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In response to a previous post about the socialist position on school bonds, reader Jennifer Kates made an interesting comment. I've been critiquing municipal bonds pretty heavily, but she thought leftists should look at the privatization of school construction, buildings, and maintenance too. Bonds are only one practice on the spectrum of threats to public school buildings.

I agree: we should be aware of these kinds of practices too and get ready to fight against them. Taking stock of what's happening with privatizing school buildings can prepare us for things to come in Philadelphia and elsewhere.

Black Democratic leaders supporting Trump policy

In 2017, a funny little article came out in Politico comparing two unlikely things: the Trump Organization's purchase of the Old Postal Service building in Washington, DC and the state of US public school buildings. (Remember when Trump opened a hotel in Washington and got elected President? Good times. He just sold it, btw!) The common thread here is financing updates to old public buildings. The article explains that, thanks to a Reagan era policy, Trump got big tax credits for taking over a historic public building and redoing it for a private purpose.

In May 2004, 50 education activists including students, teachers, and parents marched 70 miles from San Pablo, CA to Sacramento. They wanted justice for their school district's funding. The governor refused to meet with them and they escalated. A month later they did a hunger strike, refusing all food except water for more than two weeks until their demands were met.

They wanted lower interest rates on school district loans. Through their organizing they got those rates down exponentially.

At the time, they focused on a district called the Richmond Unified School District. Now it's the West Contra Costa--renamed due to severe credit rating decreases. In the late 80s, the district had bad budget issues due to declining enrollments. When people move out of your district--which can happen for a variety of reasons, few of which schools can control--your schools lose money since funding relies on student numbers. In 1991, the district went bankrupt.

From IBM to the state

The weird thing about school districts is that they're their own governments. They're not departments or offices in local governments, like they are at at the state and federal level. A lot of other things a municipality provides (police, water, human services, etc) have departments with deputy mayors or chiefs or other leaders, who all report to the mayor and are governed by elected bodies like a city council.

Not school districts, though. They have their own executives--superintendents--and answer to their own elected or appointed bodies, like school boards. This relative autonomy of school districts has been the case arguably since the 1700s.

Three hundred years later in the early 2000s, Philadelphia did something interesting. Mayor John Street created a Mayor's Office of Education (MOE) with a Chief Educational Officer, who serves as a kind of secretary of education in the Mayor's administration. In my ongoing project to understand the education apparatus in my city, here's some stuff about that office, with a particular focus on the superintendent search happening now.

From SRC to MOE to BOE

I chatted with an organizer in the Democratic Socialists of America's Austin chapter recently about a new school bond in that district. That conversation, as well as a couple others with organizers here in Philly, pushed me to formulate some general positions that socialists might take when it comes to school bonds, which are an important part of any local terrain in the US. Socialists should know what to say about them, particularly in the wake of the recent Green New Deal fight. Green school infrastructure will require adequate financing, but the way we finance school construction in this country is primarily through school bonds. So the issue is an ecosocialist issue too.

TL;DR: our horizon must be public no-cost loans for schools, but there are none yet. We're stuck in a dilemma where school districts need revenue for maintenance and construction but the predominant source of that revenue comes directly from ruling class capitalists. We can navigate this terrain by engaging directly with bond issuance through political education, messaging, issue campaigns, and school board campaigns centered on the no-cost public loans line.

Generally speaking, I think socialist strategy around school finance should be revenue + accountability. Poor districts need provisions but they need to spend well. To that end, focusing on Philadelphia, I've been exploring non-reformist revenue and around the school district's castle--440 Broad Street--to understand why the district apparatus is the way it is.

I wrote about the terrain of CRT for antiracist socialists awhile ago. But what should we think about CRT itself? The Black Agenda Report published an extremely helpful series on the black materialist politics of Derrick Bell, Jr. This post is an education specific follow-up to that piece, which I highly recommend.

For me, the CRT thing is an occasion to think about what Charisse Burden-Stelly calls antiracist socialism. What can CRT teach us about antiracist socialism, particularly when it comes to organizing?

A couple week ago, some organizers were surprised to see a Philadelphia Board of Education 'special action meeting' pop up on the Board's facebook page. The meeting had a very simple description: "This is a special action meeting to consider the authorization of the issuance of General Obligation Bonds." I wasn't totally surprised by this because I'd seen the District announce its intention to sell some bonds in the Municipal Securities Regulatory Board database called EMMA (my favorite research database these days).

