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Before I started studying school finance from a socialist perspective, my research focused on educational theory. Specifically, I focused on the French communist philosopher Louis Althusser's theories of education. It took me eight years to finish a book on this subject, called Althusser and Education, which was published this month by Bloomsbury. My current work is sort of an application of Althusser's theory to school finance, so if you're interested in learning about the philosophical underpinnings of this newsletter then take a look. You can download the book for free through the creative commons.

Recently, some professors teaching a course on the politics of education in New Zealand asked me to present on Althusser's theory during their class, and field questions from their students. They were kind enough to record the lecture, which I've edited for this week's post. So here's a podcast-like lecture of me talking through some of the basics of Althusser's theory of education. It's about 40 minutes. I'm responding to the question of how education is political from Althusser's perspective. Enjoy!

In my attempt to understand school facilities finance better from a socialist perspective I peruse headlines in American Schools & Universities pretty frequently to see what's happening in districts across the country. If I find something interesting I look into it more carefully. A headline from North Carolina the other day caught my eye: officials had to close a middle school and go to remote learning because a "microbial growth" was detected in its ventilation system. Kids were getting sick. At first parents thought it was COVID, since the rates were increasing. But then one parent recognized the symptoms of mold exposure.

For the week ending Aug. 6, Rowan County reported 34 COVID cases in children ages 5-17, state data show. That number increased to 41 the following week, according to the most recent figures available. “Back to school time often ushers in illness, as students are in close contact during the school day,” Harris said in an email. A concerned West Rowan Middle School parent “did the right thing” by contacting the county health department on Aug. 17 about what the parent thought was mold in the school, Harris said.

School officials at Rowan Middle got tests results back showing that there wasn't mold, but rather "microbial growth"--a cryptic way to put it, but that's what all the reports say. They decided to close the school and fix the HVAC system.

Most reporting and research on problems like this focus on health outcomes, parent reaction, school official announcements, and maybe the costs associated with fixing the problem. They rarely dig into the revenue side: was this school and its school district getting enough money to take care of the buildings? I realized I didn't know anything about how North Carolina school facilities finance works. I've looked into Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, Wyoming, Massachusetts, New Jersey and some others, so here was an opportunity to learn something new--and find a few surprises.

A few weeks ago, editors at the African American Policy Forum asked me to write something about how the left broadly speaking could counter the rightwing attack on public education. Here's what I wrote, which was published last week.

Build Schools Back Better: A Constructive Politics for Public Education

Something unexpected happened in Pennsylvania politics recently. A leftist state senator got bi-partisan support from archconservatives in one of the most ideologically divided states in the country. Though the breakthrough didn’t happen in the arena of education policy, I think the story tells us what the defenders of public education can and should do in the face of so much reactionary toxicity from the right.

We know the toxin well by now. Scary sophist hack Chris Rufo is at it again, this time with a fabricated moral panic over the rampant adoption of “gender ideology” in schools. Ron DeSantis is dismantling Florida's democratic government in Hungary’s image as he demands formal affidavits confirming the biological gender of public-school students. Meanwhile, the army of anti-CRT inquisitors affiliated with Moms for Liberty and other hard-right culture-war operations continues to menace the career of any school board member who dares support antiracism, or otherwise acknowledges the experience of most students in American public schools. Oh, and they’re trying to stave queer kids by  arguing that Title IX provisions extended to LGBTQ students violate religious rights--and that schools found to be discriminating against these students should still receive food funding.

I got mad reading Forbes the other day. Marguerite Roza published an article taking several school districts to task for lacking "expertise in finance" as budgets crunch in the wake of the pandemic's economic crisis. What made me mad was six out of the seven cases she examines--in a conveniently cursory manner--have to do with pay and benefits for teachers. The clear thesis of the article is that teacher unions are greedy and school board members that approve budgets in line with union demands lack financial 'expertise'.

The ideology is deep here. Knowledge is never neutral. There's no such thing as pure, objective, and scientific expertise that isn't at least inflected with partisan tendencies. Technical know-how is always socio-technical, but it can be a powerful maneuver to mask one's ideological position as a simple matter of not-knowing naturally true stuff. This kind of "you're dumb so listen to me" move is very common in finance: a lot of people (me included) tend to think of themselves as bad at math, the language used in finance makes our eyes glaze over, and it's intimidating to confront someone with academic bona fides and fancy-sounding titles when they make these sorts of claims.

