Schooling in Socialist America
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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...
School Funding in the Covid Crisis
August 3, 2020
[I’ll be discussing these ideas at an upcoming event if you’re interested in joining!]Things are bad. Really bad. It’s truly a crisis in the sense that this...
New directions: school finance
July 28, 2020
When the pandemic started my partner was eight months pregnant. I needed something to distract myself from the anxiety of having a child in a crisis. I’d...
Is there a train-wreck coming?
June 29, 2020
Scared there's a train wreck coming. I think society's basically got two parts: a state and an economy. They're inter-related. The economy is how we make our...
On the fireworks
June 24, 2020
Every night, or even in the afternoon and mid-day, we hear explosions. The explosions are sometimes a singular big boom. Other times there are multiple booms...
Big picture update
June 18, 2020
I haven’t done a finance update in a bit, but I got a chance to listen to my favorite econ podcast while changing Thisbe — have to stand and leave her on the...
Two rallies
June 10, 2020
Thinking about the word 'rally' this week. On the one hand, there have been historic marches and rallies (and successful direct actions) on police brutality...
Two demands in real estate
May 25, 2020
A communist graffiti artist is on an amazing rampage in our neighborhood. Here’s a building project happening around the corner from us that I took on a...
The US is not a failed state
May 11, 2020
Apologies for the lateness of this post. My partner gave birth last Thursday to a tiny human named Thisbe Gilbert Ronen-Backer, and I’ve been accordingly...
Finance-speak and oppression
May 5, 2020
Something else about the business news, finance, market discourses I've been thinking about. This discourse is clearly a ruling class discourse. But what...
The threat of bankruptcy
May 1, 2020
Happy May 1. What a time to celebrate international workers’ day. In honor of the day, I figured I’d continue a wonky project focusing on some numbers for...
Data confusion
April 29, 2020
Once again I have to recommend Econoday Unplugged for straight talk when it comes to the economy. It’s just a soft-spoken American guy who stutters a bit and...
Schools are not a loan
April 26, 2020
On April 23rd, the School District of Philadelphia announced that there will be a $1 billion shortfall in its budget over the next five years due to the...
Illyrian economics
April 24, 2020
Things are heating up. I got to the part in Joanna Bockman’s Markets in the Name of Socialism where she describes the basic outline of Yugoslavia’s socialist...
My sweet inflatable you
April 22, 2020
One of the bigger ‘destabilizing’ forces in economy is when prices of everything goes up or down. If the price of stuff goes up (inflates), then money...
Towards a socialist finance, part 2
April 20, 2020
In trying to craft some socialist concepts of finance, I’ve been reading about the history and theory of socialist economics in the 20th century. Right now...
Class struggle content
April 18, 2020
As much as I’ve been on a tare about finance, I’ve been watching some pretty awesome class struggle content on television. By which I mean streaming on my...
Response to Grace Blakely
April 17, 2020
This review by Grace Blakely crafts a good slogan about 'breaking the power of finance', but a couple things stand out to me: 1. 'Finance' isn't necessarily...
Is there a housing crisis?
April 17, 2020
I keep seeing headlines about possible housing crises in the pandemic. I decided to do a little meander around some housing indicators to see if one’s...
Are the testing numbers real?
April 16, 2020
So much of what’s happening in finance capitalism right now depends on whether it looks like the pandemic is stopping. The ruling class has eyes glued on...
Capital's Achilles heel?
April 15, 2020
I was almost right! Sort of. I’d had an instinct that the dollar swaps the Fed was doing with 20 international banks had something to do with inflation. I...
Gimme some muni
April 14, 2020
One of the historic things about the Fed’s pesach miracle was its entrance in muni markets: it committed to buying $500 billion of municipal bonds. ‘Munis’...
A capitalist dilemma
April 13, 2020
If you want to hear some capitalists going at it over one of the biggest questions for capitalism right now, listen to this Squawk on the Street podcast...
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