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I'm a member of the Education Justice Committee of Philadelphia DSA, a group of parents, teachers, former teachers, and policy nerds. We've been active participants in the Our City Our Schools coalition in the city, a big-tent group of organizations that is a powerful force. Part of our committee work is supporting the coalition's ongoing fight around school facilities in the School District of Philadelphia. I'm going to take this opportunity to brag a little. We recently did operational and logistical work with Parents Home and School Coalition to put on an Environmental Art Show outside City Hall (we secured easels and helped with set up/take down, eg). We're helping put together a Green New Deal for Schools platform for Paul Prescod's primary campaign. We're organizing parents, students, and teachers to measure carbon dioxide in classrooms to reveal the depth of the school infrastructure problem. We're doing advocacy around facilities-related policy issues like lead in school water, oversight of school facilities, and the ways school funding ties with the nascent Philadelphia Public Bank. We also organize watch parties for school board meetings on Twitch, helping members write and then give testimony. We've had open meetings featuring local parents' research on Penn's relationship with elementary schools, as well as a socialist watch party for the sitcom Abbott Elementary. I'm so proud of our group.

I can't emphasize enough how important it is to join an organizing group. I don't think you can properly understand issues and work to change them if you're not actively going to meetings, helping with campaigns, and "doing the work." I'd say you should join a nearby DSA chapter or start one in your area. But there are a ton of other groups to DSA's left and right that do good work--find one and join!

In praise of reading groups

One thing I like about organizing is reading groups. While they can sometimes feel small, niche, and esoteric the themes that come up when learning new concepts and arguments, particularly as they apply to terrains of organizing, can make a big difference. A new perspective on a tiny idea can have big implications for strategy, tactics, and solidarity. This challenge to deep ideas among people in the struggle is a key part of political education. I had an experience recently in a small reading group in the Democratic Socialists of America that is having that kind of impact on me.

I recently got invited to be on a panel, the first ever Environmental Forum at Lower Merion High School. The organizer was a high school student there who is quite involved in local progressive politics. We'd connected in the Philly DSA Slack channel when he asked if any organizers or academics knowledgeable about climate change, green infrastructure, the Green New Deal, etc. were able to come speak. I volunteered and found myself in a fascinating situation.

I was interested in doing the event for a few reasons. If a students asks for something then I tend to say yes unless it's a very unreasonable request. But also, Lower Merion is a sort of (in)famous school district in the Philadelphia region. I'm constantly bringing it up and seeing others bring it up in discussions about school funding injustice. I wrote about it in Dissent and mentioned it on a podcast. I just wrote a post about it. Something in the balance of forces points to Lower Merion. I also try to get in on policy debates because I always learn more when I'm in these situations and it's an opportunity to tell others about things I'm thinking about. I've found that doing policy research expands the concept of publication. Anytime I can make public statements advocating for transformative policies that push back capitalism, I consider it publication (which is much easier to do now that I have tenure, of course).

Getting there

It was pouring rain. Teeming. Sitting at home, I didn't want to go anywhere but I've been trying to go out more to get myself out of the house after two years of hunkering down. Pandemic parenthood will do that to you. So I finished teaching my class online and drove north thirty minutes to Lower Merion. I nearly had to pull over because of the rain. Local reporting the day after said it was some of the hardest and most torrential rain the region had seen historically, which set a bleak tone for the environmental forum.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine I've been doomscrolling the war, trying to hash out what the socialist position is/should be, and hoping it doesn't go nuclear. I've obviously been thinking about it from the perspective of education too. Aside from terrifying images of universities bursting into flames from missile attacks and reports of teachers and students dropping their pencils and picking up guns (and Russian students going to prison for demonstrating), I've been wondering what the education systems are like in Ukraine and Russia and what this conflict looks like from the point of view of schools.

I haven't wanted to opportunistically claim any expertise in their education systems, so everything I say comes with that grain of salt. At the same time, I think it's a good opportunity to start understanding other countries' structures. And maybe even more, I think looking at education can help illuminate features of national/international dynamics that mainstream political and military reporting can't capture.

Indeed, after doing some poking around, I found a fascinating educational history and politics that shows how complicated things in Ukraine have been. In particular, I'm interested in the regional controversy surrounding a new education law in Ukraine passed in 2017.

Watch your language

If you don't know about it, Raging Chicken Media is a great progressive source of Pennsylvania news and analysis. They asked me to come on for an interview recently and it was a great opportunity to talk through all the themes of this newsletter.