I've heard through the grapevine that progressives in the city might be interested in campaigning for a big bond issuance to fix up Philadelphia's schools. This is great news and has caused something of a stir in the education movements, particularly for wonky lefties like me. I started digging around to get a sense of the terrain and see what I could find to be helpful.

What I've done thus far is get a feel for issues that the district might raise in response to such a proposal. The schools need around $5 billion of infrastructure updates. So why would they--specifically the finance people at the district--say no?

I've actually considered this question before. When I started this newsletter, I was organizing to get the district to apply for a loan from the Federal Reserve's pandemic-response program called the Municipal Liquidity Facility. I was proposing that the district issue a bond to the Fed for around $760 million, focusing on zero emissions fixes for HVAC and windows, and also demanding that the Fed change the terms of these loans (as an aside this is how I'd prefer to get money for capital projects as a socialist: a public source with no fees, zero interest, but this isn't looking likely in the short term).

A couple weeks ago I woke up at 4am and couldn't get back to sleep. I decided to use that weird time to follow up on a question I'd been wondering about: who makes decisions when it comes to the School District of Philadelphia's buildings? What's the power structure like for facilities maintenance and updates? I'd been in a bunch of meetings with parent organizers and these questions came up. Parents have been fighting like hell alongside teachers, students, and community members for years to get something done about the city's toxic schools, which as 2017 needed around $5 billion of updates.

In these meetings, I realized I knew about the superintendent (who's leaving next year) and the board of education and the mayor. These individuals are well known and common targets. But what about all the departments, committees, teams, and offices devoted to infrastructure--how do those work and who's in charge of them? Who's actually doing this work day to day? Who should parents target? After some digging, I found some wild things.

After saw what was going on, I got mad and tweeted a thread about the confusion at the top of the Office of Facilities Management and Services. You never know what's going to get picked up on Twitter, and this thread traveled a bit. There were a bunch of comments in the thread from teachers, parents, and others interested in school facilities. Some of those people had new information I wasn't able to find too. Then I did a to organize some other info I found out about the Office of Capital Programs and got similar feedback. So here's a summary and updated info on those threads. And organization charts!

The first tutoring I remember was Kumon, the Japanese company. My parents would take me to a basement storefront in a strip mall and the tutors gave me timed worksheets to practice multiplication and long division. Then in high school I had a chemistry tutor since I was in an advanced placement (AP) course and was failing every test. And I had a private SAT tutor.

All of this private tutoring was outside the school district, run by private companies and individuals. We could afford it. The point was to get my grades and test scores up so I could get into a better college, have better job opportunities, etc, a classic story of social reproduction in 1990s American capitalism. It was an intense experience, a lot of stress and money involved.

Capitalism capitalizes on this drive to help students get a place in its structure. A “” for tutoring develops. And the more emphasis an education system places on grades and scores, the more intense that market gets, and thus the stress, anxiety, and expenditure increase.

Let's say your school buildings need fixing up. Let's also say this problem has been the case for decades and there's a machine-like city government, a neoliberal school district leadership, large teacher unions with multiple tendencies, trade unions with a lot of sway, and a powerful coalition of community organizations all dealing with the issue in their various ways. What's the strategy for socialists here?

I'm talking of course about Philadelphia, which is a terrain I know best. But this question is probably relevant for medium-large cities dealing with school infrastructure issues--or really any district dealing with bad school buildings and low revenue, whether urban, rural, or suburban. Given that 53% of school buildings need some kind of repair this is a common issue and the situation in Philadelphia might have similarities to other areas.

As I see it there are two big problems to deal with: revenue and accountability. Socialists need to consider both of these in their strategy. Here's what I think that looks like.

In May 2010, I was sitting in my apartment in the Floresta neighborhood of Quito, Ecuador and I was angry. I'd just seen James Cameron's Avatar in a theater downtown. A friend of mine had reported on indigenous groups leaving the Amazon for the first time to see this film, which was an allegory for colonial resource extraction in the rain forest. Something about the film and her article pushed me over an edge. I couldn't stand it anymore. After two years of being a high school teacher in Quito, getting to know Ecuador's history of exploitation and resistance, and reading Marx for the first time, I wanted to do something about the problems at the heart of society. I'd attended some actions in Ecuador and followed movements there. I wrote about one novel environmental policy that had caught my attention. I'd started reading about organizing, but had very little clue about what it meant.

