Debt Reveal Day (and hi to buttondown!)

April 15, 2021

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

April 8, 2021

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

April 5, 2021

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

April 1, 2021

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?

March 29, 2021

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

March 25, 2021

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

March 22, 2021

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

March 18, 2021

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

March 15, 2021

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

March 11, 2021

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

March 9, 2021

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!

March 4, 2021

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

March 2, 2021

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...

Getting swappy

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...

Just Breathe?

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.”...

Two FEMAnds

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...

D'oh

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...

DOE a Dear!

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...

How We Gonna Pay?

December 14, 2020

The left wants programs for people that need them. For schools, we want better teacher pay, benefits, school infrastructure updates, community school...

The Case of Richard Dunlap

December 4, 2020

While revising a materialist analysis of Pennsylvania school funding inequality for an educational leadership journal, the editors asked that I cut my...

Education: critical vs. structural

November 16, 2020

The following is a gestural sketch of some overarching ideas coming out of the last few years of my research. I read these for the Critical Theories in the...

Non-educated Voters

November 11, 2020

I’ve been thinking about ‘non-educated voters’. Not being educated when it comes to the electorate means not having a college degree. To liberals and some...

Apparatuses all the way down

October 29, 2020

In my last post, I came up upon an entity called the Commonwealth Financing Authority (CFA). I hadn’t heard of this little corner of the Pennsylvania...

School Infrastructure Funding in Pennsylvania

October 23, 2020

The MLF strategy calls for better terms on Fed bond purchases to fund school infrastructure improvement. One question in that strategy when it comes to...

School Funding in the Pandemic News Roundup

October 6, 2020

Readers know I’ve been following the Fed’s municipal lending facility as a possible route to liquidity support in school funding. I’m using this space to...

Rural and Urban School Districts Fighting Together

September 28, 2020

Part of the MLF strategy is putting together a coalition of urban and rural school districts to demand better terms. The urban-rural divide is one of the...

When Daddy and Mommy Fight

September 23, 2020

The Congressional Oversight Committee met on September 17th. The topic of discussion: the Fed’s Municipal Liquidity Facility. As readers of this space know,...

Budgetary Learned Helplessness

September 18, 2020

I usually write about K-12 schooling but an interesting thing happened this last week in higher education. The thing happened to me, and the story is helpful...

Did Philly Just Get Hosed?

September 14, 2020

On September 1, the city of Philadelphia sold a bond worth $300m. Underwritten by Wells Fargo, the interest rate was 4%.You read that correctly. 4%. The city...

Response to Richard Hudson-Miles

September 2, 2020

My current project is looking at school funding from a socialist perspective. Before that project I wanted to figure out what ‘socialist perspective’ means...

Illinois and the MTA

August 25, 2020

The Municipal Lending Facility has accepted two applications: the State of Illinois and New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. I’ve been examining...

The Green MLF Strategy

August 20, 2020

The MLF strategy calls for urban and rural school districts to apply for the Federal Reserve’s Municipal Liquidity Facility loans. Poor districts should take...

Organizing the MLF Strategy

August 12, 2020

This is Part 4 of a series on school funding in the covid crisis. Part 1 is an overview of a policy proposal for the School District of Philadelphia to take...

Are School Districts Eligible Issuers for the MLF?

August 8, 2020

Oh boy.After a conversation with a policy analyst, a super important point came up that I’d completely missed: can a school district even be eligible to...

An MLF Loan for a School District: The Details

August 6, 2020

On Monday I laid out a policy proposal for school funding in the covid crisis. School districts, urban and rural, should apply to the MLF for loans. In...