The occasion was my essay in Dissent on school building finance, socialism, and the pandemic. This week I'm sending along links to my interview for some audio content. Enjoy!

Recently, a student in one of my classes did a great presentation on a court case in her school district: Lower Merion (LMSD). LMSD has a certain reputation in the Philadelphia area for being wealthy and white, particularly since it borders Philadelphia. If you ask people in the city and in Lower Merion about this dynamic, they know immediately what you're talking about. I once met a lefty lawyer who grew up in Philadelphia and was a public defender in the city. When he had kids and the time came to send them to school, they moved the family to Lower Merion. He loved the city, had fought for justice there his whole career, but he felt he had to go to Lower Merion 'for the good schools'. I think this trend of professional-managerial class people--and maybe even working class people--moving to suburbs for the schools is one of the cornerstones of racial capitalism.

Indeed, LMSD has one of the highest average property values in the region and their schools are highly rated, have lots of resources, and depending on which statistic you look at, serve a population of students more than two-thirds white. There are a lot of complex dynamics here and it can be hard to explain all of them. But my student's presentation captures almost all these issues and more.

Wolk puppies

"Stay woke" is a contentious phrase right now. It actually derives from a recording of the great blues musician Leadbelly talking about a song he wrote for the Scottsboro Boys, a group of Black men falsely accused of raping and murdering a white woman in Alabama in the 1930s. Their cause was taken up by the Communist Party-USA and was a crucial terrain of contention for Black communists and socialists at that time (particularly because the NAACP didn't want to fight on it). 'Wokeness' has unfortunately come to refer to a superficial identity politics. I mention all this because I can't get the pun of "Wolkness" out of my head with the story of Lower Merion I'm about to tell. Wolkness is a whole other thing.

I talked to a superintendent the other day. I met him on twitter when I was trying to put together an illustration of how school bonds work and asking for help (see below). He said he'd be happy to talk to me on the phone to walk me through his experience. When we talked, he said he appreciated that fact that I was putting that slide together since, in all of his training to be a school leader, no one talked to him about bonds, even though they'd turned out to be a cornerstone of his work as an upper-level administrator. He said talking about bonds is important for material reasons: since he didn't have any knowledge about them, he was forced to trust whatever financial advisors and business managers told him. This made it harder to make decisions and to know for sure whether he'd be saving taxpayer money or spending it poorly.

We know that there's an information gap between school leaders and finance experts. Amanda Kass, Martin Luby, and Rachel Weber have a great paper on how that gap cost the Chicago Schools $100 million when they decided to buy swaps in the early 2000s, all of which tanked in the 2008 financial crisis. If school leaders had more knowledge and information maybe they wouldn't have let that happen.

I got my opportunity this semester to put this lesson into practice. I started teaching in a new principalship program this year. These programs prepare students, who are mostly veteran classroom teachers, to be principals of school buildings. My class looks at legal and financial issues. The director of the program told me to make sure that students know how budgets work, but other than that I had free rein. So I decided to make the first half of the course about budgets and the second half about bonds.

One my favorite parts of teaching teachers about education is assigning presentations. I ask students to do a presentation about some legal, financial, social, or economic aspect of their school districts. I always learn a ton and students get to analyze the complex social conditions they live in every day. I also try to take advantage of this opportunity. In every class, I give an example presentation on the Philadelphia school district to show students what I mean and also do some digging into my own school district. For the second half of my principalship course, I decided to do a presentation on a green bond that the School District of Philadelphia issued last year. I wanted to know what makes a green bond green, but also what it means for a school district to issue one. I like to make myself a student in my classes and indeed, I learned a lot by doing this presentation.

If you've ever seen the movie Bad Education, you know that shady stuff can happen in school districts. Some of it happens in procurement and bidding, which is where district officials oversee contracts with outside vendors for all kinds of services, including--and perhaps biggest of all--facilities and construction work. It's really important to understand this process for two reasons.

First, it's important when holding districts accountable for their spending. As happened in the movie (and happens all time throughout the country) procurement administrators watch as millions of dollars flow back and forth. They get tempted to skim, scoop, and embezzle.

Second, there are strict laws around procurement particularly when it comes to school facilities and construction. If we want a Green New Deal for Schools that calls for big zero-emission construction projects in school facilities, we have to know what kind of policies are in place around school construction. Procurement and bidding is a complex mess that can differ from state to state and even district to district. As usual, I'm looking at Philadelphia where I live to try and understand it using an ecosocialist lens.