[CW: war stuff]

I was in my high school's band room on September 11, 2001. It was 8:30am and we were all waiting to go to class, like normal. Then the band director came in with a piece of paper in his hand and a furrowed brow. He stopped halfway between the door and his conductor's podium, as though he didn't quite know where to stand to say what he had to say. Everyone got quiet.

Then he said, "There's been an attack on the United States. A plane has flown into the World Trade Center in New York City." A kid I knew named Brad, a pretty good trumpet player, shot up out of his seat. He ran for the exit. His dad worked in the World Trade Centers. We were in Danbury, CT, a medium-sized town an hour and a half north of New York City. We followed the attacks throughout the day in school, watching on TVs and refreshing news sites online.

Twenty years later, almost to the month, as American troops pull out of Afghanistan begun in 2001, Emal Ahmad was pulling into his driveway in Kabul. He was working with a nonprofit called whose is to fight malnutrition among women and children in high mortality areas of the Afghanistan. He let his teenage son drive his jeep into the house. They were met by his brother's children, toddlers and young kids, who jumped around the car. Then there was an explosion. A drone missile struck the car, gruesomely The US suspected Ahmad, specifically his car, for being involved in a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport checkpoint the previous day, killing 13 American soldiers and 80 Afghans. The US officially left the next day.

I started teaching last Monday. My university has a mask mandate but no vaccine mandate. They've been doing pretty well in the pandemic, both in terms of policy and politics, but I couldn't help being nervous. I have small classes, but I teach graduate students who are full time educators working in school buildings. We're all very conscious of our mask wearing, but there was a certain electricity the first day. We were back in person after a year and a half. Some students in a cohort had never met in person before. We sat distanced from one another. We had food but ate it outside or in between classes or alone in rooms if we could find the space.

In the back of my mind was a recent case study published by the CDC. In this case study, an elementary school teacher--unvaccinated--sometimes took her mask off during class to read to her young students, who were also unvaccinated. A number of students in the class came down with covid in the following days. The report uses contact tracing to show this, including pictures of the classroom and arrows and everything.

On August 21, the Buxmont Democratic Socialists of America invited me to give a short presentation on school funding for their lunch debt campaign. They’re working with the Debt Collective on this too. Thanks to Jason Wozniak, Ron Joseph, and other Buxmont comrades for inviting me.

The presentation was a distillation of several years’ worth of thinking about school funding as a socialist. For this week’s newsletter, with permission of the organizers, here’s the presentation with my nasally voice, slides, and all.

I’ve been getting more involved with a campaign you should know about: the Democratic Socialists of America’s Green New Deal for Schools campaign, put together by the ecosocialist working group. It’s an organizing effort with and around Jamaal Bowman’s , the for which I helped out with. There was a call recently featuring a ton of great organizers from around the country. My chapter of DSA in Philadelphia has a well-developed too, which is great. Shoutout to Duncan Gromko and Mindy Isser in Philly, and a number of other new readers doing work on this in other chapters. You should get involved! Sign up .

Electric school buses. Broadband access for all schools. Money to fix water systems in school buildings. And theater of the oppressor.

All these can be found in the ‘bipartisan’ infrastructure ‘deal’ that the Biden administration shepherded through a divided Senate. While certainly the bill is better than nothing–which had been the dominant policy over the last decade–we can and should be critical of it. Eleni Schirmer, badass researcher and organizer, asked whether I’d seen the proposed financing apparatus behind this policy at various stages of its anemic existence. I’d heard some rumblings about and harumphing in the left-populist-antimonopoly crowd on twitter, but I hadn’t dug into it. She sent me a couple pieces and, yeah, it’s something socialists interested in education should know about.

A student recently asked me something interesting. Did tax increment financing impact her school in northwest Philadelphia? We did some sleuthing and learned a bunch of interesting things about Philadelphia’s real estate development initiatives and their relationship to public schools.

We were studying Pauline Lipman’s now classic book on neoliberal urban education policy, focusing on Chicago and New Orleans. Lipman was involved in anti-school closure organizing in Chicago and the book focuses on that city’s approach to development from a critical perspective.

Her basic thesis: after the stagflation crisis of the 1970s neoliberalism replaced Keynesianism as the dominant ideology for governing and globalization brought the plague of deindustrialization, cities became handmaidens to private real estate developers. The urban ruling class wanted to make their cities thriving places without the resources industry guarantees.

