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...

To help the district, tax the rich

June 20, 2022

Something really interesting happened last week that’s going to have a big impact on school funding and education in the city generally. It had to do with a...

The Abbott Problem

June 13, 2022

Abbott Elementary is a great show. It's great for a number of reasons--it's hilarious, a solid portrait of urban education, it centers Philadelphia, it gives...

Schools, guns, and banks

June 6, 2022

(CW violence) I can't get the school shooting in Uvalde off my mind. Like everyone else, I've been hearing and reading and thinking about school shootings...

Corsi-Rosenthal politics

May 30, 2022

Frank Helleis had an idea. His wife was a teacher at a local elementary school in their hometown Mainz, Germany. It was early in the pandemic and educators...

Michael Karp

May 23, 2022

One of the most complicated things about researching school finance is the number of policies, entities, institutions, authorities, and apparatuses involved....

Spider in the web

May 16, 2022

I'm a member of the Education Justice Committee of Philadelphia DSA, a group of parents, teachers, former teachers, and policy nerds. We've been active...

The ambiguity of policy (a night in Lower Merion)

May 9, 2022

I recently got invited to be on a panel, the first ever Environmental Forum at Lower Merion High School. The organizer was a high school student there who is...

What Ukraine's 2017 education law tells us about the war

May 2, 2022

Since Russia invaded Ukraine I've been doomscrolling the war, trying to hash out what the socialist position is/should be, and hoping it doesn't go nuclear....

Interview with Raging Chicken

April 25, 2022

If you don't know about it, Raging Chicken Media is a great progressive source of Pennsylvania news and analysis. They asked me to come on for an interview...

Wolkness

April 18, 2022

Recently, a student in one of my classes did a great presentation on a court case in her school district: Lower Merion (LMSD). LMSD has a certain reputation...

What makes the green bond green

April 11, 2022

I talked to a superintendent the other day. I met him on twitter when I was trying to put together an illustration of how school bonds work and asking for...

Are you bidding me?

April 4, 2022

If you've ever seen the movie Bad Education, you know that shady stuff can happen in school districts. Some of it happens in procurement and bidding, which...

A socialist uses the Bloomberg terminal, part 1

March 28, 2022

When I got interested in school bonds, a friend and comrade who had done some research work for climate groups told me to look at a Bloomberg terminal. I was...

Testimony to Philadelphia City Council in Favor of a Public Finance Authority

March 21, 2022

A couple weeks ago I testified to the Philadelphia City Council in favor of legislation that would take a step closer towards creating a public bank for the...

Choosing a school in neoliberal times

March 14, 2022

The first iteration of this newsletter was a series of posts on my blog, but they weren't about socialism and school finance. Before the pandemic started, as...

$chool choice and freeloading

March 7, 2022

There's a lot that's dangerous about the rightwing campaign against critical race theory in schools. One of the less obvious dangers is how it advances of...