Schooling in Socialist America
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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...
A bond knot in Rochester
February 28, 2022
I'm working on a research project looking at racial discrimination in school bond issuance (with the amazing Eleni Schirmer). Part of this project requires...
Super-expropriation, elementary schools, and UPenn
February 21, 2022
Sometimes K-12 & higher education look disconnected, particularly when it comes to money. But in Philly, the University of Pennsylvania has done and is doing...
What socialists say about school shootings
February 14, 2022
Oxford Area High School in Michigan recently re-opened for the first time after a devastating school shooting last year. It got me thinking about school...
The problem of daycare
February 7, 2022
I've been working with and around schools for a long time. I taught in high schools while in college, taught full time high school for five years after I...
Cryptobonds!
January 31, 2022
A Trump tweet inspired blockchain-based mini muni bonds. This sentence isn't something I ever thought I'd find myself writing, but here we are. Apparently,...
Twitter, school finance ideology, and racial capitalism
January 24, 2022
Twitter is an interesting place. There's a lot that toxic about it, but when it comes to intellectual debates and the life of ideas there's nothing like it....
Open dystopia
January 18, 2022
As I'm writing this post, there's a stormy debate about whether keep schools open in the omicron surge. By the time this post goes out, there may have been...
Unearned and uncollected
January 10, 2022
Libertarians can be funny sometimes. A piece from the Commonwealth Foundation, a Koch-funded think tank focusing on Pennsylvania policy, opens with a riff on...
Ode to Saule
January 3, 2022
It sounded like a 1950s red scare moment, but it happened in November 2021. Republican Senator John Kennedy, in a southern twang, told a Biden nominee during...
Extended Testimony to the Children and Youth and Finance Committees
December 27, 2021
On 12/15, I testified before the Children and Youth and Finance Committees in Philadelphia's City Council. The hearing, focusing on how to fund a school...
Land of the fee
December 20, 2021
In 2011, the city of West Haven, Connecticut issued a school bond for $45 million. At the time, a couple years out from the great financial crisis, the...
The dialectic of school board elections
December 13, 2021
Organizers in Philadelphia have been exploring if/how to make the city's Board of Education an elected body. Right now, the BOE members are appointed by the...
A Green Freedom Budget for Schools
December 6, 2021
When Nikil Saval ran for state senate in Pennsylvania, I was part of an amazing team of researchers working on the campaign's platform. It was fun and...
How to privatize public school buildings
November 29, 2021
In response to a previous post about the socialist position on school bonds, reader Jennifer Kates made an interesting comment. I've been critiquing...
Fast 4 Interest Rates
November 22, 2021
In May 2004, 50 education activists including students, teachers, and parents marched 70 miles from San Pablo, CA to Sacramento. They wanted justice for...
Game of Superintendents: The Mayor's Office of Education
November 15, 2021
The weird thing about school districts is that they're their own governments. They're not departments or offices in local governments, like they are at at...
The Socialist Position on School Bonds
November 8, 2021
I chatted with an organizer in the Democratic Socialists of America's Austin chapter recently about a new school bond in that district. That conversation, as...
Compliance!
November 1, 2021
Generally speaking, I think socialist strategy around school finance should be revenue + accountability. Poor districts need provisions but they need to...
Notes on CRT and Antiracist Socialism: Ideas for Organizing
October 25, 2021
I wrote about the terrain of CRT for antiracist socialists awhile ago. But what should we think about CRT itself? The Black Agenda Report published an...
Anatomy of a New School District Bond
October 18, 2021
A couple week ago, some organizers were surprised to see a Philadelphia Board of Education 'special action meeting' pop up on the Board's facebook page. The...
New Bond Issuance and the Problem of Capacity
October 11, 2021
I've heard through the grapevine that progressives in the city might be interested in campaigning for a big bond issuance to fix up Philadelphia's schools....
Infrastructure Leadership Confusion
October 4, 2021
A couple weeks ago I woke up at 4am and couldn't get back to sleep. I decided to use that weird time to follow up on a question I'd been wondering about: who...
Chinese Communism Takes on the Tutoring Industry
September 27, 2021
The first tutoring I remember was Kumon, the Japanese company. My parents would take me to a basement storefront in a strip mall and the tutors gave me timed...
Strategy = Revenue + Accountability (Special Friday Edition!)
September 24, 2021
Let's say your school buildings need fixing up. Let's also say this problem has been the case for decades and there's a machine-like city government, a...
Occupy, Education, and Me
September 20, 2021
In May 2010, I was sitting in my apartment in the Floresta neighborhood of Quito, Ecuador and I was angry. I'd just seen James Cameron's Avatar in a theater...
Education in the Wake of the War
September 13, 2021
[CW: war stuff] I was in my high school's band room on September 11, 2001. It was 8:30am and we were all waiting to go to class, like normal. Then the band...
Ventilation and Structural Ignorance
September 7, 2021
I started teaching last Monday. My university has a mask mandate but no vaccine mandate. They've been doing pretty well in the pandemic, both in terms of...
School Funding Basics: A Left Perspective
August 30, 2021
On August 21, the Buxmont Democratic Socialists of America invited me to give a short presentation on school funding for their lunch debt campaign. They're...
Socialism and School Infrastructure Finance
August 23, 2021
I've been getting more involved with a campaign you should know about: the Democratic Socialists of America's Green New Deal for Schools campaign, put...
The Deal with the Infrastructure Deal
August 16, 2021
Electric school buses. Broadband access for all schools. Money to fix water systems in school buildings. And theater of the oppressor. All these can be found...
Accumulating Through Dispossession: The Case of Tax Increment Financing
August 9, 2021
A student recently asked me something interesting. Did tax increment financing impact her school in northwest Philadelphia? We did some sleuthing and learned...
A Value-Added Tax for Schools
August 2, 2021
There was a brief moment when school funding in the US could've gotten better. It was the early 1970s. After decades of court cases challenging Brown v....
Notes on CRT and Antiracist Socialism: The Terrain
July 26, 2021
What’s a socialist to do about the rightwing craziness around critical race theory? One thing to consider is the terrain of this situation. Antonio Gramsci...
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