Roza's article is a case in point. Roza has a material interest in saying school board members need 'training': she directs a soft money center at Georgetown University that provides training in education finance for educational leaders and policymakers. Tuition for the certificate program is several thousand dollars.

I'm used to this kind of stuff in school finance, but this article requires a response. I just can't let it slide. When it comes to teachers' unions winning demands in terms of their salaries and benefits--the working conditions that create their students' learning conditions--school board members' approach to budgeting is key. If you have school board members whose ideology tells them to cut salaries and benefits, not to give into unions in principle, and generally be austerity-mavens then unions will have a hard fight. It's obviously bad and wrong to treat teachers so terribly, but this austerity-brain also myopically limits one's view to the complex terrain of financial pressures on school districts and thus limits educational leaders' sense of possibility when it comes to solving budget crises.

There was a big strike vote in Philly last week. The union representing school bus drivers, custodial staff, and building engineers--SEIU 32BJ District 1201--voted to walk out if contract negotiations go south. There are 2,000 members of that unit and 32BJ is a powerful presence in the city. They're demanding wage increases and continuing education for members, focusing specifically on school shooting training. The school district's head of the Office of Talent Support Services (OTSS), Larisa Shambaugh--a graduate of Eli Broad programs--has led the public response as new superintendent Tony Watlington faces a first big challenge of his tenure.

I've written about the organizational structure of the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) before, focusing on facilities, capital programs, and compliance. Many of the workers in the unit going on strike work under these parts of the district's sprawling management apparatus. There's been solid coverage of the strike's basic demands, but I wanted to look a little deeper because, embarrassingly, I've realized that in my search for knowledge about how school finance works (particularly facilities) I haven't spent a lot of time looking at the workers who work on the facilities. What're their material conditions? So here are scattered notes and background that I've found. I'm going to focus on facilities and maintenance workers here, since transportation is an entirely different lane. (For some great political economy on school buses, check out this episode of Odd Lots.)

The workers themselves

Let's focus on the workers first. Looking at the most recent SDP budget we can see some interesting stuff. The first thing that I find striking is the breadth of positions, just when it comes to facilities, maintenance, and custodial workers. There's about 20 kinds of custodians and building engineers, including four types of building engineers, general cleaners, night cleaners, training managers, and even had a single elevator operator who was fired in 2020 (I wonder who that was). In this group of workers the district has been making some good moves from what I can tell. There was a huge increase in hiring Group II in 2021-2, jumping from 67 to 134. That's doubled! A good thing. There was also a huge increase of general cleaners from 2020 to 2021, from 602 to 732. They hired about 200 people in this area, most likely using ARP funds.

I've been writing the last few weeks about the Inflation Reduction Act's national green bank. The question is whether and how monies from this provision of the legislation could find its way to the School District of Philadelphia's buildings. I'd hope that the IRA provides a big pool of public money to transform Philadelphia's facilities from old, crumbling carbon emitting death traps out of which parents take their children to awesome zero emission facilities that parents are proud to put their children in. Like, let's use this federal money to fix the big problem with our buildings and our environment!

Something I've been wondering: does this funding stream through the IRA create a meaningfully different paradigm for financing school buildings, one that relies less on private credit markets and more on public revenues from green banks that reduce interest rates, fees, and other costs of credit for facilities?

If so, then we could have the material conditions for a Green New Deal for Philly Public Schools. Seriously. But before we go campaigning on this, we have to be sure: to what extent do green banks rely on private capital on the revenue side for the loans they provide? Are the revenues traveling through networks in the municipal bond market, through private banks and financiers, or are these revenue coming from--and administered by--public coffers and officials? Is green capital public capital? Or is it just another kind of private capital that costs just as much but gets used for decarbonizing purposes?

Specifically, is the Philadelphia Green Capital Corporation (PGCC) an actively public bank or a passive vessel for private banking? Here's what I've found.

I started this newsletter trying to figure out how to get public financing for Philadelphia public school infrastructure. We've got a massive problem here: the buildings are toxic, hurting kids and teachers and staff. The problem is at least $5 billion big: that's the amount an independent analysis handed to the district in an assessment of its facilities in terms of maintenance backlog (which is on top of yearly maintenance). This problem is something of an opportunity for those interested in education justice and climate justice: we could embark on a massive construction project to fix up Philly's schools and reduce their emissions. How cool would that be?

I started in 2020 by proposing that the Federal Reserve's Municipal Liquidity Facility open and relax its eligibility criteria to let school districts borrow at no cost. Republican austerity goblin Pat Toomey ended that possibility by demanding the closure of the MLF.