Are you bidding me?

When I got interested in school bonds, a friend and comrade who had done some research work for climate groups told me to look at a Bloomberg terminal. I was listening to finance podcasts and scanning long PDFs of bond documents at the time, trying to get a better sense of what all these data and laws meant in municipal finance. She said it would help. The experience of finding and using this technology was strange and wonderful but in a bitter sort of way.

When I looked up Bloomberg terminals I was shocked. To get a subscription for the most basic version of the terminal, which is really just a platform, is around $26,000. That's nearing a third of my yearly salary, a year's worth of payments on my mortgage, just slightly more than a year of Thisbe's childcare. Not going to happen. What the hell are these things anyway?

The terminals are like a finance Skynet. They have constantly updated information on all kinds of information relating to investment. All the finance bros are glued to them because it's where you see the prices of things go up and down in real time, but with ready to hand context news, background data, and historical trends. The finance journalists I was following were always posting screenshots of their Bloomberg terminals I realized.

The screen is weird looking: it's a black background with orange, white, blue, and green text and has a 1980s DOS-style look. The keyboard is also funny looking. It's got bright green and red buttons with totally different commands than a typical keyboard.

A couple weeks ago I testified to the Philadelphia City Council in favor of legislation that would take a step closer towards creating a public bank for the city. I was helping out with the Philly DSA initiative to support the coalition behind this demand (led by the inimitable group Neighborhood Networks), which would be the first of its kind in an American city. My testimony was short but I tried to make it punchy. I can report a victory here: city council voted 17-1 to pass the bill! Philly took one big step closer to having its own public bank, the significance I try to explain below.

Good afternoon Councilmembers, 

My name is David I. Backer. I’m a professor of education policy at West Chester University. I live in West Philly, I’m a member of Philly DSA, and I’m a parent to a two year old who will attend Philly public schools. 

As a scholar of school finance and a parent, I am thrilled to support the creation of a Philadelphia Public Finance Authority. The connection between school finance and this authority might be a little obscure, so my testimony tries to make this clear.

Philadelphia’s school buildings are in dire need of transformative financing. The buildings are old and due to structural injustices the district and city have not been able to keep up with their maintenance. A public finance authority such as the one considered today would help. How?

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!)

There's a lot that's dangerous about the rightwing campaign against critical race theory in schools. One of the less obvious dangers is how it advances of the school choice movement. While there's anti-CRT rhetoric in bills going through Republican state legislatures, there are also clauses therein to more fully privatize public school systems throughout the country. In some cases it looks like the CRT rhetoric is just a front for the school choice project. I'm thinking of New Hampshire's new education success account program in particular, but there are other examples. Jennifer Berkshire has documented this as well. This came up for me recently, since I unexpectedly came upon a fascinating history of the school choice movement.

The other day I was walking around my neighborhood and found a copy of Jane Mayer's Dark Money, which if you haven't read, you should. It puts the emergence of the ethnofascy ideology of today's right in the US in a helpful historical light. The basic story is that certain billionaires in this country were raised by Gilded Age robber barons. Their fathers and grandfathers lamented the existence of income taxes and any government action at all. They saw the Russian Revolution, the 1929 stock market crash, and the New Deal as the end of days and adopted a radical, resentful, and voracious form of libertarianism as a kind of political antidote. They came to see the market as flawless savior from government evil. Ultimately of course, rather than some righteous cause, this ideology served their bloated bottom line. And when the 2008 crash happened and Obama got elected, they all heard their fathers' ghosts and thought the communist revolution was coming.

Anyway, in Mayer's history of billionaire financing and political organizing, I was surprised to see a history of how the school choice movement got off the ground in Dark Money. I didn't know school choice as we know it, which started in Milwaukee, got its funding from one of these new robber barons.

Octopus

I'm working on a research project looking at racial discrimination in school bond issuance (with the amazing Eleni Schirmer). Part of this project requires doing some initial data collection to see whether predominantly white school districts get better bond deals than more diverse districts. So along with grad students Tia Allen and Heidi Kern, we're combing through school bond documents to find interest rates and cost of issuances across segregated districts all over the country.

I know I'm a nerd, but this is a new favorite activity for me: looking through bond official statements. These bond deals are a touchpoint for capitalism and education, so reading documents reporting on them is like seeing the matrix code of flowing characters behind how school finance really works.