There was a brief moment when school funding in the US could’ve gotten better. It was the early 1970s. After decades of court cases challenging Brown v. Board of Education, federal district judges were finally putting muscle into desegregation efforts. Bussing took center stage as a tactic to enforce Brown’s call for equal education. While it pissed a ton of people off (mostly white, but also some nonwhite) and probably wasn’t the best way to achieve equal education across racial difference, bussing was what marxists would call conjunctural: it found one of the weakest links in the chains of US oppression and hammered on it, hard.

Meanwhile, civil rights lawyers were going for the throat. They kept bringing school finance cases to state courts, showing how educational resources were illegal because they were so racist and unequal. Then a big decision came down in 1971. The California Supreme Court decided in Serrano v. Priest that the state had to provide equal school funding to every district no matter its property values. It was amazing.

Across the political spectrum and across the country, people in positions of power were racing to figure out what to do. Bussing was creating an enormous social pressure. They also didn’t want more Serrano-like decisions. There was an urgency to think transformatively about school funding systems.

Enter Richard Nixon. A conservative known for enigmatic approaches to big social problems (that sometimes feel leftwing to this day), he wanted to stop the bussing pressure and Even Derrick Bell, Jr., civil rights lawyer and co-founder of CRT, agreed. He said the way to integrate would be to desegregate the dollars.

What’s a socialist to do about the rightwing craziness around critical race theory? One thing to consider is the terrain of this situation.

Antonio Gramsci was famous for using military-landscape metaphors to describe politics. He said politics is a terrain where opposing factions fight, the victors winning hegemony in different regions of the social landscape–whether state power, culture, or economy. What’s the terrain like for this CRT thing and how should socialists orient towards it?

Context

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 good at science, math, or things like it (computers, etc) then I’d be smart and successful. Bottom line: I could make money.

I get angry now when I remember this structural hoodwink. Such bullshit. There’s been various waves of emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in United States curriculum policy. One of the biggest was during the Cold War after the Soviet Union launched its satellite Sputnik and won the space race. The existence of a strong communist presence in the world had a significant impact on US domestic policy in a number of ways (cf. the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which wouldn’t have happened with out pressure from the communist world).

One of these impacts was funding for science education, specifically to develop the population’s knowledge and skills to make sure capitalism won against communism. That legislation was called the National Defense Education Act.

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 populist socialist candidate who came from the margins of political power in the South American country to become its next leader. The election was closely watched on the left, since he was going up against Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of authoritarian Alberto Fujimori.

Besides the fact that he’s a socialist, the cool thing about Castillo–and why I wanted to write about him–is that he’s a teacher. After teaching elementary school in his rural province for years (a job that includes for his kids as well as teaching content), he got active in the teacher’s union. He came to national prominence by leading a that brought teachers from all over the country to the capital Lima and threatened the very top of Peru’s repressive apparatus.

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, which I highly recommend), but also from experiences in the classroom. Teaching is kind of like setting up and managing a tiny society and grades are a kind of of educational work.

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 weirdly. But I felt accomplished.

Our monthly mortgage payment was going up and we didn’t know why. This was double frustrating because we’d refinanced the mortgage given the low rates during the pandemic. We were saving about $200/month. Now the mortgage payment was going up a little bit more than that and I was pissed.

Not to mention that our mortgage got sold to Wells Fargo when we refinanced, which has a pretty bad reputation. We didn’t have much of a choice. Or at least I didn’t feel like we had a choice.

So I called Wells Fargo to figure this out. The reason I’m writing about it is because I’ve found that a really rich form of financial education–learning about how capitalism works–is using my own finances as a curriculum and getting customer service representatives to be my teachers (and interlocuters). I find if I ask questions and repeat what I’m hearing over and over again, I learn how some of these practices work. If I’m lucky I can catch supposed experts off guard, which happened in this case.

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 Institute statistic about teacher wages. Erstwhile Bruce Baker, who you should and , responded with his characteristic depth by citing graphs, statistics, and all kinds of other technical details to argue against the claim.

A couple weeks ago the Biden adminitration released a 60-page for funding “Education for the Disadvantaged,” or Title 1A of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. I’ve about Title 1 a couple times . It’s the law that distributes funds to poor districts.

Parents in Wyoming Valley School District in Pennsylvania were terrified and angry. The district sent a letter threatening to send their children to foster care. Why? Students in the district’s schools had increasing school lunch debt.