Since then I've been on the hunt. I thought the Department of Energy might have a program, but no deal. I helped with the Green New Deal for Schools legislation which called for federal equity grants, but it got killed in reconciliation negotiations (even though it still has the most co-sponsors of any GND proposal). In the intervening period I've explored how school building finance works and what socialists should say and do about it. I've tracked green bond deals in Philly too, testifying at city council hearings on the issue of transformative school facilities finance. Other than proposing we advocate for a National Investment Authority, or trying to get a meeting with the Philly Fed, I haven't seen a viable path to the kind of green revenue stream the district needs for its buildings. But last week a new possibility emerged that actually seems viable.

Big green loan for big green schools project

Everyone's aflutter about the Inflation Reduction Act. Seemingly out of nowhere, yacht-owner and coal baron President Joe Manchin announced that he was, in fact, supportive of a version of dark brandon President Joe Biden's climate agenda. Word on the street is that Chris Coons got in Manchin's ear and told him everyone thought he was evil, but also Manchin was maybe playing Mitch McConnell by working with him to pass the CHIPS act (China bad!), taking away the minority leader's legislative negotiating leverage so Manchin could push through some watered (oiled?)-down climate legislation.

However it happened, it seems to be actually happening with famous not-Republican Krysten Sinema recently giving a thumbs up and the persnickety senate parliamentarian waving it through. There's been a flurry of analysis of the bill on the left (consensus seems to be that this is good but could be much better) and I've been watching the feeds to see if anything might be available in the legislation to help school districts interested in greening their facilities and infrastructure.

The question I'm writing about here is based on a possible lead along those lines: the bill creates something called the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), otherwise known as the first national green bank in United States history. I'm wondering whether/how districts could take advantage of it.

Coddling private capital?

Last week, a reporter from a National Public Radio station in Richmond, Virginia emailed me to talk about school buildings. She's writing a story about how the state's school buildings. I knew a little about Virginia's school buildings, but I didn't have a fine-grained sense of things there. So I tried to get familiar and came up with a whole profile of the state's school building finance situation: the problem, why it's happening, what're policies being pursued, and what could be done. What I found out makes for a good case study of what Jeff Vincent, in a conversation with me recently, calls "state regimes" of facilities finance. So here's what I learned about Virginia.

Flood in the computer room

There's a coalition of rural schools in the state that recently made a big push for school facilities funding. They did this by organizing a "Crumbling Schools Tour" where officials visited rural districts in every region to check out the school buildings. They found some scary stuff. For example, the computer room at King and Queen Elementary in Mattaponi floods ankle-deep with water when rain gets heavy.

In Page County, only the high schools have hot water in their bathrooms. Luray Elementary school doesn't have air condition in its gym, doesn't have enough electrical outlets, and apparently "It's not uncommon that a teacher comes in to make copies and the room next door loses power," according to the assistant principal. To put a finer point on it: Luray Elementary still has ceiling and floor tiles from when it was a segregated school in the 1950s. It was built in 1961 as a school for only white kids.

There's been a flood of analysis on the left about the Supreme Court's repulsive decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. I was listening to a three-part series on Know Your Enemy, one of the better left podcasts out there now, and heard something I didn't know: school finance played a key role in the right's long march to legalize forced birth. I went down a rabbit hole and what I found is another good example of why school finance is so fascinating: it's a pressure point in the balance of American forces. In the Jenga game of our society, if you push on school finance--money for K-12 in particular--a lot of other pieces move.

The podcast hosts mention a long article in Politico by Randall Balmer, published in 2014, that traces the origins of the fight against abortion to a lawsuit filed in 1969. Coincidentally, the case also took place in Mississippi--but it had nothing to do with abortion. It was about the tax exempt status of whites-only 'Christian' schools opened to push back against desegregation.

The original case was called Green v. Kennedy. In 1969, the first year of desegregation in their school district, Black parents in the Holmes County watched as their white neighbors did a school strike to protest desegregation. These white parents were so passionate about their kids not sharing classrooms with Black children that they took their kids out of the public school and started private schools that were white-only. Balmer notes that "the number of white students enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the following year, that number fell to zero." So the parents sued the Secretary of the Treasury, David Kennedy, for letting this happen.

