Archive (Page 17) • Schooling in Socialist America • Buttondown

Rural and Urban School Districts Fighting Together

September 28, 2020

Part of the MLF strategy is putting together a coalition of urban and rural school districts to demand better terms. The urban-rural divide is one of the...

When Daddy and Mommy Fight

September 23, 2020

The Congressional Oversight Committee met on September 17th. The topic of discussion: the Fed’s Municipal Liquidity Facility. As readers of this space know,...

Budgetary Learned Helplessness

September 18, 2020

I usually write about K-12 schooling but an interesting thing happened this last week in higher education. The thing happened to me, and the story is helpful...

Did Philly Just Get Hosed?

September 14, 2020

On September 1, the city of Philadelphia sold a bond worth $300m. Underwritten by Wells Fargo, the interest rate was 4%.You read that correctly. 4%. The city...

Response to Richard Hudson-Miles

September 2, 2020

My current project is looking at school funding from a socialist perspective. Before that project I wanted to figure out what ‘socialist perspective’ means...

Illinois and the MTA

August 25, 2020

The Municipal Lending Facility has accepted two applications: the State of Illinois and New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. I’ve been examining...

The Green MLF Strategy

August 20, 2020

The MLF strategy calls for urban and rural school districts to apply for the Federal Reserve’s Municipal Liquidity Facility loans. Poor districts should take...

Organizing the MLF Strategy

August 12, 2020

This is Part 4 of a series on school funding in the covid crisis. Part 1 is an overview of a policy proposal for the School District of Philadelphia to take...

Are School Districts Eligible Issuers for the MLF?

August 8, 2020

Oh boy.After a conversation with a policy analyst, a super important point came up that I’d completely missed: can a school district even be eligible to...

An MLF Loan for a School District: The Details

August 6, 2020

On Monday I laid out a policy proposal for school funding in the covid crisis. School districts, urban and rural, should apply to the MLF for loans. In...

School Funding in the Covid Crisis

August 3, 2020

[I’ll be discussing these ideas at an upcoming event if you’re interested in joining!]Things are bad. Really bad. It’s truly a crisis in the sense that this...

New directions: school finance

July 28, 2020

When the pandemic started my partner was eight months pregnant. I needed something to distract myself from the anxiety of having a child in a crisis. I’d...

Is there a train-wreck coming?

June 29, 2020

Scared there's a train wreck coming. I think society's basically got two parts: a state and an economy. They're inter-related. The economy is how we make our...

On the fireworks

June 24, 2020

Every night, or even in the afternoon and mid-day, we hear explosions. The explosions are sometimes a singular big boom. Other times there are multiple booms...

Big picture update

June 18, 2020

I haven’t done a finance update in a bit, but I got a chance to listen to my favorite econ podcast while changing Thisbe — have to stand and leave her on the...

Two rallies

June 10, 2020

Thinking about the word 'rally' this week. On the one hand, there have been historic marches and rallies (and successful direct actions) on police brutality...

Two demands in real estate

May 25, 2020

A communist graffiti artist is on an amazing rampage in our neighborhood. Here’s a building project happening around the corner from us that I took on a...

The US is not a failed state

May 11, 2020

Apologies for the lateness of this post. My partner gave birth last Thursday to a tiny human named Thisbe Gilbert Ronen-Backer, and I’ve been accordingly...

Finance-speak and oppression

May 5, 2020

Something else about the business news, finance, market discourses I've been thinking about. This discourse is clearly a ruling class discourse. But what...

The threat of bankruptcy

May 1, 2020

Happy May 1. What a time to celebrate international workers’ day. In honor of the day, I figured I’d continue a wonky project focusing on some numbers for...