Schooling in Socialist America

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...

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...