The segregation academies were founded as non-profit entities. Under the 501(c)(3) law governing non-profits, the institutions themselves didn't have to pay taxes. But not only that, under Internal Revenue Code 170(c)(2), those donating to the foundations could deduct their donations from gross income tax. Basically, if you give money to these segregation academies then you didn't have to pay taxes on the income you used to pay them. The Black parents, as plaintiffs in Green, claimed these tax exemptions violated the Civil Rights Act of 1965. And when it came to school finance justice, they had the wind at their back.

This is the second part of an interview I did with teacher and organizer Dan Reyes about the organizing he and others did at his high school in Philadelphia around facilities issues. Check out the first part here.

Reyes

Our building committee made a whole campaign plan from the beginning. We were moving up the ladder of escalation, and that was really important, because we had a clear roadmap, we knew what we're going to do at each step. And that also showed our co-workers, and then the rest of our school community, that there was a plan here, that we're not just doing this one thing and stopping, which is really important to maintaining momentum. 

Over the next few weeks, I’ll publish an edited interview with the amazing teacher and organizer Dan Reyes. I met Dan through work with the Philadelphia Democratic Socialists of America, but also through this newsletter. Dan has been in the trenches of the fight for school facilities in Philly and his group won a victory recently at his school, pressuring the district for air conditioning and other fixes in their building. In our interview we talked about the campaign, how it came together, and how they won. Here’s the first part.

DB: Thanks Dan for taking the time to talk! I'm interested in hearing the sort of issues that you are/were organizing to change at Robeson in terms of the demands, and then the on the ground details of how it went. The story on it. Organizing stories are precious because they show you that things can change how they get changed, particularly when it comes to school infrastructure. How would you tell it?

Dan Reyes: I'll give you a little background about Robeson first. So Paul Robeson High School, we're on the smaller side and we’re a citywide admit school, which means we're not we're not a magnet school. But we're not we're not like a regular neighborhood catchment school. We wind up having mostly kids from West Philly but kids from all around the city apply and at this point it works like a lottery system. So we're a category of school called city wide access, somewhere in between a magnet and the neighborhood school. 

In 2013, which was before I was teaching, when the district was doing a round of school closures, they attempted to close our school. You know I think there's a lot of different reasons why that was— they were trying to close and consolidate these smaller schools. And you know, honestly, we’re a majority Black poor and working class high school and I think they thought that they could get away with eliminating us.

Readers! I'm going to be in the San Francisco Bay Area for three weeks starting 7/12. If you're in the area and want to get together to chat school, socialist, finance, and whatever else we should meet up! Just respond to this email and we can take it from there.

There's inflation happening, which means that the prices of things are getting higher. If you're not a troll then you're understanding of the situation is that we've just been through a convulsion of economic crises known as the pandemic shutdowns and, just as things were maybe working themselves out, Russia invaded Ukraine, throwing the welter of globalized trade of basic stuff--most notably oil--into disarray. 

What I want to work out here is how this all impacts school finance, but first the politics of the situation itself. The progressive take on the inflation--held by heterodox people, MMTers, and most leftists thinking through it--was that the inflation was transitory because of what I just said: the pandemic was effed up, specifically for supply chains, and things would even out. And they did, sort of. Another take, typically moderate and conservative, is that 'government spending' in the form of big fiscal packages like the American Rescue Plan put more money in people's pockets and thus we have 'too much money chasing too few goods' which leads to higher prices. 

I still think the progressive take is the right one. If Russia didn't invade Ukraine just when the world economy was kind of maybe getting back on its feet (which is to say getting back to the normal hegemonic global capitalism thing, which is not to say that anything was 'fine' but rather that it was returning to something predictable) then things were maybe going to be alright. The reality might actually be somewhere in the middle, with bottlenecks passed forward into supply chains combined with more spending power on the consumer side. But the battle lines are drawn. In some ways, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has set back whatever post-neoliberal economics may have been zygotically developing in the confused ecology of the Biden administration. The federal government decided to get a little generous, finally, and wham things get out of whack.

I studied philosophy of math in college. One idea that always stuck with me is that there are many different kinds of infinity. The classic infinity happens when you keep counting forward on the number line. But there's also an infinity between any two numbers, like between 0 and 1. Because you can always keep dividing, numbers are infinitely deep. I bring this up because I get a sense of infinite depth from school policy, specifically the number and kinds of institution involved in education. Between any two institutions there's another institution doing something else with its own history and regulations and budget. Between any two policies is another policy, formal or informal, that was relevant at some point and could be relevant again.

