Making School Finance As Public As Possible

Speaker 1 I started researching this about maybe a little less than ten years ago, and my interest was to figure out how school buildings were financed because in Philadelphia, the buildings have been so toxic. And when you ask about where the money comes for school building, the first thing you encounter is Wall Street.

Speaker 2 Hello, and welcome to the Human Restoration Project Podcast. My name is Nick Covington. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this episode is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Simeon Frank, Corinne Greenblatt, and Leah Kelly. Thank you so much for your ongoing support. We're proud to have hosted hundreds of hours of incredible ad free conversations over the years. So if you haven't yet, consider liking and leaving a review in your podcast app to help us reach more listeners. And, of course, you can learn more about Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, and connect with us everywhere on social media. We're recording this episode the week the Iowa Doge task force released their final 136 page report. You heard that right. That's the state level version of the Department of Government Efficiency convened by our governor back in February, tasked with maximizing return on investment of Iowa taxpayer dollars. As you can imagine, among their recommendations are ideas from the Return on Tax payer investment working group about improving education results, quote, aimed at delivering greater value for taxpayers, end quote. Fortunately for Iowans, this working group assembled a crack team of experienced education experts for the job, including the CEO of an ethanol plant, the former chair of the Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission, and the chair of a civil engineering firm. Among their recommendations are to, quote, establish a merit based compensation framework, including a bonus structure, teacher professional development, and incentives for those in high need schools in order to improve student outcomes and financially reward high performing teachers, end quote. Merit pay is, of course, a tried, tested, and failed idea. But teacher salaries are just one thread in the complex tapestry of how states pay for public education and the ideological tug of war in our public debates over school funding. That's how we pay for buildings, pensions, special education, title one, school food programs, every cost that goes into making schooling work or not. If the Iowa DOGE report and the policy agenda that'll inevitably follow could be titled as privatized as possible, doubling down on outcome based school funding and accountability measures, and even recommending AI based bus route optimization to quote cut costs and improve service end quote. What's the alternative? Well, my guest today asks, quote, what would it mean to democratize school resources? What would it mean to have truly public schools down to the very means of resource creation and distribution that fuels them? What will it take to make school as public as possible? End quote. It's also the title of his upcoming book, As Public as Radical Finance for America's Public Schools, out this December. You can preorder it now from the new press. David Bakker is the author. He's an associate professor of education policy at Seton Hall University whose research, teaching, and organizing focus on ideology and school finance. A former high school teacher, his research has appeared in a half dozen scholarly journals like the Harvard Education Review, as well as popular venues like the American Prospect and Jacobin. And you can find him on social media at SchoolDaves. Thanks so much for joining me today, David Becker.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Nick. It's such it's so great to be here. I'm such a fan, you know. I I I follow your work. I've been following it for a while, so this is a real a real honor.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I always love these conversations because even though we've not met to have this before, it feels like we're picking up in the middle of something,

Speaker 1 rather than having to start from scratch. That's right. That's right. Yeah. I like I know that you were talking about Doge, and and I know you've been thinking about this stuff. So it's just like, yeah, the the online to, you know, synchronous kind of interaction. It's so cool to really get to meet you Yeah. We people. We just get to let the audience in on the side conversations we've been having. So Right. Exactly.

Speaker 2 You know, before, you know, I encountered the book, here I was thinking that, you know, we pay local, state, federal taxes. Those tax dollars get appropriated and allocated on this per pupil basis to spend on things that schools need to function, and where there's a lack of equity, the federal government steps in to help fill those gaps. But as I was reading your book, it turns out that Wall Street investors are making tax free profits off of debtor schools. Zoning and property assessments are rigged to keep rich schools rich. And Richard Nixon was right about replacing local property taxes with the federal value added tax. I had no idea. And I shared this with you the other day and at the top of this conversation that this book really was radicalizing for me on that issue of school funding and finance. So what in the world is going on here, man? How does our public school system fail at being as public as possible?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Thank you for that. You know, I think it's been radicalizing for me too, you know, because I got into this. I'm a philosopher by training, and, I got into this as someone who's very active with education justice movements, people who are fighting, in activist groups, unions, political groups who, you know, want better schools to transform the schools. And, you know, a number of years ago, I was living in Philadelphia, and I just realized I didn't know how the money works, you know, and particularly with school buildings. And I think that's important because I I started researching this about maybe a little less than ten years ago, and my interest was to figure out how school buildings were financed because in Philadelphia, the buildings have been so toxic. And when you ask about where the money comes for school buildings, the first thing you encounter is Wall Street. And as someone who had been studying anti capitalism and and been thinking about this, you know, for a while before that, you know, since Occupy Wall Street and before, I was just like, wow. And, you know, I think I think one a pun that I use sometimes to think about, you know, how it is that it's not as public as possible, or, you know, I even question sometimes what public means in this you know, when we say public education is public, what what are we referring to exactly? Like, we're we're certainly referring to the sense that within a certain defined set of boundaries and, like, a ton of fine print, you know, that's in five point font that no one can read, anyone, quote, unquote, can go to can go to school. Right? And it is sort of, quote, free, unquote, at the point of service. But that fine print, when you start to look at it, you get your mice microscope out or whatever, it start you start to wonder when you look at the ways in which private property, in particular, racialized private property structures this system. It's not clear to me that if if public is supposed to mean a kind of for all under some interpretation, whether or not this education that we have has been for all. And the pun that I sometimes use to think about this is the word values. So when when we think about our values, you you might think of these kind of very lofty, idealistic, or democracy, participation, citizenship, you name it, you know, whatever the trend of the moment is. But but, like, what's going on here in the finance system is a whole other set of values, and that's property values. And that's, you know, bond interest rate values or pension contribution values, discount rates, and the the ways in which, taxes are levied on certain kinds of values, whether it's, you know, the prices of things at the sales tax or on income or or or not. And so the the those values are really undermining those other values. Right? They're they're in complete tension with one another, and, yeah, that's this is sort of overall, like, a kind of picture that I've, come to see.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And I think before we get into a lot of those specifics, you know, you almost have to turn over the rock of big finance, and then you'll find the interest rates, and you'll find bonds, and you'll find all these things under there. But I think you've mentioned that you'd work with unions, with other local organizing groups. I think this is a big ask for organizations that are used to speaking in a language of values and not in a language of finance. And you make a pretty strong case, I think, early on in the book that this should be the battleground on which we fight over these values and not necessarily on that culture war front, the curriculum front where it so often typically plays out. I was wondering if you could maybe make that case for us here. Why should we lean into the wonky world of school finance?