In this process we came across a knot that needed untangling. We were looking for recent bond issuances done by the Rochester City School District in upstate New York.

In doing all this research, I've it's important to remember that these are actual living and breathing places, not just bundles of numbers. Studying school finance is a perfect example of Marx's concept of exchange value: when you think about a school district as a commodity that can be bought and sold (like we have to for municipal bonds), the material substance of the district gets put out of sight in favor of its exchange value. The district and its schools, its students, teachers, parents, community members, all the educational experiences and labor it contains, get reduced to a flat and abstracted credit rating, price, or interest rate. F**k that!

Sometimes K-12 & higher education look disconnected, particularly when it comes to money. But in Philly, the University of Pennsylvania has done and is doing some wild stuff with elementary schools in its neighborhood. It's a great case study of neoliberal urban development, dispossession, and school funding in racial capitalism.

The story starts in West Philly. People hear that and sing the song from Fresh Prince of Bel Air (Will Smith attended Overbrook schools here). Overbrook is north of University City, where UPenn--indeed, acting like a feudal Prince--has flip-turned the area upside down.

UPenn has done this through a suite of real estate acquisitions and programs. One was helping with housing costs when Penn employees buy houses in West Philly. They have an office devoted to Homeownership Services. My house for example was owned by a facilities worker at Penn, a black woman who was part of that program and appreciated it in our conversations about the house and her time here.

A recent study by Meagan Ehlenz in the Urban Affairs Review notes that overall, Penn's West Philly Initiatives (WPI) in the University City District "improved but did not gentrify" between 1990-2010. But there's a lot more to that story.

Oxford Area High School in Michigan recently re-opened for the first time after a devastating school shooting last year. It got me thinking about school shootings generally. They're terrifying and a uniquely American thing haunting my generation. I remember being in high school in 1999 when the Columbine shooting happened in Colorado. I had friends and acquaintances, mostly nerds of various kinds, who wore black trenchcoats to school. It was a goth-ish kind of thing. They stopped doing that. The fear of a student coming into the building with a gun and firing has since stuck around with the exponential increase of such shootings in the last thirty years.

Recent shootings have only gotten more intense. The rampage in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, for example, a small town right next door to where I grew up in Danbury, CT. My middle school math teacher's wife was the principal at that school. She was shot along with a large group of young kids. Unimaginable. And then the shooting in Parkland, Florida that killed a record number of high school students. The list goes on. When I taught at a community college in New York City, the security team showed us the footage of the Columbine shooting in its entirety as part of their training and just that experience of witnessing the video was scarring.

When I go to campus I often imagine a student opening fire, either outdoors or in a hallway, and think about what I would do in that situation. I try not to think like that too much but it's hard. Working in education, having been a teacher and now teaching teachers, I've developed a numbness to these events. What can you do other than read and talk about it and then try not to think about it? Something I've realized though is that I don't have a ready-to-hand socialist take on school shootings. What's the socialist position on this?

What socialists say

I've been working with and around schools for a long time. I taught in high schools while in college, taught full time high school for five years after I graduated, then did a doctorate in education. Now I'm teaching people who work in schools about school, specifically education policy and law and social context. So it was, to use a technical term, a mindf**k for me when we dropped Thisbe off at daycare for the first time a couple weeks ago.

She's almost two, a pandemic baby, born in May 2020. She hasn't known a world outside of the shutdowns. She doesn't know about restaurants or stores or big parties (aside from what we've been able to do outside). She also doesn't really know what it's like not to be at home with us. We've traveled and visited family, but the majority of our time has been at home because we've parented with the perpetual fear that Thisbe will contract a novel coronavirus and get sick, maybe have to go on a ventilator, maybe die, maybe give it to us and make us very sick, maybe give it to people we love who will get sick and die. They call it pandemic parenting. You get used to it.

The whole childcare situation is overwhelming and full of fodder for thinking about how society could be different. Here's what I've seen and felt.

The daycare hierarchy

A Trump tweet inspired blockchain-based mini muni bonds. This sentence isn't something I ever thought I'd find myself writing, but here we are.

Apparently, when fascy provocateur Milo Yiannopoulous was deplatformed at University of California-Berkeley in 2017, Trump threatened the city's federal funding in one his infamous tweets. The city government got to thinking: um, maybe we should be looking at alternative sources of revenue.