The infinite depth of the education apparatus is important because if we want to think about what education policy, particularly finance, could look like in a socialist American society we have to understand every layer of the apparatus. Not only do we have to know it better than anyone else, we should be able to think creatively about how to use these layers and their policy histories to create potentially new and more just arrangements in line with our ideology.

In Pennsylvania, there's one such institution I want to examine a little more carefully for this reason: Intermediate Units. I'd heard about them from my education leadership students in the past but didn't appreciate how unique they are until one of them mentioned that she works at one and did a presentation on it. Looking into them more, I found a whole world of the Pennsylvania education apparatus I didn't know before.

Between state and local

Something really interesting happened last week that’s going to have a big impact on school funding and education in the city generally. It had to do with a big debate over local taxes spurred by a number of factors, one of them being a recent property value reassessment that saw property values rise exponentially. In some places, they more than doubled. (My house doubled!) The increase means that homeowners will pay a lot more on their yearly property tax bill and landlords will pass the increase along to their renters, increasing housing costs. It’s a big deal. 

After lots of serious critiques and complaints, the city is trying to figure out whether/how to ease this property tax burden and still have enough in its coffers. Options have included redoing the assessments or increasing certain kinds of exemptions that give people a break on a certain amount of the property's value if they live in it as a primary resident, like the homestead exemption. At the same time, the city is figuring out what to do in the wake of the pandemic crisis that’s both ‘over’ and also still ongoing. The question is: how should the city get the right amount of revenue to run itself? Who should be taxed and how much? The property reassessment is part of that. 

The property tax increase hits everyone, though perhaps disproportionately middle and working class people who spend a big portion of their income on housing. Historically, while these kinds of taxes go up, taxes on the ruling class—rich people that can more than afford it, but prefer not to be taxed—don’t. The city’s Chamber of Commerce is their advocate as they push for tax cuts on businesses, like the business income and receipts tax (BIRT) and the wage tax. The whole local tax question tends to be kind of one-sided in that way, favoring the rich who can buy politicians, threaten to take their capital out of the city, or even, in the case of Allan Domb, serve on city council while being a real estate mogul.

But this year was different. Thanks to the work of a new-ish left revenue group, Tax the Rich PHL, led by the inimitable Arielle Klagsbrun of the Action Center for Race and the Economy (as well as local labor leaders, Philly POWER Research, Neighborhood Networks, Philly DSA, and others), the debate this year has been far from one-sided. Tax the Rich, partnering with the PA Budget and Policy Center, has put out reports on and proposals for on a wealth tax on intangible assets, championed by the amazing socialist city councilmember Kendra Brooks (which even inspired a visit from Elizabeth Warren). Marc Steir and Eugene Henninger-Voss find that such a tax on .4% of intangible wealth in the city would generate $200 million a year for the city.

Abbott Elementary is a great show. It's great for a number of reasons--it's hilarious, a solid portrait of urban education, it centers Philadelphia, it gives money to actual schools--but there's something I've been thinking about beyond these qualities. The show, particularly its pilot, illustrates something really deep about school finance injustice. It's a philosophical problem I've encountered in both thinking and organizing around money and schools. If you don't know the show, let me set the scene.

The main character Janine is a relatively new teacher of very young students (I think first grade). One of her students has an accident and pees on the class carpet. As all primary school teachers know, carpets are important. They're a collective meeting space and a place of comfort, sharing, and community. So the loss of the rug is a big loss. In a poignant vignette, we see one of Janine's students sleeping on the cold floor of the classroom during lunch. He's got a difficult situation at home, so he gets the sleep he needs in school, usually on the carpet. Now he has to lay his head on the tiles.

Janine goes on a quest to get a new carpet. The problem, as always, is how to pay for it. Earlier in the episode the group of teachers featured in the show are complaining about money. It's one of the first things they talk about: how the district can't afford this or that. There's a brief mention of work being done on a new football stadium which, when juxtaposed with the teachers' and students' needs in the school, is clearly absurd.

Back to Janine's project. Of course there's not enough money in the budget for a new carpet, nor are there ready replacements available. A veteran teacher tells her to be resourceful and figure it out herself (buy a new one with her own money, eg) because, in her experience, leaders in the district can rarely deliver things like this. With well-meaning and plucky naiveté, Janine doesn't give up. She goes to the principal, Ava, who may be one of my favorites on the show. We find out that Ava got the principal job because she caught the superintendent cheating on his wife and blackmailed him to hire her. She doesn't have experience in education and is neither sympathetic nor competent. Her character's humor comes from the fact that she's in charge of this school and is the last person who should be.