Speaker 1 I opened the book with a kind of image that came to me when I was starting to think about how to frame all the stuff that I've learned. And it's the image of a a tug of war. And the tug of war is you know, it's a game. Right? Okay? But it's a a game of force. And the game of force is happening between you know, it's two sides, more or less, along a spectrum, and there are people pulling on either end of this rope. And, you know, if we think of the rope as a public schools, you know, the right side of the rope or whatever has been just, like, really dragging the left side, and the center has basically just been going along with it. Whether or not they're being pulled because they're feckless or they actually just agree with the right wing, like, that's that's the the the the reality of it since since Democrats, you know, basically gave up supporting teachers' unions, across the board in the neoliberal period. And so the the case here to some degree is the right wing is just pulling and pulling and pulling, and who knows what abyss, you know, we're all gonna fall off if they keep pulling. You know, they've got this sort of techno fascist theocratic thing going on. But in the image that I try to use in the book is that underneath the feet of the pullers of this rope, there's a whole subterranean plumbing system of flows, you know, pipes and and and the like. And I try to I try to say, like, what's propping up this entire tug of war? What what makes this sort of even sort of possible? What's the terrain here? What's the landscape that this this sort of constant fight is happening on? That's the terrain of the school finance. And I think when you when you fight on that, you can actually pull the it's another image. I mean, there's no rugs and tug of war necessarily, but you can pull the rug out. You know, you can you can get underneath this issue in a way that I just think you know, I'm sort of tired. Like, you know, I'm tired having been on the left now for a while in education, and and the refrain has been protect public schools, reclaim public schools, protect, reclaim, protect, reclaim. Like, no. Like, we need to transform this. Like, we need to go on the offensive. We're we're always in this defensive position, and it's the right wing somehow that is always the ones who have this agentic creativity with respect to the very fundament of how these schools, get the material resources that that they need to function. Whether it's, like, you know, complex tax loopholes, for these, quote, unquote, scholarship programs that have now morphed into vouchers or, you know, the the the, like, positively postmodern, juridical and financial realities that are charter schools, which are just sort of real estate development, you know, with these classroom arms. Like, we can do that too. And, I think that the case to be made here to get to fight wonky, as I put it in the book, is to really try to go to the, the material conditions of the existence of these schools and fight from there rather than constantly, you know, protecting and and trying to reclaim ground. I think we can maybe try to even change the whole terrain by examining what's going on, under the surface there. And just one example that comes to mind here that I actually didn't get a chance to write about in the book, but I can tell you here, there is a really fascinating moment from the Virginia governor's race. Youngkin was running. Okay? And young it was a bit everyone was watching this race as sort of bellwether, and there was a CNN town hall. And, this sort of culture war stuff was just really, really out in the open at that point. And I'll I'll never forget, and I teach this clip a lot. During that town hall on national television, a, like, a white man with, like, a a just the corneas, haircut you can imagine, bright blue eyes, stands up, you know, grabs the microphone, and and asks Glenn Youngkin a question. And this man says, I'm a trans man, and your policies say that I I have to use the girl's bathroom. Do you think that that makes any sense? And, there's a moment when Glenn Youngkin, who's just been pandering this pushing this awful transphobic stuff, He can't you can see it for about half a second. He can't can't compute what's going on because the student has really brought the reality of his existence, you know, to confront him. And and what what Junkin says is, you know, I just think we need more bathrooms. And, and he's just trying to save it. You know? He's just trying to he's just trying to get it together. And, ultimately, he says, yeah. I think we need to build more bathrooms. And, like, that to me was really interesting moment where the, this sort of what we call culture war, a war perhaps over what you could call recognition politics, actually has this material, politics substrate, infrastructural underpinning, which is actually like, yeah. Build more bathrooms. Like, build more bathrooms for all the kids, like, so that no matter who you are, like, you can use the bathroom that suits who you are. But how do more bathroom I wonder. How do more bathrooms get built? And I thought about the movements to protect trans kids' lives and the movements to, gain that recognition politics and then, you know, what trans activists call bathroom politics. You know, we have to engage with municipal bonds for that project. And we have to say, we need the money and the technical knowledge, and we we need the resources to be able to construct facilities that are appropriate for, you know, the the the gender and sexuality experiences of our, of our students to properly recognize them and provide nourishing education for everyone. And so what would it be like for those movements to start talking about bonds and start talking about the Virginia Public School Authority, and how they pool they act in Virginia, they actually pool risk such that districts can go to that authority to borrow, and and and not as many districts use it as should. And and perhaps that public authority needs more resources and how we can demand more resources so that we can get the bathrooms for for that sort of student. And I don't and so that story seems to me like, you know, what I call in the book constructive politics, right, where what the right is trying to do is just trying to tear all these things down. They're trying to tear people down. They're trying to tear the buildings down. They're trying to tear systems down, and it's really awful. So so as I ask in the book, why not build? Okay? Let's think about building this. Let's think about constructing a truly public education. But to do that, to do constructive politics, you gotta start thinking about things like the bond market because that's how it's all funded.

