Please note: This transcript was automatically generated. We have reviewed it to ensure it reflects the original conversation, but we may not have caught every transcription error.

Christopher Saldaña: Hi everyone. I'm Chris Saldaña and this is the National Education Policy Center's Talks Education Podcast. On this month's podcast, we interviewed doctors David Backer and Roseann Liu. Dr. Backer is an associate professor of education policy at the College of Human Development, Culture, and Media at Seton Hall University.

He's also the author of As Public As Possible: Radical Finance for America's Public Schools. Dr. Liu is an assistant professor of educational studies and Asian American Studies at Swarthmore College. She's the author of Designed to Fail: Why Racial Equity in School Funding Is So Hard to Achieve. In this month's podcast, Drs. Backer and Liu walk us through both their research and their approach to studying K-12 school finance.

So you both study school finance policy in the United States, but you both come at it from very different angles. So can you each tell our listeners a bit about what you study in K 12 school finance and how you go about your work and Roseann, maybe we can start with you.

Roseann Liu: Sure. Yeah, so it's really funny, I think, that I actually wrote a book about school finance because I have zero intrinsic interest in school finance and if anything, maybe a negative interest. Like I have never balanced a checkbook. I don't know, that's not even a thing that’s done anymore. I have no aptitude for math but I cared a lot about, care, a lot about issues of race and equality and education.

And so a lot of those issues just run through school funding. And so that's how I backed into the topic. And so I had to read these really very boring spreadsheets and documents to try to make sense of them and to stitch together a story. And I guess this is where my training as an anthropologist comes into play and was helpful because there's this ethnographic conceit, in both senses of the term that you learn really early on, which is that through field work you can make the strange, familiar.

And so, in other words, you can understand something by immersing yourself in it for long enough. And so I had to learn some of the technical aspects of school finance. But I think my real interest was in trying to understand why are we still dealing with this problem of racial inequity in school funding today?

Long after civil rights legislation has been passed and long after lots of like facially neutral things, that the policies are facially neutral. Why do we still deal with this today? And so what I realized pretty early on was that the school funding problem is not primarily a technical problem, so it isn't because we don't know how to create a fair funding formula, but rather the problem is a racial and political problem.

It's that we value lives differently, and then we make these different material investments based on those values. And so in a lot of ways I feel like the punchline of inequality is always the same, right? We know who's gonna get stiffed, we know who's gonna get screwed in this. And so the contribution that my book tried to make was to ethnographically, show how that happens, right?

Through tracing these small and sometimes seemingly insignificant decisions that end up maintaining the racial school funding status quo. And so one reviewer of my book, when I submitted it to Chicago Press, he called it it's like showing how the school funding sausage gets made.

And I really liked that metaphor because that was that was in a lot of ways what I was trying to do. And the last thing that I wanna mention about how I approach the work is and how is it has to do with how we tell a story about inequality, right? It becomes increasingly important for me nowadays to not just give a doom and gloom story about how terrible everything is, but to also show how people are contesting these conditions.

And I'm like here thinking about an influence by Eve Tuck who has written about what it does to us, right? When we tell this story of damage and despair and how that positions us, as always victims. And so I wanted to in this book not just tell a story about how terrible state legislators are and how they continue to reproduce inequality, but I also wanted to focus on the organizers and the advocates and the people who are really working to change these oppressive conditions.

And I think that in the end it ended up being a good decision, not just for the book, but also just for me. Because being around organizers and amplifying their work, it really expanded my own soul, right? And my own sense of what we deserved and could imagine and strengthened my sense of hope.

David Backer: I wanted to say first thank you for having me on, us on, and again, it's so good to be in conversation with the both of you. I'm such a fan of both of your work. And this question is a really great opportunity to talk about, like our methods to some degree, like our discipline, but also how we approach this question of school finance.

And I think I want to, I would want to talk about a couple things, namely two - philosophy and movements. And Roseanne you were talking about anthropology as your methodological kind of background and disciplinary, and my disciplinary background is philosophy and I, as an undergraduate, I studied the philosophy of mathematics. And I think one of the reasons why I did that was because I was such a terrible math student. I, there was so much pressure to be good at math and to be smart. And I just couldn't take, I hated it. I didn't like the whole structure of math education. And it turned out when I went to college, I had this, I was really drawn to like dissecting numbers, dissecting in the very sort of traditional notion of analytic philosophy, right? Analysis, a diagnostic of the structure of truth claims down to the very formal languages like set theory and, other kinds of like modal logics and the like. I just really liked that. For whatever reason, I think it was a sort of revenge on math and, then I became a high school teacher and then I taught in Ecuador for a number of years as an international school teacher. And I don't know, my politics took a left turn when I understood what was going on in Ecuador with oil exploitation and a kind of neo-colonial order that had brought me there that I hadn't been aware of. In any case, I became interested in how philosophy, I was still interested in philosophy, but I became interested in how philosophy and concepts work and exert pressure, but also run parallel to not the non-conceptual, that is to say the material. And I think the way that I approach school finance is in that mode and it actually is quite influenced by an essay that two philosophers of education wrote Kathleen Knight Abowitz and Nick Buis on situated philosophy. That made a big impression on me when I was doing my doctoral work, and what I did was I did my dissertation on classroom discussion actually, and, but it was a situated philosophy study. I was out in the field and I was observing classroom discussions and also discussions in Occupy Wall Street.

