The first iteration of this newsletter was a series of posts on my blog, but they weren't about socialism and school finance. Before the pandemic started, as my pregnant partner's due date was approaching, I decided to start a research/writing project about where this child would go to school. I've read a lot of critiques of neoliberal education policy and practice in cities, but I haven't seen too many personal accounts from socialist parents navigating that reality.
Before the pandemic set in, I was going to focus exclusively on this project: writing, researching, and organizing around our own elementary school choice process in Philadelphia. The question weighed on me. The problem of privatizing public education, neighborhood schools being weakened by marketization, had been weighing on me politically and intellectually since I started studying education, but it became so much more personal as my partner's pregnancy advanced. This child would have to participate in this system and we'd have to guide them.
But when the pandemic hit, I got knocked off course with everyone else. The baby was only a couple months away from arriving and my anxiety got me fearing the worst. I started studying finance more in-depth. I was partially dissociating to relieve the anxiety to distract myself, but I'd also wanted to go really deep into municipal finance so I could talk more confidently about school funding. The school choice project took a back seat.
Time rolled on. Thisbe started daycare recently. She's turning two in May. The pandemic's machinations are sort of old hat and, feeling confident about my finance-speak skills, I started thinking about the school choice question again. We've still got about three years until we really have to make a decision, but research and organizing take a long time and I'd like whatever we do to be intentional, informed by solidarity, and obviously what's good for Thisbe. So a couple weeks ago I took out my notes from 2020, dusted them off, and got writing. I ended up learning something I didn't expect. (This is a long post, so I won't bury the lead: after reading, thinking, and talking to people I've concluded that you should just send your child to your catchment school and don't think about it too much!)