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

Debt Collective: a very brief youtube history

On Wednesday this week, the Debt Collective is organizing a national action in Washington, DC called FUND EDUCATION NOT GENOCIDE. I’ll be headed there on the...

Notes on disclosure and divestment

As the student movement against genocide in Palestine continues around the world, one of the key demands made by activists and their coalitions has been...

As Public As Possible: the book!

I have some exciting news: I wrote a book using the material from this newsletter, and it has a cover with a web page, release date, and everything. You can...

Patricia Ann Conway

[Content warning: this post is about self-immolation and protest] I taught a class this semester on power and privilege in higher education. One of the...

MOU money MOU problems in Hingham

This is my second school budget crisis request from TikTok. It’s from Hingham, MA. Apparently, as of March, the size of their budget deficit issue is at most...

Educational erosion in Long Beach

I got a request on TikTok to look into a budget crisis situation in Long Beach City School District in Nassau County, Long Island. Apparently the budget vote...

Critical theory and K-12 capex

Announcement: The American Educational Research Association (AERA) organizes the biggest education research conference I know. Within the conference are many...

Students over bondholders!

There's an interesting situation with the University of California's bonds going down that I wanted to pass along. Basically: bondholders are having a...

A question I don't know how to answer

I've always picked books up off the street when people are giving them away. It's one of the many small joys of life. In college one time I picked up a book...

Higher education finance?

I work in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE). It's a network of old normal schools and land grant colleges peppered throughout...

Just say no to performance-based budgeting

A bunch of colleagues and I published an op-ed today in the Bucks County Beacon about Governor Shapiro's vision for public higher education in Pennsylvania,...

The money-changers at Temple

Organizers at Temple University got in touch with me recently to ask what I thought of their campus's supposed 'budget crisis'. I did a little digging around...

Two public school solar financing policies: public and private

February 26, 2024

The other day policy researchers from the Center for Public Enterprise (CPE) got in touch with me. I'd met one of them on twitter and at that time he told me...

On being well-endowed

February 19, 2024

As a preface to this post, for higher education finance resources and organizing help you should check out Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education,...

No austerity for Minneapolis!

February 12, 2024

A labor organizer reached out recently to talk through something. The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) is in the midst of a contract negotiation with...

February 5, 2024

Announcement: I'm giving a lecture at Teachers College, Columbia University this Thursday at 5:30pm titled "Education Finance, Statistics, and Philosophy."...

What to do in Denver when in debt

January 29, 2024

While researching a seemingly never-ending paper on the Philadelphia School District's relationship with the municipal bond market between 1993-2021 and its...

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...