A local politician, city council member Ben Bartlett, is big into crypto and made a proposal: what if the city sells minibonds to our own residents using the blockchain? The city said yeah, okay. So they're actually doing it! Municipal bonds are a key source of revenue for school districts, and everyone's talking about blockchain this and crytpo that, so this Berkeley thing could portend a new frontier in school finance. Let's take this idea apart piece by piece.

This is your minibond

Twitter is an interesting place. There's a lot that toxic about it, but when it comes to intellectual debates and the life of ideas there's nothing like it.

A few weeks ago, a debate burst open on twitter about whether to keep schools open in the omicron surge. I commented on a few threads published by writers with big followings, pointing out the systematic for-profit underfunding of school infrastructure, specifically ventilation systems. (This led to me writing a thread spelling out the basics of the private credit system behind school facilities finance that got a little attention.)

One of my comments on a tweet by Helaine Olen inspired some responses. These responses used some common conservative ideology about school funding. Sometimes I get sucked in and try to gain ground on these ideologies by picking apart comments, pushing back and trying to convince people to change their minds. This mostly doesn't work, but I got close on Olen's thread. I ended up going back and forth with a person in suburban Wisconsin whom I've never met for quite awhile. Our dialogue shows some of the strengths of twitter dialogue on school funding, but also its limitations.

My interlocutor was called Platinum Burm, whose handle is @BURMESEMOM. I'll call them Platinum and refer to them as her given the word 'mom' in her handle. Here's how our public convo went down and the common school finance ideologies at play in it.

As I'm writing this post, there's a stormy debate about whether keep schools open in the omicron surge. By the time this post goes out, there may have been some resolution, but I thought I'd try to capture this moment from within the din.

There are two sides to the debate: keep schools open or close them. This is all happening in a political-economic context that gets some play in the debate but probably not as much as it should. I'll summarize the various positions and get to this context last, pointing to what I think is the socialist take.

Keep them open

Proponents of keeping schools open show how devastating school closure has been throughout the pandemic. There's a chorus of voices supporting this position, mostly rightwingers and moderates. The moderates point to learning loss and other associated impacts on kids when their schools close. David Leonhardt summarized the premises and conclusion of this case well in a long, devastating thread based on his writing in the New York Times. He points to sinking test scores, suicide, gun violence, and other impacts juxtaposed with studies showing how covid in students is relatively mild. Economist Emily Oster has been an academic voice in this chorus, along with journalists Helaine Olen, Ross Barkan, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot, New York's new mayor Eric Adams, and members of the Biden Administration like Ronald Klein and Miguel Cardona. But it was not just moderates. Krystal Ball did a keep-them-open segment on her 'populist' show Breaking Points and Nicole Hannah-Jones, author of the 1619 Project, came out with a similar take.

Libertarians can be funny sometimes. A piece from the Commonwealth Foundation, a Koch-funded think tank focusing on Pennsylvania policy, opens with a riff on the ancient buddhist koan "if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?" In this post, they ask "if a tax is on the books and no one knows it, does it matter?"

The answer is maybe. It turns out that Philadelphia's hasn't been collecting a tax that could bring in money for its revenue-starved school district.

SIT down

The tax's formal name is the School Income Tax, or SIT. It's a tax on unearned income. Here's the regulation language itself:

It sounded like a 1950s red scare moment, but it happened in November 2021. Republican Senator John Kennedy, in a southern twang, told a Biden nominee during her confirmation hearing "I don't know whether to call you colleague or comrade." He asked whether she'd formally left the Kosumol, a Soviet youth league.

Kennedy was trying to delegitimize Saule Omarova, a candidate for the Comptroller of the Currency in the Biden Administration. Indeed, she was born in Soviet Russia but gave up her citizenship decades ago. She has since worked in conservative administrations. But Kennedy couldn't help grilling her on her membership in the Communist Party.

Ryan Grim did a great summary of the moment and what was at stake in it. Omarova has actually been proposed some radical financial things during her time in the academy since she last worked in the Treasury Department under the second Bush Administration. The absurdity of Kennedy's comments even had his own party members shaking their heads and apologizing on his behalf. But like so many references to the US's Cold War history, this red baiting reference resonated in an outsized way. For a brief moment, communism was viral in the news cycle (like that time Bernie Sanders said it was true and good that Fidel Castro increased his people's literacy rate exponentially after the Cuban Revolution--which, btw, is true.)