School lunch debt, believe it or not, is a real thing. It’s when students can’t pay for lunch and the school has to spot them. Typically, parents have to put money into accounts for their students, who swipe cards or give their ID numbers when getting the food in the cafeteria. If a student’s account is empty, then they technically can’t afford the meal. But the district is obligated to feed them. It’s a loss for everyone. Districts lose money and students get shamed. A blog post on this phenomenon of lunch shaming tells more harrowing anecdotes:

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 focus on rural districts unique, but Cyna makes a move that few others in the motley arena of school finance research make.

She rejects the characterization of school finance resource distribution as inequality. Instead, she calls the situation kleptocratic. Rather than a technical system that just so happens to be allocating resources non-optimally, Cyna says that this distribution–which favors whites across class lines, but also follows a class struggle dynamic–is an intentional theft of one group’s resources by another.

A comrade asked me a question recently about school infrastructure reimbursements. He’s interested in knowing whether there are models elsewhere in the US for ‘good’ programs where schools get what they need from the state when it comes to updating their school buildings.

Financially, this question is about capital expenditures: when districts take on big one-time projects to maintain their facilities like HVAC, heating/cooling, building updates, etc.

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 reforming Title 1 funding.

When it comes to left reform in public finance I’ve been influenced by Modern Monetary Theory. In my own reading of the paradigm, it’s a shift away from austerity brain. It breaks through restrictions on thought, debate, and imagination that lead to poorly funded programs.

MMT is more about provisioning. When I think through that lens, I start asking questions like: How can we provide people with what they need? What would it take? It’s about generosity rather than small-government balance-the-budget fastidiousness. It’s not about taking or cutting. It doesn’t ask what we have to tax or slash. (That comes later, if necessary, according to specific criteria.) It doesn’t make incorrect presumptions about inflation or insist on staying stuck in 1980s politics. The bottom line for MMT is provisioning the people.

So I’ve been sitting here thinking what a provisioning-approach would recommend when it comes to federal education spending for poor schools and districts through Title 1A of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, originally passed in 1965 as part of the War on Poverty.

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 read. It was a surreal and tense experience to be teaching history at that moment. I found it particularly challenging as an educator, so I thought I’d write out a kind of teacher journal to recount what I did and how it went.

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 it’s good to know about generally, but I’ve been wondering whether it could be used as a strategy to address contemporary problems in education finance.

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, had to explain to his daughter why their neighbors were calling them sharks. The popular fiction author John Irving felt his children were being threatened by ‘trailer envy’, pulled them out of their public schools, and started his own private school using his own money.

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 asked me why/how I started researching it.

Specifically, they asked if I’m a ‘math person’.

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 ground zero for an interesting structure for combatting unequal property values and its impacts on revenue for public education. The Minnesota Fiscal Disparities Act of 1971 set up a regional tax-base sharing program for the Twin Cities metro region that redistributes municipal revenue.

Last month, I wrote about a way of measuring exploitation at the school funding level. I call it cooperation analysis, since the numbers speak to the extent to which school districts are cooperating with one another across racialized property valuation.

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 education.

But like I mentioned last time, an obvious question haunts that demand: where is this money going? What apparatus will spend it? Will they manage it well? Can they handle it?

Parents, students, and community members are struggling with this question now that American Rescue Plan money is available. Do districts have the capacity to spend money well? What does that look like?

The American Rescue Plan is coming to your town soon if it hasn’t already. The dollars are flowing.

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.

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. Then I analyzed a 2020 issuance here.

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 passover seder. I couldn’t stop myself from reading it when Thisbe our ten-month old woke me up crying one night. I tweeted a lot.

I think I finally came to some understanding about the Philadelphia Authority for Industrial Development’s (PAID) limited offering memorandum on a nearly $53 million bond it issued last year.

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 book coming out soon. Look her up!

She mentioned that, while researching her book, she found herself reading the minutes of school board meetings from the 1960s, and when she got to the parts about funding she got frustrated—what does this stuff mean? That’s the work I’ve been doing recently, and I asked if she had a sense of any important bond issuances from the minutes she’d been reading.

She and another colleague mentioned a $55 million bond issuance in 2013 that enabled String Theory Charter Schools to purchase a corporate office building on 1600 Vine Street. Reporting at the time the bond the “largest in the city’s history.”

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 Burgos, who’s running for City Council there, mentioned that a constituent was wondering where the money for schools went.

Loans like the bond issuance are only part of the story. We should look at the grants also, which come from taxes.

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 doing this for a couple reasons.