But what I was really interested in was the ways in which, you know, being a philosopher, reading philosophy and then doing the practice exerted these mutual pressures. And that's sort of my approach to school finance too. I draw from many different kinds of disciplines. I use history, I use anthropology, I use sociology, I use literature.

But ultimately what I'm doing is I'm working with and on concepts, when I approach the numbers in school finance, to see what possibilities there are in those numbers, in those policies. And I think one of the more succinct ways of putting it is, and this is how I put it in bios and stuff, is that I work on ideology and school finance because the finance is actually, it's not just a sort of cold technical, just as Roseann said thing, it's actually part of the din of history. And my own philosophical background is in critical theory, Marxism, and it's caught up in the class struggle. There's a dialectics of school finance, so to speak, and I'm kind of interested in understanding those dialectics as I participate in them.

And I'm always trying to keep fresh on my philosophy and challenge the concepts that I'm working with, but also trying to track the concepts that are behind the words and numbers of school finance. And, but the way that you have to do that, at least in this tradition of dialectics and Marxism, is you have to be in the movements.

You have to be organizing, you have to be on the ground. And it's not necessarily a matter of studying the movements, but actually like organizing and seeing. Seeing things and understanding things as they happen, learning and then translating that into research. My approach to school finance is really to do it that way, philosophically, but movement-based and to do organizing and learn about it from there.

And it was actually in Philadelphia that I really got my sort of chops and really got my questions about toxic schools and infrastructure and in a way it was Philadelphia and the struggles for decades around the school buildings that revealed to me as someone who had studied critical education critical pedagogy quite in depth, I realized that Paula Ferri was famous for talking about the banking methods of education, but it's very few critical pedagogs or critical educational theorists that talk about the banks in education, like actually how the money works using this framework, this left framework, actually the not just schooling in capitalist America as Bowles and Gintis would have it in terms of the curricular reproduction of the division of labor, but actually the touchpoint, the material touchpoints between capitalism and the schools.

You don't get a lot of that which I was shocked by. And so I find myself, that's how I approach the work there.

Christopher Saldaña: So you've both already mentioned the technical aspects of school finance and for better or for worse they're there. But you've both also are, and you've already started to talk about this in your response to the first question, you center humans in the story of school finance when that often isn't the norm about, we have talked about it traditionally, and so I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about how you try to do that in your work.

And then Dave, maybe we start with you this time.

David Backer: Sure. Actually I could almost extend my, how I approach this a little bit in the sense that from a very young age since I was a little kid, I wanted to be a novelist. I was very into writing fiction. My first big goal in life up until my twenties was to write fiction. And it was actually, I had gotten really far. I'd written a novel and I had an, a publisher that was interested in it, quite a big one and agents that were interested in it. But they were all it was all happening in, in 2008 and 2009. And they were saying we lose money on literary fiction, frankly, and we can't afford to lose any money right now because of the financial crisis. And that was really when I became very angry at capitalism because I realized that even my hopes and dreams that I had spent almost my whole young life fantasizing about were actually all commoditized.

And in any case, that's just to say that I approach things with a very strong sense of narrative and story, but not maybe in a different, perhaps way than maybe Rose's ethnographically. It's more just I like story. I just like beginning, middle, and end, like drama, tension. I think that when we tell stories about school finance, when we mix this sort of arcane two-dimensional, abstract public finance with the drama intention of a narrative and also just the weird, the weirdness that you can portray in literature the way in which literature can actually represent in a very dramatic and robust way, the fullness of the reality of a situation. I think that we can get to the political economy of school finance, not just the economics of school finance, which is typically what we do. So yeah, I like when I go into a I love reading bond statements.

That's the thing that I really like. I go into bond statements and I'm just like, where are the stories? What what's going on here? Who are the people? But I also, and this sort of gets, I think to the next question maybe that you sent us, but I'll just maybe give a little taste perhaps of what I'm thinking.

It's like particularly coming out of a very influenced by the thinking of Louis Althusser and Marxism. The emphasis on structure is really important and I think there's actually a way in which I try to narrativize and almost characterize the structures in the school finance, which is like, the main character of a story is the millage rate, let's say and rather than it being traditional, typical human being individuals who are interacting with one another and having stories actually, like it's the structures themselves that are also alive and exerting forces, but also being exerted upon.

And I think Althusser’s theory of like imminent structure, that is to say like an absent cause like where you have all these overdetermined contradictions I feel like that's a very narrative approach to the social structure. And so I try to maybe narrativize oh, what the heck is the targeted grant formula in Title one funding? How does that work? And who is that? I'm interested in. And so I approach this sort of technical from that.