Speaker 2 I don't suppose that the question that the person who is asking Young can ask next is, okay, how many millions of dollars are you willing to publicly commit to the cause of building bathrooms for transgender students? It just seems like we we are so much more willing, and perhaps it's because it's just a more accessible fight, particularly like the age of social media, to fight on like this amorphous turf of values, you know. But I don't see that necessarily being a winning issue because you can't really change your your ideological opponent's values in this case without appealing to that or changing that person. Right? I think that's how we've seen that story play out. However, we can get into that infrastructure of power that you're speaking to and actually make it work in favor of the values we're talking about. We don't have to defend the values. We can build the infrastructure that actually lives those values and implements them into practice. And I wonder if this is a place to actually if I'm thinking about Junkin and the millions spent in an alternative universe on transgender bathrooms, if that really was his policy solution. A local example here, again, lot of breaking news, on bonds and, school finance in the state of Iowa, but the largest district, the Des Moines Public Schools District, just announced they're gonna have to ask voters to approve a $265,000,000 bond for renovations. And the consequence of not getting it, according to the interim superintendent let's see here. He says, quote, hundreds of people could be laid off. So so either get in on what is, you know, a third of $1,000,000,000 bond that's gonna add to property tax bills over the next twenty years, or lay off hundreds of staff and you can't do the job of educating without that staff. I think, again, in a life before reading this book, I took bonds for granted. You know, they feel pretty commonplace. You hear of bond issues, bond votes. I don't imagine it's a very popular place for electoral politics. You know, we we just sort of it's just the water that we swim in. But, like, why, if schools are publicly funded, do they need these bonds? What are these bonds, and how does this system of school funding via Wall Street create debtor schools, and to whom are they indebted to?

Speaker 1 This is the question. This is the question. Particularly, the way that you're you're phrasing it and the situation that you've mapped out in Iowa, that's the situation that school districts have been in, not since 1970, but since 1870, maybe even before that. The first school bond that I've been able to find and there's no history of the school bond. Even though school bonds this municipal bond market in The United States is $4,000,000,000,000 big, maybe five about $5,000,000,000,000. It's got about a million and a half different issuances, and 27% of that market is education bonds. Now that includes higher education, but that's the plurality. That's larger than, quote, general purpose, unquote. The this municipal bond market is a huge market. And what does this market do? Okay. So I think the best way to explain it is this way. There's a difference in school finance between operating expenditure and capital expenditure. OpEx, CapEx. Now the difference, like, for you and me and there's a there's a clear analogy. For you and me, when we buy our food, when we buy our clothes, when we pay our rent on a regular monthly basis or or hopefully not buying clothes every month, but maybe some people need to. Like, regular line item kind of expenses. Salary and when it comes to education, we're talking salaries, benefits, materials. Okay. Those are regular. Whether it's yearly or monthly or even weekly expenses, we we we guide our income flows towards that expenditure. Revenue comes in, we expend. Okay. But every so often, as we all know, there are costs that confront us that are not those regular temporally paced expended expenses. They're bigger expenses. So for you and me, like, you got we wanna buy a car. You wanna buy a house. You wanna go to school. You wanna go higher higher education. You wanna get married. Those are big irregular expenses. And there's a word in the school finance literature for this, which I really like, which is lumpy. It's lumpy cost because I think the line the trend lines get lumpy. Right? Because it's and then it goes up. Right? There's lumps. This is how costs are. Right? Like, there are regular costs, and then there are lumpy costs. Those lumpy costs are capital intensive. Capital intensive in that sense meaning, like, you need a lot of money. You need a lot of resources to be able to account for it. Like, the cost of for when it comes to school districts, the cost of a new roof, the cost of a new school building, the cost of repaving your parking lot, your HVAC system, your playgrounds. Like, those are big costs that just come down the line that are different kinds of costs that, require different kinds of resources at a different kind of pace than the payment of your salaries, the payments of your benefits. Okay. So the the question then becomes, okay, how do you finance? How do you pay for those lumpy costs? And in The United States, the way that we've decided to do it is to treat school districts like private businesses, who need to get liquidity on a private credit market. So we treat it as a we treat it as a credit problem. And not only that, we treat it as a private credit problem. And, again, this is the way that it's been time immemorial. Now the bonds have looked different. The loans have diff looked different. The market has looked different and changed. But, again, the first one that I found is in 1837 in Kentucky. That's the first time a school district had to take out a loan and pay it back with interest. Now how does it work? School district two thirds of school districts are out on their own. Individualized, they have to go to a a market called the municipal bond market, and they have to sell themselves. Okay? So it's like a bond is a loan that you get. It's money that you borrow. But the reason why it's called a bond is because it's a it's a large, like, security where you're promising to pay a series of investors who have given you money on a with a price, interest rate. And it's like a security because they're gonna be they're gonna feel secure that you're gonna pay them back, and you're gonna feel secure that they're gonna lend you that money that you need for your HVAC, for your new playground. Now these bonds, yeah, they're in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Sometimes billions of dollars if you get to school districts that are really big, like in New York City where I live. And so so school districts another story I tell in the book is when I I taught a leadership, class for principal students who wanted to become school principals, and it was a law and finance class. And I brought them to the Bloomberg Bloomberg terminals at my university. A Bloomberg terminal is a computer that all the finance bros use. They're all glued to them because, this has up to date financial data for investors. If you wanna you wanna, make money as an investor, you need your Bloomberg terminal. School you can find your public school districts on a Bloomberg terminal. Why? Because they are investments on Wall Street that people put their money into to be able to make interest profits on. And each all the school bonds will have a yield, and that's the amount of money that the investors are gonna make. And, who who are the big in betweens? Well, it's the big private banks. So if you look at the bond statements that are publicly available for your school districts, you'll see Wells Fargo, JPMorgan, Bank of America. You know, those are the underwriters. And the underwriters take something called an underwriter's discount, which is never, like, fully actually listed or invoiced. It's never clear how much the private banks get. The there the your school district has a credit rating. And, you know, there are school districts in this country like Philadelphia where I learned about all this stuff for the first time that were considered junk investments. Because if your bond is beneath a certain threshold on the credit rating scale, then you're considered a junk investment. You're riskier even though it turns out that, like, the like, school districts are just not like businesses. They don't close down and and open up. It's like a completely different anyway, I could go on and on and about this stuff. The reason why Iowa is in that situation, the reason why Des Moines is in that situation is because they have some kind of set of costs that are lumpy, and there's no place for them to get those resources otherwise. There's no national program. There's no federal law. There's no, resources or grants, paid in kind. There's no there's no school's infrastructure policy. The only school infrastructure policy that exists is something called the tax exemption for interest paid on municipal bonds. What does that mean? It means that the government chooses not to tax you. If you're an investor that fronts up money to a municipality when they need the money for the bond. So if, if I give, you know, a $100,100 dollars to a min in in a municipal bond as an investor and the yield is, 3%, I make back a $103 when the time comes. The $3 I made are tax free. That's the the school infrastructure policy we have in this country. Who are the investors? Guess who these people are? These people are are are very wealthy. They're largely older retirees who want what they call fixed rate returns. So they wanna be sure that they're gonna get a certain return without the fluctuations of the market. So rather than, you know, risking getting an 11% return, which would be really high versus, like, you know, losing money on the stock market, they'll go for, like, a three or 4% yield on one of these municipal bonds because it's regular. That's how we do it, and school districts like, if you if you've ever been in a movement and you've ever been in a situation where you're demanding that your school district do something that would cost more money, you're probably familiar to some degree with the feeling of the superintendent or the school board looking over to the CFO or who's or the business office or whoever's in charge of the money, and then the person who's who's in charge of the money saying something about the district's credit rating or doing saying something about the district's debt payments or saying something about the district's ability to, you know, the the costs of borrowing. That's that's what happens here. Right? Because the district is always even though the debt payments, they range between 810% of the budget each year. It's not a huge amount, but also, like, 10% of your school budget. Like, in New York City, that's $3,000,000,000. Last year for the there was a $3,000,000,000 debt payment, that the that the school district made just on its just on its debt service. But the thing is, even though that's sort of qualitative quantitatively small between 810%, qualitatively, the experience of being in the district budget office is is basically having, like, a kind of fiscal gun to your head, where if you do anything out of line, whether your reserves aren't high enough, whether you've spent too much on curriculum materials, whether you've literally, like, opening charter schools in your districts lowers your credit rating. So, like, if they do they make, any kind of wrong move, they could they could have a credit rating problem. If the credit rating is lowered, that means that their borrowing costs are higher. It means that the property values in the district goes goes down. It means that all of the ways in which the district is networked with the local property markets is impacted. They cannot have that. They don't wanna be, they don't wanna have any undue attention on them that would question their, like, fiduciary kind of responsibilities, fiscal responsibilities. So as I say in the book, it's it's a sort of a hidden force of educational injustice. They're the but the bonds are the most powerful thing nobody's ever heard of.

