Archive (Page 6) • Schooling in Socialist America • Buttondown

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?

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

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

[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

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?

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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?

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?

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

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

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...

Towards a socialist finance

From the article “Concrete Utopia,” on Yugoslavian Architecture.I’m trying to understand finance as a socialist. The pandemic is a good opportunity because...

What the Fed did on Thursday

It was a pesach miracle. The Fed decided to initiate another program of $2.3 trillion, boldly buying credit it has never bought before (specifically junk...

'Green' Bonds Now

We know that carbon emissions are an emergency. They need to go down a lot and fast. We all know the Green New Deal and the Green Stimulus and other...

Poop back and forth, forever

Remember that scene from Me, You, and Everyone We Know where the little boy says I want to poop back and forth. Like, I'll poop into her butt hole... and...

The Wizard of Oz Effect

This strangely formatted article has so much important information about the financial terrain in this moment. What I’m getting from it is that there was a...

Corporate debt spreads, here I come. This weekend I set myself the task of trying to understand this short piece at Econospeak on corporate credit spreads...

People before corporations?

This may be a dumb or unpopular question for a socialist to ask, but I’m interested in thinking it through: should our slogan be “people before...

The online news show Rising is a new favorite source for left news/analysis. I listen to it almost every day. One of the strangest and most interesting...

There’s a good piece on the difference between furloughs and layoffs in the Philly Inquirer today. The lines are fuzzy at best. Furloughed workers ‘maybe’...

Joblessness and suicide

(CW: suicide.) Joblessness claims went up again last week, making the total 6.6 million claims in the last month. In searching around for the impacts of...

Leverage: an assignment

A friend on Facebook who studies economics posted a challenge: try to read this semi-insidery article about what’s going on in finance right now and post a...