I am of course talking about the most hypocritical nation in the world, my own. And this essay on the financing of public education demonstrates how for all people might want to talk about things like “all men are created equal,” nothing in this nation allows such a radical statement to come to fruition.

In As Public as Possible: Radical Finance for America’s Public Schools, David I. Backer, an expert on school finance and a professor of education policy at Seton Hall, seeks to illuminate how property taxes, school bonds, and school district budgets all conspire against the progressive ideal that everyone should grow up with equal opportunities. For each of these crumbling pillars of our public education system, Backer suggests ambitious policy fixes. As the book’s title suggests, the only way to make American schooling as equal as possible is to make it as public as possible. Pool the taxes, funding, administration, and risks—and keep schools, teachers, and students as far as possible from capture by private interests or the discipline of financial markets. While the book largely sidesteps the politics of how to get there, it is an excellent blueprint for reimagining public school funding.

Public schools are financed primarily by local property taxes. While these taxes are easy for school districts to levy and budget for, relying on them to support students drives a perverse outcome: neighborhoods with higher property values can buy themselves better schools than neighborhoods with lower property values. This inequality reinforces itself across time: minority neighborhoods subject to redlining a century ago—cut off from credit and federal mortgage assistance—have lower property values today and, therefore, worse schools. One reason why public schools remain highly segregated, seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education, is that wealthier neighborhoods have carved out separate school districts to keep their property tax dollars at home.

To capture property tax revenue disparities, Backer has created a “super-expropriation index.” Like a Gini coefficient for national inequality, it measures the variance in districts’ resources and tax revenues within a metropolitan region, quantifying the gap between the richest and poorest districts. Values above 0.5 demonstrate that, in a given region, richer and whiter districts claim a disproportionate share of regional tax collections; Backer finds that Seattle and Philadelphia score 0.5 and 0.6, respectively; New Orleans scores 1.0. For Backer, the only real solution to bringing these values down is to pool property tax revenues at the state level (if not the national level) and redistribute them across districts to guarantee a minimum level of per-pupil spending. Citing success stories in Minnesota, Vermont, and Massachusetts, he argues that change is possible. He adds that this super-expropriation index quantifies the theory of racial capitalism, but the book does not seriously foreground this concept.

Next, Backer focuses on school bonds—how schools raise debt, backed by their property tax revenues, to finance new construction and long-term investment needs. Unsurprisingly, school bonds are also horribly unequal. Districts have to raise the money on Wall Street, where bankers charge them millions in fees. They treat poorer districts as credit risks by hiking bond interest rates—perpetuating a doom loop of disinvestment precisely in the communities that most need support. When Backer shows his students their home districts represented as debt securities on a Bloomberg terminal, we see how the status quo is, on one level, rational for investors—districts with less tax revenue pose a greater risk—yet deeply irrational from any other perspective. Poorer districts need more money, not less, if the goal is educational equality.

Backer highlights how state bond banks can attenuate the risks of school districts raising capital themselves—but advocates for going even bigger with institutions like a National Investment Authority or a fund resembling the Federal Reserve’s pandemic-era Municipal Liquidity Facility, which could backstop school bonds and break Wall Street’s ability to discipline public spending. He also notes how the Inflation Reduction Act has provided schools with tax incentives and grants for retrofits. Although the future of these programs remains uncertain—to say nothing of the challenges surrounding their implementation—districts expressed enthusiasm about leveraging them to invest in school building efficiency and energy savings. Citing the popularity of Pennsylvania’s Whole-Home Repairs Act, Backer speculates that progressive school finance campaigns centered around school building construction and retrofits could mobilize both moderates and conservatives. This optimism is hard to square with conservatives’ knee-jerk aversion to direct public spending.

In a methodical section on teachers’ pensions, Backer also underscores the danger of using financial markets to determine the entitlements of teachers, or any other public servant. The shift from defined-benefit to defined-contribution pension plans places the risk of investing prudently onto individual pensioners, rather than onto their employers or the state. But Backer emphasizes the political dangers as much as the financial ones: he walks us through how conservatives have politicized school districts’ budgets and teacher pensions, and he uses high-profile accounting discrepancies to illustrate how conservatives and progressives alike have come to treat an “unfunded pension liability”—an accounting term and not a measure of insolvency—as a political emergency that justifies austerity.

Let’s take a state like Rhode Island. Public schools aren’t great and there are many reasons for that. But on top of all of this is a culture of sending your kids to private schools if you can, leaving the political push behind good public school funding weak. Forever, the pipeline to power in Providence was the Catholic high schools, then to Providence College and law school and then to the statehouse. Now, it’s Emily Oster telling the nation to open public schools during the pandemic while living in a fancy east side of Providence house and sending her kids to tony privates. That’s the Gina Raimondo era Rhode Island right there. Meanwhile, Providence Public Schools are laughably underfunded, or it would be laughable if I didn’t know horror stories from the schools from teachers and union leaders I know. So to get at what this book requires, you have to break down the entire structure of not only public school funding but the attitude toward them that exists in too much of the nation, especially on the east coast. It’s not good. And of course Maddie and Connor, they deserve the BEST schools and fuck anyone who tells me not to enforce the nation’s inequality through my own actions.

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