Speaker 2 And it seems like it really sets up, like, this perverse incentive or, I guess, a negative feedback loop in the sense where I hear all the on the front end all the time that, you know, state and local governments want to cut the tax burden for, you know, individuals. They wanna cut business tax rates to draw in greater investment into the state. And so that lowers the pool of money that schools have to draw from on the front end. But then on the back end, those same people can take the money that they got, say, through these tax breaks, invest them into these municipal bond markets, and end up as creditors to these large urban schools or to, you know, to whomever, to which then the tax base, the the taxpayers then also become their creditors sort of by default. Because when the the taxpayers end up paying their property taxes, those are going to schools who are taking that 10% to to, you know, finance their debt, and that's going tax free back into the pocket of those investors. So it's like they've developed this free money hack where they can get them to cut taxes on the front end and get tax free profits on the back end. Meanwhile, right, they're literally it's like a tax on households by virtue of raising their local property taxes. I don't know. It I just I felt like a crazy person while I was reading through that to say this really can't be how the system works. Right? But like you said at the top, $4,000,000,000,000. It's the largest market for these kinds of bonds is in these municipal bonds with schools, to your point, k 12 through higher ed as the premier borrowers. It it literally defies reason and rationality.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's, once you start once you start, you know, connecting it, it's like that meme from Always Sunny in Philadelphia, you know, we're trying to bet they Sylvia. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. You start thinking about it that way, and and and and the loops just sort of continue. Like, for instance, you know, Linda McMahon, you know, the former head of the World Wrestling Federation, who's our esteemed secretary of education, she's deep into municipal bonds too. There was a there was an article about, on this on Chalki. I can't remember the amount of money exactly, but, you know, she's invested in this. She's destroying the system and also extracting the, the resources from from those school districts at the same time. And, you know, there's another chapter in my book where I talk about the relationship between municipal bond markets at the state level, private banks, and the gun industry, for instance. So, like, you know, the the the sort of looping flows that you were just talking about reminded me of that. You know? And I tell the story of the shooting in Uvalde and how, you know, in the sort of postmortem on that, they figured out that it was a faulty door lock or or a door lock that wasn't locking from both sides that, helped this shooter, get into the school with a with an automatic rifle and kill all the kids and and and and their teachers. Right? You know, it turns out that the the funding flows and the relationship of private banks, the funding flows that fund that faulty door lock and then also fund the companies that create the rifles and sell those rifles on the mass market, they're connected through the same private banks. And Texas in 2021 made it illegal for banks that, quote, discriminated, unquote, against the gun industry, to do business in Texas municipal bonds, which means that, for instance, Citibank, who had, like, the best rating in terms of their, from from, advocacy groups who were evaluating banks and their willingness to defund the gun industry, who sell weapons, on the mass market that are that are, by and large, the kind of weapons that are used in school shootings. The Texas bond municipal bond market is the second largest bond market in the country, and there was something on the order of 300 or $400,000,000 made just in fees from that bond market for these big banks. And so Citibank, which, you know, had, like, you know, tried to pose itself as as being, you know, committed to this, made a statement to the Texas state government saying, we in no way discriminate against the gun industry, and we work with the gun industry regularly. So, like, it's, you know, I think if if there were if there were different systems for financing school facilities, then there perhaps wouldn't have been this kind of terrifying, dual kind of pressure created by, you know, the private banks and their financing of the gun industry and also their financing of the school facilities in this way. And there's there's all kinds of connections like that Right. In this world once you start sort of following it. The the idea that, you know, the fear and terror that drives

