Archive (Page 5) • Schooling in Socialist America • Buttondown

The Thing About 'STEM'

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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'

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

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

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

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?

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

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?

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

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

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...

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...

Debt Reveal Day (and hi to buttondown!)

Hi everyone, I started a Buttondown newsletter account! Here's my first post on the new platform. Thanks to Jezza and Katherine for suggesting it. Check this...

This is (not) a school

This is part 3 of a series on String Theory Performing Arts Charter School in Philadelphia. I did a basic history of their massive 2013 bond issuance here....

String Theory Development Corporation

I went down a significant rabbit hole trying to understand a Philadelphia charter school bond issuance last week. It almost ended me. I was reading it before...

School district revenge fantasy

The amazing Dr. Camika Royal gave a lecture on her research to my program recently. She’s an historian of urban education focusing on Philadelphia and has a...

WTF is local school funding?

Schools get funded two ways: grants and loans. I wrote about Yonkers school district’s recent bond issuance, focusing on a recent loan they took out. Carlos...

Yonkers' Bad Neighbors

I mentioned before that I was going to focus on a school district I know very little about. That school district is the Yonkers City School District. I’m...

Yonkers City Council took out loans to pay for kids' textbooks, gave millions to corrupt firm

Yonkers School District is taking out a loan for textbooks. The district was facing a $22 million hole left by the pandemic and its economic crisis. Yonkers...

Green School Stimmy

This week something really exciting happened. Jamaal Bowman announced support for a Green New Deal for Schools initiative, focusing on infrastructure and...

How to understand school districts and capitalism

If I want to get to know a school district’s relationship to capitalism, specifically its funding structure and apparatuses, there are a few places I’ve...

Talking points for no-cost loans

I’ve been organizing with the Action Center on Race and the Economy and Lilac to demand no-cost loans for local governments from the Federal Reserve. (Sign...

A school bond that was actually a bond

I’m feeling lucky. A couple posts ago I wrote about how Black civil rights organizers Ann Atwater and Bill Riddick turned KKK leader C. P. Ellis from Exalted...

Cancel Wall Street and Fund Our Schools!

Online event on March 11, 4:30pm. Register here. Facebook event page. If you’ve been following this newsletter, you know I do a lot of writing and thinking...

What happened with bond yields last week

Something happened last Thursday. A little line on a little graph went up a little more than people thought it would and capitalists held their breath. A...

A Klansman joins the struggle

February 28, 2021

One of the biggest questions on the left is unity in difference. How do you collaborate and struggle together when there are so many things keeping people...

February 23, 2021

File this one under Things You Probably Didn’t Know School Districts Do Under Capitalism. It turns out two school districts in Pennsylvania lost millions of...

Fragments of Frank Moretti

February 20, 2021

I advise doctoral students and one student this year is doing a project on surveillance capitalism and education technology. I told him he should look up...

February 15, 2021

The debate around reopening schools in the pandemic is about a lot of things: getting back to ‘normal’, having adults get back to work, not letting students...

The Fed and the School

February 11, 2021

Yesterday, Jerome Powell gave a big speech about the Federal Reserve’s approach to monetary policy at this moment. Everyone was watching. People wanted to...

School districts are the cell structure of racial capitalism

February 8, 2021

I’ve been going around saying this for awhile now, but it’s time to write out why I think it’s true: school districts are the cell structure of racial...

Introduction to tax-base sharing

February 4, 2021

Whenever someone asks me what we should do about school funding inequality, I mention tax-base sharing, the regional system set up in the Twin Cities in 1971...

School funding as socialist planning?

February 1, 2021

I finally got a chance to read Aaron Benanav’s recent essay in Logic about socialist planning. I’ve been a fan of Aaron’s since I first heard him talk about...

Fun with apparatuses

January 29, 2021

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf put out his 2021 agenda yesterday. The third point from the top is “Invest in Public Infrastructure, Including School Buildings.”...

January 27, 2021

After writing about the Biden administration’s new policy that school districts can use FEMA funds for safely reopening, I found out that Philadelphia is...

Are you my FEMA?

January 24, 2021

In the flurry of executive orders coming out of the Biden administration, it looks like schools can get Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) monies for...

Title Onedering

January 20, 2021

During the Democratic presidential primary, I noticed something weird. Bernie Sanders was obviously the leftist candidate, Biden the moderate, and Warren...

Budget Reconciliation?

January 14, 2021

In my constant search for school funding, particularly green school building infrastructure funding, the same friend that told me about the Department of...

January 12, 2021

Last week I wrote about a possible revenue source for school infrastructure improvements at the Department of Energy. The DOE is guaranteeing loans for green...

"Education, Inequality, and School Finance" for socialists

January 8, 2021

If you want to know about school funding from a progressive point of view, you have to read Bruce D. Baker. His research over the last two decades and more...

January 4, 2021

Well what do we have here? Apparently President-Elect Biden saved himself a juicy morsel of funding at the Department of Energy when he oversaw the last...

The Covid Vaccine and Socialism

January 3, 2021

In the flood of news about the covid vaccine, I’ve been reading about Katalin Karikó, the Hungarian scientist in Philadelphia who has been doggedly...

We need an education liquidity facility (ELF)

December 28, 2020

I was feeling pretty bummed last week. Pat Toomey all but doomed the municipal liquidity facility (MLF) as part of his demands to sign off on the CASH act,...

Shut down, forbidden, and banned

December 21, 2020

If you were chewing your fingernails and feeling generally bummed over the weekend about the fiscal relief talks, there’s now a deal. And it’s not great for...

Fiscal shit storm

December 18, 2020

It’s a big day for the MLF strategy. The Fed relief programs are at the center of a fiscal shit storm. It’s nerve-wracking. Infection rates are sky high. The...