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...

The Thing About 'STEM'

July 19, 2021

When I was young, I got the impression very early that I should go into science and be good at math. It's actually one of my earlier memories: if I could be...

Peru's New President is a Socialist Teacher

July 12, 2021

You might have seen huge pencils in your feed recently. Or heard about the big hats. They're symbols of Peru's president-elect Pedro Castillo, a left...

A New Principle?

July 5, 2021

I’m no economist. I don’t have formal training. What I know about economics is from studying with groups and on my own (going through CORE-ECON for instance,...

Scrots, Mortgages, and Personal Finance Praxis

June 28, 2021

After two hours on the phone with three different customer service representatives, we finally figured it out. My heart was beating hard. I was sweating...

The Ideology of Education News

June 21, 2021

Lying in bed one rainy morning, I went down a rabbit hole. I had some time off from childcare and saw a tweet by Chad Aldeman critiquing an Economic Policy...

The Fifth Formula

June 14, 2021

A couple weeks ago the Biden adminitration released a 60-page proposal for funding "Education for the Disadvantaged," or Title 1A of the Elementary and...

School Lunch Debt and the Ruling Class

June 7, 2021

Parents in Wyoming Valley School District in Pennsylvania were terrified and angry. The district sent a letter threatening to send their children to foster...

The socialist way to talk about school funding 'inequality'

June 1, 2021

I can’t stop talking about Ester Cyna’s award-winning essay on school finance in North Carolina over the long 20th century. The history is rigorous and the...

Fear and Loathing in School Infrastructure Reimbursement

May 24, 2021

A comrade asked me a question recently about school infrastructure reimbursements. He’s interested in knowing whether there are models elsewhere in the US...

Title 1 Funding: An MMT approach

May 17, 2021

I spent a good chunk of time the last few days sitting at my desk and twirling my pen, staring out the window. I was trying to figure out how I would propose...

Teaching History During the Chauvin Verdict Announcement

May 10, 2021

I taught a history class the day the Chauvin verdict was announced. The class started at 4:30pm, which was the exact time the verdict was supposed to be...

A little fiscal mutualism, as a treat?

May 6, 2021

Michael Glass and Sean Vanatta, in their history of 1940s municipal finance in the New York suburbs, coined the term fiscal mutualism. This is a cool idea so...

What happened in Vermont

May 3, 2021

Carol Brigham’s family stopped talking to her. The superintendent of her school district got his tires slashed. A father, reporting on what was happening,...

How did I get here?

April 29, 2021

In my history of school funding seminar last week, students asked me something personal. We were talking about how hard and wonky school finance is, and they...

Cooperation Analysis of the Twin Cities Region

April 26, 2021

So much focus has been on Minneapolis in the wake of the Derek Chauvin trial. The city's been on all of our minds. Coincidentally, the Twin Cities is also...

Making Schools Safe: A Different Angle

April 21, 2021

So much of the literature and organizing on school finance comes down to a two-word demand: more money. If we get the revenue, we can provide better...

Rescue me

April 19, 2021

The American Rescue Plan is coming to your town soon if it hasn't already. The dollars are flowing. This includes $122 billion for school districts. How does...