Speaker 2 the gun industry, they might get a a loan in order to expand a factory or something, right, to help meet the demand for guns, while at the same time then the school goes to that same borrower. Right? And the banks are benefiting from from both of these things to say, okay. I'm benefiting from the growth of the gun industry. And then as a school, to update my security measures to combat the the risk and fear of guns, increase security or or buy better door locks, I'm going to that same bank and borrowing that money. You know, just, again, this this sort of negative feedback loop of perverse incentives that, you know, on the flip side of all of this, it doesn't work like this everywhere. Right? There are more sort of sane or rational ways that you write about as well that some municipalities have figured out how to essentially build up an insurance policy for these lumpy costs when they come up through some sort of, like, cost sharing or risk mitigation by pooling resources together or sort of spreading the tax base around more more equitably so schools can weather that storm? First, let's name those places so people can can find and learn more about them. But then what is it that they do that helps mitigate that in ways that other places don't? What are they doing right?

Speaker 1 You know, there's there's certain kinds of issues. In in the book, I try to have this kind of rhythm where throughout the chapter, I'll kind of critique the status quo and then punctuate the end of it with the kind of policy that I think is the one that we should have. And there are different issues that the different policies, I think, address. Now there's the issue of the way in which racialized private property markets influence, taxes and revenues for school districts, And then there's the issue of the municipal bond market. And, some there's there I I think different I mean, we want a suite of policies, and at the end of the book, I I try I try to sketch out a plan for public education that, know, would have a suite of policies to address all the issues, including, you know, taxes and, and the like. And so, you know, when it comes to the municipal bond market, I think you know, the thing that the thing that I think would be really great to do is, in general, would be to have a national investment authority. You know, then you'd have what you'd have is a a third pillar of the, the country's, financial system. You'd have the treasury, the Fed, and the national investment authority. And, like, when it comes to lumpy costs in the in the literature, there's this idea of patient capital. And patient capital is the kind of capital that would, be invested in the kinds of public infrastructures from which multiple generations of people would benefit, in a way that kind of challenges and maybe violates the more impatient kinds of capital that we're used to where the people who are fronting the money or investing in something would see that return in the same same kind of generation or the same decade. Like, you you would get to see your investment. Right? Patient capital is the capital that's required, like, for school buildings. You know? And school buildings that will like, that educated your grandparents, your parents, you. Like, investing in that kind of what, you know, authors like, Sallio Morova and and Robert Hockett, you know, call collective goods. It's different than a public good. The collective good is the one that is this kind of public infrastructure that requires very patient capital, and, we need institutions that can properly provide that patient capital. And right now, what we have is impatient capitalist system that's trying to finance patient public collective goods. And so a lot of the schools are really hurting because of that mismatch. It's just like it's a category mistake to think that this kind of system of impatient capital can finance our our patient needs, for for for collective infrastructure. And that that doesn't it's not just school buildings. It's all kinds of public infrastructure. And, you know, I'll say that, like, some of the stuff that was in the inflation reduction act that's been recently gutted was quite exciting on this score. I'm I'm not super pumped about everything about that law, but there were parts of it that were really great. And there were two things, you know, that I'll talk about, and I talk about in the book too. One of them were these tax credits, and the tax credits reimbursed school districts up to 60% for, green infrastructure expenditure. And that's basically like you get a mail in rebate. You know? It's like if a school district wants to put solar panels on their roof, like so many school districts started doing, then they could look to the federal government bet get between 30%, 60% reimbursement for that, which makes a huge, huge difference to a school district, not only in the moment for the expenditure on those solar panels, but, like, over time, because solar panels are more efficient, they they you can get savings just by using these alternative sources on your utility costs, which, by the way, are increasing. The utility utility costs of water and electricity are only going up because these AI data centers. And so so having that tax credit structure was really great because then school districts could could say, hey. Like, I can put in a ground source heat pump or an electric heat pump, and, you know, I could save money on my cost going forward because it's cheaper than, oil and gas. And, also, I can get reimbursement from the federal government. But, also, guess what? Like, with the green stuff, like, it won't put as much carbon into the atmosphere that's gonna ruin the future that we're supposed to be preparing our kids for in these buildings. And, and educators are sensitive to that. Okay? Like, they they understand that, you know, that this climate issue is gonna it's, like, actually undermining their very purpose, in their their jobs. And so the tax credits in the IRA were cool, but I think even cooler, was the green bank capitalization. I really am a big fan of green banks, and green banks are like, bank is sort of a misnomer. It's more of, like, it's more of an investment fund. And what it does is and for education audiences, this is the line I use. Like, green banks are reverse charter schools. And the reason why they're reverse charter schools is because like, whereas the charter school takes public money and funnels it into the private sector, the green bank takes private money and funnels it for the public purpose. And, you know, for the capitalists, you know, the green infrastructure and public infrastructure, the price is always wrong. Right? Like, it's not a good investment. They're not gonna make as much money as possible because they make, you know, as much money as they can ruining the world. But, like, the the the, the green bank helps them and and derisks it for them, in a way that I think is is cool, in ways that we can work with. And so I think, you know, more more policies that provide these kind of tax credits, more policies that empower the green bank are ways in which we can take on this municipal bond market. And, you know, I think you can get pensions involved in that too, and you can start actually using the public's money for the public's infrastructure in these ways that actually don't require the federal government. So if we can't rely on the federal government anymore, maybe we need to start thinking about how we can get sort of state and local money sort of virtuously cycling and building on itself.