As I said, I’ve wanted to focus on a district I don’t know about; maybe to test my chops and maybe to get out of the Pennsylvania context for a bit and try to examine a school district and capitalism in a different region.

I’m focusing on Yonkers specifically because a friend of mine is running an insurgent left campaign there for city council. He’s trying to unseat a conservative Democrat and he said it’d be nice to see some analysis of the district. I’ve also been working with Jamaal Bowman’s office on school funding, and Yonkers is right in Bowman’s congressional district.

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 City Council had some tough decisions to make. How to close the gap?

Council ultimately decides how much to allocate for the school district (a pretty unique arrangement), and they did fill the gap. But not without some pretty eyebrow-raising moves.

Publicly, Council did some good ol’ union to justify the new budget, noting that the Yonkers Federation of Teachers wasn’t budging on a less-than-two-percent pay increase demand.

This week something really exciting happened.

Jamaal Bowman announced support for a Green New Deal for Schools initiative, focusing on infrastructure and pandemic safety.

I played a small role in an awesome team working on this proposal, which was led by Akira Drake Rodriguez at the at University of Pennsylvania.

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 learned to look.

Start with data banks. The Civil Rights Data Collection has racial demographics as well as good population numbers per school district and at the school level. Reporting waned under Trump, which is a crime. The National Center for Education Statistics also has fine-grained, more up-to-date district-level data but without the civil rights angle.

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 up and come to the event! It’s today at 430pm EST.)

Since certified badass City Councilwoman Kendra Brooks is introducing a resolution supporting this demand, I thought I’d lay out some talking points to people who might not be convinced this is a good idea.

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 little.

The United States Treasury ten year bond yield went up. To almost

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 dollars betting on interest rates. They made a deal betting that the rates would go a certain direction (in this case up), but the rates have stayed so low that they now owe Wall Street money.

It’s called an interest rate swap. And yes, school districts do it.

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 capitalism.

I like the image of cell structure because cells are small, everywhere, and have a definite structure that makes an entire living system go. They’re decentralized but work coherently. They’re small compared to bigger features of bodies, like organs or blood or skin.

But if you change the cell structure of a body, you change the whole thing. I’m pretty sure the same is true for school districts when comes to racial capitalism in the United States.

Just think about what’s involved in school district lines.

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 and then in the north of Minnesota in 1995.

This system is pretty cool. It’s not perfect but it’s the kind of thing we should look at when thinking about how to reduce inequalities between local governments with radically different property values.

Here’s a quick post on what tax-base sharing is and how it works.

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 his work debunking the idea that automation creates unemployment.

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

It’s a predictable move. Wolf had already to fix lead and asbestos in school buildings before the pandemic. To finance it, he wanted to increase money in the (RACP). Plus there’s probably going to be some kind of money from the Biden administration for this purpose.

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 very much exploring this option.

If Philly does apply for these funds, and if the money can go towards infrastructure improvements like ventilation systems (which they should), I think school district leaders and education organizers should make two things very clear:

1) These funds must not be rigidly tied to a reopening schedule that outpaces vaccination. We can’t have districts taking money on the condition that they’ll reopen independently of teachers, students, and families getting vaccinated. and schools should get money for improvements either way.

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 safely reopening.

These funds can go towards things like ventilation infrastructure, something schools across the country need, particularly Philadelphia.

During the Democratic presidential primary, I noticed something weird.

Bernie Sanders was obviously the leftist candidate, Biden the moderate, and Warren somewhere in between. The gap between Sanders and Biden was obvious in almost every way.

Except federal school funding.

Both Biden and Sanders said they’d triple Title 1 funds on their education platforms. Warren even said quadruple at one point.

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 projects through its Loan Programs Office, and there’s $40 billion left over from the 2009 crisis that Biden oversaw. I thought maybe our school district could get one of these loans and fix its buildings.

Turns out the answer is no, but I learned a couple things when looking into it.

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 global crisis as Vice President.

The morsel is about $40 billion in unused loan authority.

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 researching mRNA vaccines since the beginning of her career.

My mother’s side of the family is Hungarian and there’s a some heritage-type pride there (not to mention the Philly connection), so I read a bit about Karikó’s story. She did her PhD in Hungary at the University of Szeged in the 1970s, which was when she got interested in mRNA.

The date caught my eye. Hungary had a market socialist economy at that time. I got to wondering about the political-economic situation when she was going to school, particularly the relationship between the socialist economy and the university.

