District. I’m...

Yonkers City Council took out loans to pay for kids' textbooks, gave millions to corrupt firm

March 22, 2021

Yonkers School District is taking out a loan for textbooks. The district was facing a $22 million hole left by the pandemic and its economic crisis. Yonkers...

Green School Stimmy

March 18, 2021

This week something really exciting happened. Jamaal Bowman announced support for a Green New Deal for Schools initiative, focusing on infrastructure and...

How to understand school districts and capitalism

March 15, 2021

If I want to get to know a school district’s relationship to capitalism, specifically its funding structure and apparatuses, there are a few places I’ve...

Talking points for no-cost loans

March 11, 2021

I’ve been organizing with the Action Center on Race and the Economy and Lilac to demand no-cost loans for local governments from the Federal Reserve. (Sign...

A school bond that was actually a bond

March 9, 2021

I’m feeling lucky. A couple posts ago I wrote about how Black civil rights organizers Ann Atwater and Bill Riddick turned KKK leader C. P. Ellis from Exalted...

Cancel Wall Street and Fund Our Schools!

March 4, 2021

Online event on March 11, 4:30pm. Register here. Facebook event page. If you’ve been following this newsletter, you know I do a lot of writing and thinking...

What happened with bond yields last week

March 2, 2021

Something happened last Thursday. A little line on a little graph went up a little more than people thought it would and capitalists held their breath. A...

A Klansman joins the struggle

February 28, 2021

One of the biggest questions on the left is unity in difference. How do you collaborate and struggle together when there are so many things keeping people...

Getting swappy

February 23, 2021

File this one under Things You Probably Didn’t Know School Districts Do Under Capitalism. It turns out two school districts in Pennsylvania lost millions of...

Fragments of Frank Moretti

February 20, 2021

I advise doctoral students and one student this year is doing a project on surveillance capitalism and education technology. I told him he should look up...

Just Breathe?

February 15, 2021

The debate around reopening schools in the pandemic is about a lot of things: getting back to ‘normal’, having adults get back to work, not letting students...

The Fed and the School

February 11, 2021

Yesterday, Jerome Powell gave a big speech about the Federal Reserve’s approach to monetary policy at this moment. Everyone was watching. People wanted to...

School districts are the cell structure of racial capitalism

February 8, 2021

I’ve been going around saying this for awhile now, but it’s time to write out why I think it’s true: school districts are the cell structure of racial...

Introduction to tax-base sharing

February 4, 2021

Whenever someone asks me what we should do about school funding inequality, I mention tax-base sharing, the regional system set up in the Twin Cities in 1971...

School funding as socialist planning?

February 1, 2021

I finally got a chance to read Aaron Benanav’s recent essay in Logic about socialist planning. I’ve been a fan of Aaron’s since I first heard him talk about...

Fun with apparatuses

January 29, 2021

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf put out his 2021 agenda yesterday. The third point from the top is “Invest in Public Infrastructure, Including School Buildings.”...

Two FEMAnds

January 27, 2021

After writing about the Biden administration’s new policy that school districts can use FEMA funds for safely reopening, I found out that Philadelphia is...

Are you my FEMA?

January 24, 2021

In the flurry of executive orders coming out of the Biden administration, it looks like schools can get Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) monies for...

Title Onedering

January 20, 2021

During the Democratic presidential primary, I noticed something weird. Bernie Sanders was obviously the leftist candidate, Biden the moderate, and Warren...