Speaker 2 Zooming out to the federal level, I think we typically think of the federal government stepping in to support special education funding, title one. They're they're filling the what we might call those equity gaps in different state and local budgets. But you liken federal funding in the book to quote, different sized spoons that dole out money from a cracked and uneven pot. Love that So that visual what's what's happening in that metaphor and how does federal money get allocated to schools in the strange way that that these don't live up to, the expectation that we have for them?

Speaker 1 In some ways, I wrote this book in a time before January 2025. And, as as as quickly as, things have changed, I've also had to kind of adapt my own thinking to it and and trying to keep up with this the the the sort of terrible speed of the, changes happening in the federal government, you know, trying to be able to name what's going on in a way that's helpful. Like, yeah, before, you know, I would have said, and I think it's also still more or less true that the federal government's contribution is qualitatively important and quantitatively pitiful. You know, on average, the federal government funds, you know, public education about 8% of a school's budget. It's it's just not much at all. And, you know, another way of thinking about this, for instance, is on average, title one a, which provides, federal monies for poor, you know, districts that serve poor students, On average, in 2015, which is the last kind of massive study we had of it, it was about $1,200 per student that it provided. On average, school districts were spending $12,000 per student. Okay? But that $1,200 still means I'm not I don't wanna say it doesn't mean anything. I I'm really, very, like, I wanna say that it actually when it comes to school finance, what these district officials are trying to do is they're trying to pay for what's needed, and a little bit helps. Okay? And and but also when you're missing a little bit, it also makes a big difference. And so what was going on with the federal government was essentially this dynamic of, like, you know, in crisis moments, the government steps in and sends, you know, send sends in money. And historically, those crisis moments have always been linked to war. So, you know, the first time the federal government decided to fund public education was actually in the wake of World War one when they saw that all their white boys that they were sending overseas were actually quite sickly and illiterate. And so they thought to themselves, well, if we wanna project power, we better have a school system that, you know, builds up these soldiers we wanna send into the mosque of They weren't quite living up to the doughboy stereotype, it sounds like. You know? No. No. Right? And so that's that's a big moment of of federal a federal intervention in school funding. Another big moment of federal intervention in school funding, Sputnik. Okay. Cold war fighting communism. Right? Like, turns the Russians send a satellite into space for the first time, and everyone in The US starts freaking out that the communists are ahead of the game and that they're gonna win the Cold War. So they're like, well, we better fund our education system. Okay? Again, as context context of war. And just, you know, I guess as a footnote there too, like, I I like just telling people, you know, Brown versus Board of Education is crowning what's seen as a crowning achievement of civil rights movement that happens in 1954, a good ten years before a lot of the action we see in what's ultimately the second civil rights movement. The justices and, the federal government was, this is according to Derek Bell, one of the founders of Critical Race Theory, whose work I really love. You know, he he he was he was a member of the NAACP trying the busing cases and the inter integration cases. He wrote a couple essays that were groundbreaking, and he said, listen. Why do you think that it happened in 1954? It happens in 1954 because a couple of those supreme court justices did a world tour. And in much of the world that was contested between this the the Soviet bloc and The United States, they kept hearing a refrain, which is you keep saying that you're supposed to be a bastion of freedom in the world, but look at how you treat your people of color. Look at how you treat your black communities. How could you how could you project an image of freedom and equality on the world stage against communism when you treat your people so terribly, in in terms of racial segregation in the schools? Right? So it was the local school buildings in segregation that ultimately, like, kinda, you know, made made these people think to themselves, well, hey. We better get our act together in in terms of integration or else we're gonna lose a cold war against the communist. And, like, that's that's when the federal government feels, you know, the need to get involved. Right? And and most recently, we we saw the the CARES Act, and that was a global pandemic. Okay? So that wasn't a war in the same way, but in a way, it was a sort of existential threat, and so the federal government steps in. Otherwise, you know, the the the legacy that we have of the of the great society legislation from from Lyndon B. Johnson and, you know, ESEA, the title the titles of those title one and title two and title three and title four, like, you know, that that's, you know, the the the legacy of the civil rights movement. And the the that funding has been just, it's just been undermined. It's been compromised. I I guess I'll use the word compromised because in the years since the civil rights movement, what you've seen, like, starting from LBJ himself, even when he was a vice president with with JFK when they started undoing FDR's economic policies. Like, onward, what we've seen is just a constant compromising on that vision, constantly just giving into, oh, we can't spend this. We shouldn't spend that. Who's getting this money? It's just the the the diverse working class kids of color in the cities, like and over and over again. And, like, you know, title one that I talk about in the book, you know, if you start looking at the history of it, it's got these four formulas, and the four formulas have been added. They've been weakened. They've been this and they've been that. They've tried to be more generous, and that generosity has been taken back over and over again. And so you get this, like, image, you know, that you that you say that I try to write about in the book of this crackpot with these differently sized spoons, you know, where Idaho students get, you know, $800 of of money, for for poor students, whereas Vermont poor students get 2,000 you know, it's like the the the formula is dice dice things up and slice them up in ways nobody really knows about. But, you know, I'll just getting back to the way that I sort of preface this response, like, the federal government now I mean, even when I was writing the book, I thought, you know, okay. You know, the big threat here is that what they would do is they would outsource the administration of the the funding streams from the legislation to other departments and get rid of the Department of Education. Okay? But just getting rid of the Department of Education doesn't mean that they get rid of the funding sources. Right? Like like, it's just they're administered by HHS or or the Department of Justice or or the Department of Commerce. And, like, fine. I mean, the Department of Education, that was a relic of Jimmy Carter. And the only reason they the Republicans wanted to get rid of it was because Reagan was fond of saying, like, let's just get rid of it because that's what Carter did in '19, in the 1979, you know, in nineteen eighty presidential election. In any case, you know, they they they could they could outsource it, but then they could do something, also bad, which would be to make the categorical grants block grants, which would mean, like, taking these grants that are trying to target concentrations of poverty in different ways, and and just sort of flatten it all out, give it to the state, say use it for whatever the heck you want. I didn't know that even that they would just fire everyone. You know? I didn't know I didn't know that they would literally just like, even like, the it's even a more materialist intervention. Right? It's like a a a a terribly materialist thing. It's like, well, you don't want whatever. Like, we'll just fire everyone who's responsible for taking care of this stuff, and, like, maybe the money will go out, maybe it won't. Like, in July, states across The United they got an email a week before a big payment was supposed to come in from the federal government saying, oh, that money's not coming. You know what I mean? Like and so now everyone's just sort of knocked off balance, holding their breath, and and they're they're they're dismantling it in a way that I wasn't even clear, you know, would happen. But I guess, you know, there's a way in which we should have seen it coming. We should have seen, you know, last vote saying, like, we're gonna put them in trauma. We're gonna remake this deep state of this administrative state. You know, there are definitely valid critiques, left critiques of federal government and its interventions, but, like, you know, it's in a it's in a much more chaotic, dire state than even when I was writing. It is so interesting