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, which Trump has just signed into law.

But a couple things I read today are giving me more hope, optimism, and even ideas.

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 repressive state apparatus, so I was curious to keep exploring.

CFA’s the kind of entity, like the Metro Transit Authority in New York City, that could apply for a Municipal Liquidity facility loan. It issues all kinds of bonds on behalf of the state, including revenue bonds meant for specific purposes like transportation.

The website describes it in the following terms:

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 Pennsylvania is who—which entity—should apply for a bond issuance.

I’ve mentioned this issue before. It’s confusing. At first, it seemed to me that school districts themselves should apply. They’re the ones that create their budgets and fund and finance those budgets. But school districts aren’t eligible issuers to the MLF since they don’t issue revenue bonds.

But funding for school infrastructure projects have a unique financing structure in Pennsylvania. Districts can actually get reimbursed by the state for infrastructure projects through a set of forms called the School Construction and Facilities Workbook (known as PlanCon for short).

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 track as many possible angles on this as I can, specifically oriented towards a campaign to get better terms on MLF loans so state and local governments can the provisions they need. I’m particularly interested in improving school infrastructure given my home city Philadelphia’s struggles with infrastructure.

In the last couple weeks there have been a ton of interesting tidbits in the news on this front. I haven’t pulled these together into an essay. Not sure if it’s because Thisbe’s not sleeping well, I’m applying for tenure, or the presidential election is threatening to crack open an already faltering US social structure—whatever it is, my brain is scrambled. So I rounded up some links and images. Enjoy!

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 out an MLF loan. Part 2 crunched some numbers for that proposal. detailed criteria for eligibility. This part will lay out politics and strategy.

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 wanted to have a better handle on finance in general, but particularly as part of my research on school funding and socialism.

So I started inhaling business, market, finance, and economic news during the crisis. I made a list of websites tracking business and economic news (so far Trading Economics is the best site I’ve found). I got a subscription to Bloomberg. I even found a way to access Bloomberg terminals at my campus (which I couldn’t because of the virus). I worked my way through some modules of CORE-Econ. I read a great marxist history of the Federal Reserve and Skidelsky’s Keynes biography before going to sleep.

Podcasts ended up being the best. I could clean the house, walk the dog, cook meals, and change diapers/feed Thisbe and hear about exchange-traded funds, the relative importance and weakness of sentiment indexes, and currency swaps.

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 material lives together. The state, more or less, helps make sure that material life stays a certain way over time.

Seems like there are *big* problems in both parts of society and that they might run into each other, at least in the US.

In the economy, the biggest issue I see is the severity of unevenness. It's been a 'global' economy where countries work together really closely, but some countries are okay and others really aren't. The difference between Europe, Latin America, the US and China, eg, in terms of the virus, is wildly uneven (both within those regions and between those regions).

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 table for a bit to air out her butt, diaper rash sucks— so here’s what I gathered.

Things are freakin uneven. As economies across the world ‘reopen’ and central banks continue their bigass responses, some things are looking up. In the US, retail went through the roof in May and the housing market is very strong.

At the same time the stonks have been going up fueled, they say, by young retail day traders who don’t have sports to bet on anymore and started watching the stock market instead. The Fed is also just positively doping up the situation. Any bad news comes with fresh commitments to unlimited easing forever, zero rates forever, and facilities up the wazoo to loan to anyone and everyone, from corporate junk to municipalities to small businesses.

Of course the paycheck program is ending and the country just went through an intense uprising, so instead of being all “well if we pay the people they won’t want to work bar bar bar” electeds are talking up fiscal measures: big infrastructure projects! More paycheck protection! Free vacation money! Squeeee!

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 in response to George Floyd's murder. Hundreds of thousands of people are rallying to demand defunding police and generally weaken repressive force in the US and elsewhere.

At the same time, there's a stock market 'rally'. I don't want to be glib, but it's true: ruling class investors are flocking to equities and 2020 losses in the DOW jones have been erased in the last few weeks. There's been a huge increase.

I only mention the pun because the two rallies, while diametrically opposed (one is leftwing and the other rightwing), are connected.

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 occupied. I want to keep writing though! It helps me keep my head above water somehow.

***

I've been hearing some socialists, like , say that the US is a failed state and others on social media saying it’s end times for the economy.

Something else about the business news, finance, market discourses I've been thinking about. This discourse is clearly a ruling class discourse. But what that means is complex and uneven, and articulates with all kinds of relations.

