Archive (Page 2) • Schooling in Socialist America • Buttondown

The politics of reserves

January 22, 2024

One thing I've learned to do in trying to understand school finance is watch out for big pools of capital. Wherever there are pools of capital, there are...

Underfunded by design

January 15, 2024

Late last year I did a mini-project on teacher pensions. I wanted to understand what their deal was. I ended up concluding that project with a proposal for...

The war at school

January 8, 2024

Nothing's the same after October 7th. I've thought a lot about how to get this newsletter involved amid the horror and I finally figured something out, at...

January 1, 2024

Happy new year! For this post I thought I'd do something a little different. I'm really into music, both playing and listening, but I rarely get a chance to...

Taking care of careworkers, free education, and the 529

December 25, 2023

When it comes to tax hacks, we usually hear about how the ruling class is constantly exploiting loopholes in the tax code to keep their money from the...

December 18, 2023

I'm constantly on the hunt for narratives that can explain the complexity of the relationship between private finance and public education. I think if people...

NYzantium and the politics of weights

December 11, 2023

I've been living in Brooklyn the last few months as part of my academic sabbatical. The school district here is wild, serving just under a million students...

Fund the facilities! A teacher pensions policy for the polycrisis

December 4, 2023

Last week I summarized a debate about public pensions between socialists Henwood/Featherstone and Sawicky. This week I want to make my own proposal based on...

Twoers and Seveners

November 27, 2023

You can learn a lot when leftists disagree in public. The cover story for the January 2018 issue of In These Times was "Wall Street Isn't the Answer to the...

Is there a public pension problem?

November 20, 2023

A general question I've come upon in my project on pensions: is there really a teacher pension problem? If so, what is it and what do we do about it? So far...

Six things about teacher pensions

November 13, 2023

Here are some things I've learned so far in my attempts to understand teacher pensions. 0. The first thing is a rule of thumb. If someone says there's a...

The ideology of 322%

November 6, 2023

Call for participants! I'm helping put together a workshop on capital expenditure, debt, and K-12 education that will use critical frameworks to talk about...

October 30, 2023

How do we know what's really going on with teacher pensions? It's a big problem. Andrew G. Biggs, writing in 2022 for a special issue of the research journal...

Who's clapping?

October 23, 2023

At his blog teacherpensions.org, the neoliberal economist Chad Aldeman has made some disturbing claims about teacher pensions. I've been writing about the...

October 16, 2023

A few weeks ago I wrote about teacher pensions. I was readying the ground to dig into them as an organizing strategy. Basically, since union elections hinge...

How to do critical school finance

October 9, 2023

I'm giving a guest lecture at the University of Manitoba, Canada thi week. The title of the lecture is "How to do Critical School Finance." The professor who...

October 2, 2023

Scrolling through tiktok I came across a video with more than a million likes. It's just a few seconds long. Two guys stand in front of a new playground, on...

The IRA and Public Schools

September 25, 2023

The website Phenomenal World, which is a great resource for critical and left political economy, published an essay of mine gathering together thinking and...

COPs (but not that kind)

September 18, 2023

I meet all kinds of great people writing this newsletter. Recently, a researcher and organizer in California reached out and we had a great conversation....

Movements at the fiscal/monetary crossroads

September 11, 2023

I recently published a research article in the Journal of Urban Affairs with the amazing Akira Drake Rodriguez. The paper is called "Movements at the...

Pension questions

September 4, 2023

My neighbor is a longtime labor organizer and I trust her sense of things. Her husband is a teacher and unionist also. A few weeks ago we were talking about...

August 28, 2023

Dear readers, I'll be spending the next academic year in New York City as part of my sabbatical. If you're in NYC and want to meet up email me! The prologue...

A vacation smattering

August 21, 2023

I'm on vacation this week, so instead of a typically prosaic post I'm sending along a smattering of three interesting school finance things that happened...

Towards a technography of Title 1A

August 14, 2023

I had a doctoral student named Rob Rust who wrote a great dissertation on surveillance capitalism and educational technology. In the part where he tells...