Speaker 2 to see on the federal and horrifying really to see at federal level what seems to simultaneously just be like an abdication to support civil rights, right, and what they are legally required to spend on these programs. And for these students who are entitled by their civil rights to have a free and accessible public education, right, at the same time that their rhetoric against DEI and all these other kinds of things, we shouldn't it shouldn't be surprising to us. But then alongside that abdication in the what's legally required part, there is a weaponization on the other hand, which is for us to give you money, right, you have to sign off on compacts at in in higher ed or we've seen I've seen this at the state level here. Local schools changing DEI policies because their lawyers tell them they'll be at risk of losing access to federal funds if they don't change the language of some, you know, school board handbook or something. Now I don't know, you know, to what extent those are just tokenistic linguistic changes and you don't have to really change policy and practice. Like, I I completely understand that. But there just seems to be they're they're having their cake and eating it too at the federal level in the sense of not wanting to do their legal responsibilities, but really caring a lot about how these other things get spent. Just like we did with the school bonds talking about like, okay, what are some examples of of ways to do this better, more humanely, in ways that make rational fiscal sense? I wonder if we could talk about, like, the value added tax idea. I think I had mentioned it in this introduction. But what really struck me about this, not only is it a policy tool that seemingly the rest of the world has, if you've, you know, traveled abroad, you've paid a VAT, a value added tax on things that you buy, but it really seems like a really cool and unique compromise politically while also providing like a really great policy tool, to address the kinds of things that we're talking about here. Do you wanna talk about the history and power of this intervention?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Sure. So the value added tax is a tax at different levels of production, and it historically is leveled on the supply side, not necessarily on the demand side. So but but you do pay that, you know, as a consumer as well. But the the structure of the tax is one that is also on the supply side. And rather than just like a a a sales tax, which is exclusively an excise tax, or it's it's paid at the point of the transaction and the money on the demand side, like, you know, you've got your VAT tax, which is taxing on the production side. And, most countries in the world have some form of value added tax. It's a tax on the value add. Right? When the value is added, we tax. Okay? And, this is how governments all all over the world, except for, like, Saudi Arabia, Greenland, and us, do it. And so the story of Richard Nixon's proposal of the value added tax for education is quite interesting, and I was very surprised to come upon it myself. But in the, in the days when and I write about this in the book. In the days when school funding policy in The United States could have been something much better, than it is, the situation in the nine early nineteen seventies was this. So you had a twenty year kind of period of civil rights organizing that had brought a very significant legal challenge, to the segregation, and white supremacy in The United States. And there were court cases popping up everywhere, and the state supreme courts were finding that, indeed, the system of property local property taxation was one that violated the, the equal rights. Like, it violated you know, you couldn't you just can't do that. That's illegal because it's the, you know, racialized communities with certain kinds of municipal revenue that can pay, and the other ones even right next door can't. And that's just not, yeah. That ain't legal as they as as they say. So Richard Nixon, like, pretty crafty politician, sees this sort of coming, and then there's a huge case in California in 1971 called Sereno versus Priest. And California, you know, biggest state in the country, finds that, like, you know, it is, in fact, illegal. This is bad. It's wrong. And when you have a kind of accumulation of cases like that, then what you have is is a tendency or a kind of pressure on the federal and the Supreme Court to decide in their favor because that's where the states are all headed. And, you know, Richard Nixon, is sort of like, well, if they're gonna be challenging this, at the federal level and we're gonna have to do something about it, why don't we head them off at the pass and try to at least take control of the situation and, in a way that will make, you know, the advocates happy, but also not have to really give up our white supremacist, you know, system or something? He was trying to find ways to figure out how to accommodate, like, how to, you know, how to how to find settlements, I guess, within this within this, you know, conjunction in this crisis. And he said, why don't we do a Let's just do a VAT. We'll take it away. We won't we won't have the property tax. We'll do a VAT, and we'll we'll fund schools this way. And it's a really interesting history because, like, you know, the the there were these reports that were written that were just like, you can't do this. This is a this is a terrible tax on the supply side. Like, we're we're your constituency, the business community. We won't have it. And, you know, Nixon scuttled it. And then in a couple years, it turned out Rodriguez passed at the supreme court level, where the supreme court decided that because the word education doesn't appear, in the federal constitution, the federal government has no obligation to fund it. And that combined with the case in in Milliken, you know, where there was no, there was no responsibility to deal with disparities across district lines, you know, then, you know, the the the the the the case was closed. The rich and Richard Nixon didn't have to worry about it anymore. We could keep that whole system in place because the federal government just said, well, the word isn't there. So we don't have to we don't have to pay for it, but it's an interesting moment in history. And so I think, you know, we can we can think about that stuff. And but I just wanna say too as a postscript, and I try to qualify in the book, and I didn't know exactly how far to get into it, but, you know, I think the modern monetary theorists are really right when it comes to federal government. And we can fund whatever we want. We can fund whatever priorities we have. So it's not a matter. Like, I don't think the VAT tax is I wouldn't wanna say that it's gonna pay for it because that's not how it works. The government just prints and budgets and finance the the money finances the money for its budget for whatever it it wants to do. Okay? But that doesn't mean we shouldn't have taxes and that, actually, taxes control inflation, and, like, also keep money you know, like, keep maintaining a sort of balance and political power. Having a VAT tax, I think, would do that. So, you know, that's why I think having a VAT tax is an interesting way to to explore this at the federal level, you know, and this idea, you know, for people who think at some point we're gonna take power back in federal government. You know, it's an idea, I think, to keep in your pocket.