(CW violence) I can't get the school shooting in Uvalde off my mind. Like everyone else, I've been hearing and reading and thinking about school shootings since 1999 after the Columbine shooting. I was in high school and started looking over my shoulder. Then the steady increase of people coming to campus with guns and killing got me more and more nervous as a high school teacher, graduate student, and then professor. But this time is different. Our toddler Thisbe just turned two earlier this month. Something about being a parent makes this time different.

I've started writing a longer essay on school shootings and socialism that should come out later this summer. It's more theoretical. For this post I want to do some digging into connections between municipal finance and the gun industry in Texas.

Obviously the proximate cause--something that could be done immediately about these mass shootings, including the one at the Buffalo grocery store--is banning assault rifles and generally taking on the gun industry through regulation. But gun companies need financing. Thinking as a socialist here, I know that government isn't the only realm of social-political action. Capitalism matters a lot. If the right pressure were put on banks, for instance, could they refuse to provide gun firms the credit they need to do business? Would that help prevent school shootings? It turns out that yeah, maybe. But the connections don't stop there.

Bonds are mostly for education

Frank Helleis had an idea. His wife was a teacher at a local elementary school in their hometown Mainz, Germany. It was early in the pandemic and educators around the the world were trying to figure out how to balance the need for education and the need for safety in public health. Helleis is a professor of engineering at the Max Planck Institute for chemistry who studies aerosols, or how droplets of stuff travel in the air. His idea was to set up a unique set of fan structures above each desk in classrooms, guaranteeing a fresh airflow and reducing the threat of covid transmission. They found their setup could remove 90% of artificially generated aerosol particles in their experiments at the school. The setup was extremely low-cost and could be built by teachers and students themselves.

Myself and few people I organize with wondered: could schools in Philadelphia do something like this? Helleis's setup is a classroom-level structure that puts fans above students' desks. It's pretty elaborate. It's not clear something like that could be done in Philly, but the question connected with another idea that's much more feasible.

Engineers in the crisis

Through the education justice committee of Philly DSA I've been working with Lizzie Rothwell an organizer, parent, and architect in my neighborhood. She got national coverage for measuring the carbon dioxide levels in her son's Luke's classroom at Lea Elementary school, and we've scaled up that citizen science tactic to eleven other schools in the district. Recently, we got coverage for some of this work on WURD, a radio station focused on Black issues in the city.

One of the most complicated things about researching school finance is the number of policies, entities, institutions, authorities, and apparatuses involved. They're opaque and hard to follow. The language is difficult to understand. Mapping it all is intimidating. One of the approaches I've taken in the last few years to name and critique this system is to use narrative. At the center of narrative are characters, and I've found that sometimes focusing on one or two people can illuminate a whole terrain of institutions and policies. This post is about one individual who, when you look at what he does, brings a whole part of the state to light when it comes to education finance in US racial capitalism. His name is Michael Karp.

About a year ago, I fell down a rabbit hole of a rabbit hole that led to Karp. I was looking into the commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s school infrastructure reimbursement program, PlanCon. (I recently did a spreadsheet livetweet of PlanCon's grants to school districts, pretty interesting.) PlanCon historically was the entity that reimbursed school districts for capital expenditures. It was halted in 2012, briefly reopened, and then halted again. I read that, since 2016, PlanCon has been financed by the Commonwealth Financing Authority (CFA), a program in the state’s economic development department. Before that it was financed through taxes and then Gov. Tom Wolf, for some reason, decided to finance it using bonds through the CFA.

The thing about the CFA is that it's a spigot for all kinds of project financing around the state. Want to build a park? A playground? A new industrial facility? The CFA can green-light state financing for it. There's been reporting that meetings of the CFA have been contentious of late, combining absenteeism with little discussion of high-stakes proposals. It's obscurity is matched by its power for economic development.

I still don't know the whole story about the CFA, but while I was investigating it I came across Michael Karp's name several times. He's on the CFA board. But he's so much more. He's a West Philly real estate investor that started University City Housing. He's the secretary/Treasurer of the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority, the state-level entity that oversees Philly’s budget since it went bankrupt in the 200s (and recently came up for a renewal vote). He's the founder of Belmont Charter School network and actually served on the Philadelphia Board of Education before the School Reform Commission took over. He's gotten special treatment on huge real estate deals in West Philly, including holding up a $52 million project to build a new police head quarters. The state government invented an entire category of school just for him.

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).