The war at school
Nothing's the same after October 7th. I've thought a lot about how to get this newsletter involved amid the horror and I finally figured something out, at...
Earhole 2023
Happy new year! For this post I thought I'd do something a little different. I'm really into music, both playing and listening, but I rarely get a chance to...
Taking care of careworkers, free education, and the 529
When it comes to tax hacks, we usually hear about how the ruling class is constantly exploiting loopholes in the tax code to keep their money from the...
Billions
I'm constantly on the hunt for narratives that can explain the complexity of the relationship between private finance and public education. I think if people...
NYzantium and the politics of weights
I've been living in Brooklyn the last few months as part of my academic sabbatical. The school district here is wild, serving just under a million students...
Fund the facilities! A teacher pensions policy for the polycrisis
Last week I summarized a debate about public pensions between socialists Henwood/Featherstone and Sawicky. This week I want to make my own proposal based on...
Twoers and Seveners
You can learn a lot when leftists disagree in public. The cover story for the January 2018 issue of In These Times was "Wall Street Isn't the Answer to the...
Is there a public pension problem?
A general question I've come upon in my project on pensions: is there really a teacher pension problem? If so, what is it and what do we do about it? So far...
Six things about teacher pensions
Here are some things I've learned so far in my attempts to understand teacher pensions. 0. The first thing is a rule of thumb. If someone says there's a...
The ideology of 322%
Call for participants! I'm helping put together a workshop on capital expenditure, debt, and K-12 education that will use critical frameworks to talk about...
Force decides
How do we know what's really going on with teacher pensions? It's a big problem. Andrew G. Biggs, writing in 2022 for a special issue of the research journal...
Who's clapping?
At his blog teacherpensions.org, the neoliberal economist Chad Aldeman has made some disturbing claims about teacher pensions. I've been writing about the...
Less cowbell
A few weeks ago I wrote about teacher pensions. I was readying the ground to dig into them as an organizing strategy. Basically, since union elections hinge...
How to do critical school finance
I'm giving a guest lecture at the University of Manitoba, Canada thi week. The title of the lecture is "How to do Critical School Finance." The professor who...
nah cuz why
Scrolling through tiktok I came across a video with more than a million likes. It's just a few seconds long. Two guys stand in front of a new playground, on...
The IRA and Public Schools
The website Phenomenal World, which is a great resource for critical and left political economy, published an essay of mine gathering together thinking and...
COPs (but not that kind)
I meet all kinds of great people writing this newsletter. Recently, a researcher and organizer in California reached out and we had a great conversation....
Movements at the fiscal/monetary crossroads
I recently published a research article in the Journal of Urban Affairs with the amazing Akira Drake Rodriguez. The paper is called "Movements at the...
Pension questions
My neighbor is a longtime labor organizer and I trust her sense of things. Her husband is a teacher and unionist also. A few weeks ago we were talking about...
On WALTER
Dear readers, I'll be spending the next academic year in New York City as part of my sabbatical. If you're in NYC and want to meet up email me! The prologue...