It's a capitalist discourse that is for and by the people who own and control the means of production. It's a discourse for people in the dominant position of capitalist relations of exploitation.

But that relation of exploitation is articulated with others when it comes to finance, like relations of white supremacy, patriarchy, and ability in particular. (I’m with Stuart Hall when it comes to thinking about how ‘class’ relates to things like ‘race’, etc: the latter is one way the former is lived.)

I'm just starting to get a handle on the effectivity of these relations when they work together in the discourse itself (which is anchored in the practices of business, finance, and markets). It's really pointed and effective.

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 the labor movement. I learned a couple things that could have implications for the labor movement from the newest episode of the historically-informed, persnickety, and libertarian finance podcast Grant's Interest Observer podcast.

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 economic model, which ran from 1956 until oil and stagflation crises of the 1970s and 1980s. It’s really interesting!

In general I’m interested in forging socialist concepts for finance so that when I read the business news I can know where I stand.

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 I’m reading more Joanna Bockman, this time her book Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Originas of Neoliberalism.

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 capitalist: we'll have to fund our budgets in socialism too.

The issue is how to win hegemony for socialist finance and end the dominance of capitalist finance.

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 brewing.

Obviously there was a housing crisis before the pandemic. But I’m wondering if the production crisis is causing one in finance/whether the capitalists are going to care about it.

TL;DR: don’t think so, but it’s interesting to sniff around.

Just for fun I went back and skimmed Engels’ I didn’t find much of relevant to today. The dislocations he’s talking about there had to do with the transition between agricultural and industrial modes of production. The preface is pretty fun.

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 these numbers. The case numbers, death count, number of new cases, etc. determine confidence and sentiment and basically whether things can open back up.

I heard on a finance podcast that traders are calling their home office setups “RonaRigs” with lots of screens, but they get pissed when their internet bugs out and they don’t get up to date numbers.

But the numbers are…not exactly real.

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’ (myooneys) as they’re affectionately called form a nearly $4 trillion market that’s super relevant to my own research in school funding. These bonds finance everything socialists want more of, at least in terms of government programs.

So I decided to take my anxiety down the muni market rabbit hole. (Get it? Muni me?)

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 starting at around 27:00.

The host presents a pretty big contradiction from the last week: the stock market just had its best week since 1974. But then almost 17 million people are out of a job.

Which leaves a big policy question.

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 bonds in the private sector and junk municipal bonds).

Yahoo Finance is saying the Fed is “seizing control” of the bond market. Forbes is it “community quantitative easing.” The truth is probably somewhere in between.

Remember that scene from Me, You, and Everyone We Know where the little boy says

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 during the coronavirus crisis compared to the financial crisis in 2008.

The article is saying that corporate credit spreads on high-rated corporate bonds shot up to 4% during the pandemic. ’s one graph that shows the spike for Bank of America BBB credit.

(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 joblessness in the United States, I came across one pretty sobering effect: suicide.

In a 2011 paper, Classen and Dunn found that joblessness meaningfully correlates with suicide. They found two things, one heartening and the other not so heartening.

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 summary. Below is my attempt. (He subsequently said I did pretty well!)

To me, this article is saying that one of the reasons the market is going down is that after years of low interest rates, finance capitalism is full of certain kinds of leveraging practices that can't take the stress of the production crisis resulting from coronavirus.

I know you're dying to know about some sneaky leverage in the pandemic relief package signed last week!

Apparently there's $454 billion of this package that "could then be placed into a “credit facility” and levered up 10-1," according to David Dayen at American Prospect. 

I guess this must be part of the $500 billion going to corporations? See Adam Tooze's breakdown here: 

We obviously want people to recover from COVID-19, but when it comes to society as a whole there's going to be a bigger recovery from the structural impact of the virus that effects everyone.

The pandemic caused an infection in capitalism too. Even if you recovered from the virus, you'll have to recover from the economic crisis it’s causing.

Here's a podcast whose first segment is really interesting on this, though it might not seem like it at first. It’s about bond markets. I’ve been dealing with my anxiety around the pandemic by looking into wonky capitalist stuff that socialists don’t tend to talk about. I’m an education researcher, but what happens in places like bond markets really impacts public education. So here we are.

Welcome to Schooling in Socialist America by me, David I. Backer. education, ideology, policy, socialism (@lilacphilly + @phillysocfem), puns, etc. he/him. asst prof of social foundations of education

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