Schooling in Socialist America

Bond/failure

June 5, 2023

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

May 29, 2023

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

May 22, 2023

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

May 15, 2023

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

May 8, 2023

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...

Give 'em Helen

May 1, 2023

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

April 24, 2023

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

April 17, 2023

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

April 10, 2023

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"

April 3, 2023

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

March 27, 2023

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

March 20, 2023

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

March 13, 2023

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

March 6, 2023

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...

Philly's asbestos crisis

February 6, 2023

Maybe you've heard the hot goss: the School District of Philadelphia is suing Philadelphia City Council. At stake is who controls school facilities safety...

A profound sense of unease

January 30, 2023

This newsletter focuses a lot on school facilities finance. It's an under-examined aspect of school finance and education policy generally, but it's an area...

Is the Inflation Reduction Act non-reformist?

January 23, 2023

I hit a wall last year. After getting excited about the Inflation Reduction Act and teasing out the particulars of what it would mean for school districts to...

The debt and the wolf

January 16, 2023

I've been putting together a literature review on school facilities finance and came across something curious. In a great working paper on state credit...

Chatbot GPT on socialist school finance

January 9, 2023

You've probably heard of Chatbot GPT by now. It's an advanced form of artificial intelligence that responds to queries you give it based on vast banks of...

The cat litter thing is true, but not how you think

January 2, 2023

Right wing politicians were going around in their stump speeches and campaign conversations talking about cat litter in schools. For them, it’s a dog whistle...

A parent trap

December 26, 2022

Something has been making me mad recently. I'm parenting a toddler, two and half years old, so I've been at it now for a couple years. I love Thisbe dearly,...

Planned scarcity in public university housing

December 19, 2022

When I first got to my university in 2016, I was surprised when I moved into my office. It was a dorm room with a professor's desk in it. There were shelves...

The Sandia Report: numbers and struggle

December 12, 2022

In school, I was taught that there are two kinds of people: math people and non-math people. The math people are smart and the non-math people aren't. The...

Tax-base sharing and racial capitalism in school finance

December 5, 2022

Three years ago, a friend and comrade Julie McIntyre sent me a call for papers, soliciting proposals for a special issue of The Journal of Educational Human...

Kudos to Verona: a look at Wisconsin

November 28, 2022

A friend passed along a par

As public as possible

November 21, 2022

I've been thinking about what the overall argument or statement of this newsletter might be. What's holding it all together? One idea I'm working with is...

A school bond that was actually a bond

November 14, 2022

This week I'm revisiting a post I published close to the beginning of this newsletter. The readership has almost tripled since then and I think about this...

Public resources for public stuff!

November 7, 2022

I was asked to give a two-minute speech at the Public Banking rally on Friday, October 7th. Here's an extended copy of some remarks I prepared. A couple...

The structure of indiscriminate school shootings

October 31, 2022

I met badass critical geographer Kate Derickson earlier this year at a workshop on urban climate finance. She and I got to talking after the school shooting...

Actually existing green schools: Manchester, Connecticut

October 24, 2022

I had a conversation recently with someone who's very deep into green infrastructure finance for schools. They gave me a ton of resources to sift through...

The life and death of bonds, or Bill Gross's scalp

October 17, 2022

I've been trying to understand how bonds work, specifically municipal bonds, so I can better understand school finance. But the subject is notoriously...

A new way socialists might fight the right

October 10, 2022

As the rightwing continues winning around the world and threatens to win even bigger next month in the US, I've been thinking about stuff socialists can do...

Let them eat ITCs

October 3, 2022

I've written a few posts about the Inflation Reduction Act, focusing on how schools could take advantage of the green banking provisions in the law to get...

Althusser and Education

September 26, 2022

Before I started studying school finance from a socialist perspective, my research focused on educational theory. Specifically, I focused on the French...

Microbial growth: a state/county apparatus in North Carolina

September 19, 2022

In my attempt to understand school facilities finance better from a socialist perspective I peruse a headlines in American Schools & Universities pretty...

Why not build?

September 12, 2022

A few weeks ago, editors at the African American Policy Forum asked me to write something about how the left broadly speaking could counter the rightwing...

Expertise is ideology

September 5, 2022

I got mad reading Forbes the other day. Marguerite Roza published an article taking several school districts to task for lacking "expertise in finance" as...

Solidarity with school facilities workers!

August 29, 2022

There was a big strike vote in Philly last week. The union representing school bus drivers, custodial staff, and building engineers--SEIU 32BJ District 1201...

Who's driving? Green bank dialectics in Philly

August 22, 2022

I've been writing the last few weeks about the Inflation Reduction Act's national green bank. The question is whether and how monies from this provision of...

Green public financing for Philly public schools

August 15, 2022

I started this newsletter trying to figure out how to get public financing for Philadelphia public school infrastructure. We've got a massive problem here:...

The IRA's green bank

August 8, 2022

Everyone's aflutter about the Inflation Reduction Act. Seemingly out of nowhere, yacht-owner and coal baron President Joe Manchin announced that he was, in...

Meet Virginia

August 1, 2022

Last week, a reporter from a National Public Radio station in Richmond, Virginia emailed me to talk about school buildings. She's writing a story about how...

Taxing schools, forcing birth

July 25, 2022

There's been a flood of analysis on the left about the Supreme Court's repulsive decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. I was listening to a three-part series on...

Cool organizing at Robeson High: An interview with Dan Reyes, Part 2

July 18, 2022

This is the second part of an interview I did with teacher and organizer Dan Reyes about the organizing he and others did at his high school in Philadelphia...

The heat at Robeson High: an interview with Dan Reyes, Part 1

July 11, 2022

Over the next few weeks, I’ll publish an edited interview with the amazing teacher and organizer Dan Reyes. I met Dan through work with the Philadelphia...

How inflation screws schools

July 5, 2022

Readers! I'm going to be in the San Francisco Bay Area for three weeks starting 7/12. If you're in the area and want to get together to chat school,...

Intermediate Units

June 27, 2022

I studied philosophy of math in college. One idea that always stuck with me is that there are many different kinds of infinity. The classic infinity happens...