Speaker 2 The the notion that it could bring together coalitions of people who hate paying local property taxes, right, which I I imagine are wealthier people, you know, a a huge portion of the the middle class who are homeowners, who maybe send their kids to public schools, but who might find themselves, you know, part of a fiscal conservative and socially conservative coalition. Right? It's an offer to that to then say, okay. We're gonna then leverage that at the federal level. At least it sounds like in Nixon's time as a way to sort of shift the power away from, you know, what we know was happening locally on the ground for cities and low principal principalities. Jesus. I was an AP Euro teacher. Municipalities to to, right, maintain those systems of segregation. This was like a way for the federal government to leverage more of that to mitigate that. So, yeah, there really is a lot of power there, I think, both in terms of a political strategy to potentially build coalitions with groups on the issue of supporting public education. And then it sounds like a pretty effective again, it's not gonna be a panacea, but a pretty effective fiscal tool to help address these inequalities. Although it does sound, you know, you mentioned these Supreme Court precedents too, that there are perhaps some barriers before we get there. At the same time, I'll say there's been a lot that has happened in the last nine months that hasn't necessarily followed precedent or hasn't had lawyers preemptively shutting it down to avoid court decisions. So maybe, again, lawful good federal government at some point could come in and use the use those same powers on the other hand, but that's, again, a slightly different political conversation. But I just I love that you insert that into, you know, the toolkit, just setting that on the table and saying, here's something that was tried or explored at a at a certain time, and maybe now is the moment to pick that tool up. If it wasn't the right political moment back in when when Nixon had proposed it or or thought of it, maybe that time is now. But your book, right, just gives us these ideas to think differently about school finance and the way of funding public schools as a way to, I don't know, expand our horizons of thinking about it. I think right now we're so trapped in this claustrophobic present that I really appreciate those ways of opening the door, not on, again, the battlefront of values and culture wars, but through this different way of leveraging our values through economic power. What do you want the, you know, the closing message of this conversation to be, perhaps for people who go on to to pick up your book or wanna explore these issues, you know, more deeply?

Speaker 1 Yeah. No. Sure. I mean, honestly, like, what you just said was such a great summary of what I'm trying to do with the book, right, which is to take what seems like a claustrophobic situation and create space to, you know, like Mark says, rest freedom from necessity, right, where where whatever seems like it has to be actually need not be and, gives us opportunities to to, you know, to change things and and make it better. And I think to some degree, I'm trying to bring this, you know, arcane but extremely important, set of, you know, financial policies to light to show that we can actually work there too. And the way you said it was was great. It's you know, we're trying to open up new senses of possibility in an otherwise bleak, claustrophobic landscape. And I think that there are ways of using the money to do it.

Speaker 2 I wanna share this anecdote real quick, because I was at an organizing event, for Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement earlier in the week, and, you know, I happened to have the physical copy of your book with me and all my notes. And as we went around the table and people were introducing themselves, you know, I said, hey, I'm Nick Covington, you know, here's what I do. And the question that we were supposed to answer was like, well, why are you here? You know, why why do you support this public school strong movement? And, you know, I was weighing all of the the the tensions and the competing forces in my head over the course of the week from that DOGE report. Right? And then the the vision in your book, the kinds of things that you heard as I was, you know, dealing with them in the introduction as well. But the thing that I had talked about is, you know, the line the entire time I was in the classroom teaching, you know, my entire time now that my kids are in public schools has been like demanding that these public schools do more with less, do more with less, do more with less. And you're very plain in this book to say like schools need money to do well, and schools that have money do more and and do better. And I, you know, leverage that in that conversation to say, like, I'm I I want the permission to demand that our schools do more with more instead of try to do more with less. This hypocritical, you know, way of putting more and more in our schools and less and less amount of funding on there. I want them to be thriving public schools where, you know, kids have access not just to sustenance level, you know, food and intellectual and physical and emotional safety and security, but really can thrive in a lot of different areas to have access to robust art and music and clubs and extracurriculars and course offerings and, you know, well paid adults who can, you know, live comfortably in the communities in which they teach, you know, and have parents who don't have to stress out so much because, you know, they're supported in this as well. I just think, again, your book is a wonderful off ramp to the permission to demand that, you know, fiscally and financially, that investment from state, local, and from the federal government, regardless of the timeline of getting it. You know, I'm not gonna let reality impinge on this just yet, but I think that that basic permission from your book was a really powerful thing to lean into, and perhaps as listeners go and and they read the book, they can bring that message into their communities too. I mean, what what you just did was you

Speaker 1 fleshed out the concept of what public education should be. What does it mean to have public education for all? That's what you just said. That's what you just described. What we need are financing policies that can provide that, that can finance that. And what my book is about is are are those policies and and why the policies we have now aren't those policies, which means that the education we want now isn't that education. Yeah. And that's why I called it as public as possible because we we actually want we don't wanna protect our public schools. We want our public schools to be as public as possible, and, this is, I think, how to how to fund it.

Speaker 2 Well, that's the book, As Public as Possible, Radical Finance for America's Public Schools. The author is David Bakker. You can preorder it from the new press. And and just my personal opinion, I think we need more philosopher school finance experts. So thanks,

Speaker 1 Dave, for sharing your work with us today. Thank you so much, Nick. It was a really great conversation.

Speaker 3 Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change. If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player. Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org.

Speaker 1 Thank you.