The Pyrrhic property tax

The property tax has a strange ambivalence. On the one hand, it tethers the fate of public goods like education to the cruel vicissitudes of racial...

School finance: a critical primer, pt. 2

Here's Part 2 of "School Finance: A Critical Primer." Federal grants Bruce Klunder was a priest in Cleveland. His faith called him to participate in the...

School finance: a critical primer, pt. 1

Two years ago I pitched a primer-like essay on critical school finance to the excellent political economy website Phenomenal World. They accepted the pitch,...

Following a dollar

A professor told me once that buying private property is a great education in capitalism. I was a lowly graduate student in his political theory class so I...

Gunshots at the playground

Something unsettling happened a few weeks ago and I've been trying to make sense of it. I took our three year old Thisbe to a playground on a Sunday. The...

Lifeline fracas

You may have heard about the historical court case in Pennsylvania this year. After more than a decade of fighting, the Education Law Center won its class...

Mourning or melancholia? An Althusser tour

I'm extremely lucky to be spending some time in France as part of a sabbatical this fall. I've got a whole semester off just for research--no teaching or...

Half liberatory

The historian of education Esther Cyna invited me to give a lecture in Versailles, France at the UVSQ last week. The lecture was the keynote for a small...

Autobiography of a quantitative method

I spent the last year or so working on a research paper analyzing the relationship between charter schools and super-expropriation. I used a quantitative...

One of my favorite sources of school facilities news is American School and University's Schoolhouse Beat. It's an almost daily and free subscription to...

IRA debates: a view from the schools

This post is the basis for a keynote lecture I'm giving in France on June 9th. Feedback welcome, and wish me luck! I've been following debates about the...

Don’t be stupid: election reflections

I'm feeling intensely bummed. Last Tuesday was election night in Philadelphia and the left got routed. Helen Gym, the our mayoral candidate, placed third...

The tide turns for Gym

After writing a piece about Paul Vallas in advance of the big mayor's race in Chicago with my great friend Jason Wozniak, editors at In These Times asked for...

The BABs problem

I came across something recently that both answered a question I've had for a couple years, and also scared me. It has to do with the debt ceiling hullabaloo...

Happy May Day! There's an exciting and confusing race for mayor happening in Philadelphia right now. I live there and so I'm obviously deep in the weeds on...

Drinking sea water

I'm co-authoring a research paper analyzing underinvestment in Philadelphia's school buildings between 2005-2021 with Camika Royal. We're presenting it in a...

Pension tension

You've probably seen what's happening in France. Centrist president Emmanuel Macron forced through a change to French retirement age from 62 to 64, relying...

Green dream or whatever

An addendum to a post from two weeks ago about applying for IRA money: here's the EPA's website for the Inflation Reduction Act planning and implementation...

On Paul Vallas: "He sold our schools to the highest bidder"

My great friend Jason Wozniak and I co-authored this essay on Paul Vallas for In These Times, which was published this Saturday. Vote Johnson! *** Shakeda...

How school districts can take advantage of IRA programs

Last Thursday, the Philadelphia School Board had a public meeting. I submitted the following testimony into the public record urging the board to encourage...

SVB and education

A reporter recently interviewed me about something I tweeted on teacher pensions amidst the recent Silicon Valley Bank banking crisis, and it got me thinking...

Welcome to Carmel High

A video went viral recently that caught my eye. Students at Carmel High School in Indiana were giving a tour of their building as part of an after-school...

Organizing a millionaire's tax

I went to an amazing workshop on radical pedagogy at Yale a few weekends ago. It featured a mixture of discussion, report backs, and analysis of the present...

Why is my neighborhood school a charter?

February 27, 2023

A lot of my friends in Philly have kids. The kids are toddlers now, but soon they'll be going to school. So we're all thinking about where to send them to...

The science of reading: a socialist take

February 20, 2023

Over the last year, I kept hearing rumbles about something called "the science of reading debate" and stuff about the "reading wars." I didn't know what it...

Notes on possible next steps for a student housing struggle

February 13, 2023

In a previous post, I wrote about some of the recent financial and political history behind the student housing crisis happening at West Chester University...