And yet. The stuff Omarova worked on at Cornell as a professor, and its implications for school finance--specifically school building finance--is actually really interesting. Capitalists in both political parties had good reason to attack her. She has created a framework for infrastructure investment policy that any practical-minded communist now would most likely feel okay about.

On 12/15, I testified before the Children and Youth and Finance Committees in Philadelphia's City Council. The hearing, focusing on how to fund a school modernization initiative, was organized by Councilwoman Helen Gym's office. The testimony only gets to be between 2-4 minutes. Here's the extended draft of what I wrote at first, which I then whittled way down. These extended comments are also a kind of year in review post for me, as they draw from lots of the writing I've done in this newsletter.

Dear Committee members,

I am in the confounding position of being a former high school teacher, a professor of education policy, and the parent of a toddler in West Philadelphia. Having become somewhat familiar with the system into which our child Thisbe will spend a great deal of her life, I am angry and sad. I stand with thousands of parents and other community members who are impacted by sick school structures in this city, both physical and social, and who support the initiatives called for in the modernization legislation you're considering.

In 2011, the city of West Haven, Connecticut issued a school bond for $45 million. At the time, a couple years out from the great financial crisis, the school district was facing both budget problems and a teacher shortage. The budget problems necessitated the bond. This crisis also made them fire fourteen teachers to try and save some money.

Like everything else in finance capitalism, bonds themselves get a credit rating. But these credit ratings aren't free. You have to pay for the service. The firms that offer these services are called credit rating agencies. You might be familiar with them: Moody's, Standard & Poor's (S&P), Fitch's and some others. These agencies are for-profit companies that make money by assigning how much money you can make from certain kinds of money. Right.

Tragically, West Haven had to pay S&P and Moody's a combined $31,700 for the bond's credit rating. In a Bloomberg article written about the issuance, the reporter estimated that these fees--just the cost of getting a credit rating alone--could pay for a teacher's full year salary.

To repeat: the city had to take out a huge loan and fire teachers because of budget problems after the financial crisis. As part of the cost of taking out the loan, they had to pay the equivalent of a teacher's salary. They could've kept a teacher. Instead they had to pay credit ratings agencies.

Organizers in Philadelphia have been exploring if/how to make the city's Board of Education an elected body. Right now, the BOE members are appointed by the mayor. Activists say that opening the body up to elections would be more democratic and thus make the body more accountable. What should we think about this?

Philly's not the only one asking this question. At this moment, big cities like Chicago are considering the switch from appointed to elected boards. In Montclair, NJ voters overwhelmingly chose to have an elected school board this year. (Nashville is actually considering the opposite, switching from elected to appointed.) New Jersey has an interesting history of this dynamic of going back and forth between elected and appointed boards in several cities.

Yanneli Llamas reviews the question in her student thesis focusing on a proposal out of Nevada, pointing to Kenneth Wong's decades-long research focus on mayoral involvement in school governance. Wong has written about the cases of Philadelphia, New York, Washington DC, Boston and Chicago. He gives some important perspective in a 2011 article reflecting on that transition too, which is really interesting for socialists looking at this issue.

Dialected school boards

When Nikil Saval ran for state senate in Pennsylvania, I was part of an amazing team of researchers working on the campaign's platform. It was fun and humbling to think about what I'd want to see on a candidate's platform when it came to school funding. Of course there are a number of ideas that came immediately to mind in terms of policies he could fight for. (I pitched tax base-sharing for the Philadelphia metro region, but the campaign thought it was too spicy, hah!)

One thing that was important to me, maybe more than any of the specific policies, was rethinking the politics of school funding in general. Rather than a technical, wonky, and mechanistic part of education politics, funding is where the rubber meets the road. It's the material conditions of our dreams and demands. Financing is freedom's food.

I'd gotten this idea a few years earlier. As part of the Working Educators Caucus yearly summer reading group series, I read a fantastic book by Paul Le Blanc and Michael Yates called A Freedom Budget for All Americans. The authors tell the story of the Freedom Budget, a document put together by the same coalition that organized the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech.

The budget initiative was a genius attempt to translate the demands of that march--led by a powerful coalition of labor, civil rights, and social movements--into material reality. It also shows how deeply involved socialists and communists were in that coalition, proposing ideas and influencing the debate on many sides of the coalition, including MLK, who in later speeches explicitly advocated for a socialist economy in the US.

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.