Roseann Liu: In a lot of ways I feel like we actually have a lot of overlap in our approach towards things. Even though disciplinarily, it's different. But as I said, I'm an ethnographer, right? So I, so it was always gonna be a story about humans and people. And the way that I oftentimes like to talk about the book is that it's the story behind the numbers. And by the time I start writing the book there had already been some really great quantitative studies out there that showed that there was indeed this racial school funding gap, right? But the why and the how of it I thought was still missing. And that's essentially the gap that I tried to fill, right? To write an ethnography about school funding to explain the why and the how. And so once you decide that you wanna write a story about school funding, you really actually don't have to manufacture a whole lot of intrigue because I feel like humans are just really intrinsically interested, innately interested. And so you just have to ask some questions and listen well to, to what people say to you. And so when I was promoting the book last year, I used to call it the People Magazine version of school finance. People who were like, not really that interested or thought that it was just gonna be a technical read, a little bit more interested.

And like I talked about, yeah, there's like salaciousness and gossipy aspects of it. But then a friend of mine who read it who's not an academic was like, there were so many hard words in here. It's not like People Magazine. I was like, it was a metaphor. There's no like section of the book that's like, which state legislator were it best?

That's not in the book. It was just a metaphor. But it was meant to tell people that what I was trying to do was to make it accessible to people who weren't, maybe, into the numbers, right? And that there was like a human, a more human dimension to this story. And so I really didn't want the technical aspects of school funding to obscure the social, the moral and political parts of the process, and how decisions are made over money and who gets more or less of it.

And that process, I think is intensely political and there are alliances, right? There are betrayals, there are hurt feelings, right? There are schisms and there are people trying to do the right thing. And so all those elements of that story are in the book along with some explanation about policy and some of the more technical aspects of it.

But really that's the story that I wanted to tell. I wanted to pull the curtain back and to make the backstage or what oftentimes I think is the backstage of school finance, which is or, I'm sorry, the front stage of school finance is like the numbers, right? So I wanted to make the backstage about the humans, right? The people who are doing these things and make that the front stage.

David Backer: Can I just follow up on that? Because this is something that I say sometimes, but, and I'm so glad to hear you say it too, because I feel like to some degree I'm doing like gossip. Like school finance got celebrity gossip in a way.

I just think it's a great methodology. I'm also like a consumer of celebrity gossip. But like particularly, I've been getting into making tiktoks about school finance crises all over the country, and I get like requests now and try to do a quick spicy 60 seconds on what I see in a bond statement for a district that's in a school crisis.

And I think it's just such a, it's just such a spicy, I just like this way of thinking about it. It's just did you see that? Did you see what he said to her? Did you see what that formula did? Oh my god. I just, I think it enlivens it, it activates it, it brings people in and this is what we need to do with school finance if we wanna change it.

Christopher Saldaña: What's so funny though is that you both really bring this human element to it. You're all into the spice. But then at the same time, you're really good at thinking about the role of structure and systems and what that plays and how that shapes individual decision making and what agency we do have and how we move in the world.

And so I'm wondering how you bring that sort of element into your work as well and how it informs the way you think about you, how you interpret your findings.

Roseann Liu: Yeah. I really appreciate, I think what Dave, you said earlier about that the structure itself is a character and it moves right?

And it does things in the world. And I think both of our work is part of this I think newish approach towards school finance, which is a more critical approach to school finance, right? And people who aren't just coming at it from an economic perspective. But I was also really grateful and I think struck by a comment that a reviewer made who read an early draft of the book and critiqued it or just raised this issue where he said, you seem to be saying two different things, right?

You seem to be both saying that it's about the structures that kind of automatically reproduce these inequalities. But then you're also saying that these individuals who are making these decisions are making racist decisions, right? So which is it? And I think those comments really forced me to clarify what I was trying to say and what I was seeing ethnographically.

And it led me to come up with this phrase, agentive structural racism, which in some ways is a little bit different, I think from what you were talking about, Dave. But it is this idea that like structural racism, right? Has these agentive qualities to it because it's a both-and thing, right? And there's a way in which there's being agency exercise, right, when it comes to maintaining structural racism. And I was really helped, I think by the work of Eve Ewing, in the school year where she has this metaphor and she's trying to talk about structural racism. And she says that structural racism is like a merry-go-round, right? It's sort of automatic, right?

It's not like an equestrian who's actively making these decisions to jump an obstacle or to speed the horse up or to make it slower. A merry go around, like racism, is much more automated than that. But I think that's true, but in my case and in the case of what I was looking at, I extended that metaphor to say that even a merry-go-round needs an operator to maintain the system.

When it comes to state legislators and other people who are in these positions of structural power, right? They are actually making decisions and choices that really overdetermine people's livelihoods. And so just trying to think together with so it is structural racism, but there are also these people in these positions, right?

That make it, that, maintain it, and make it keep going. And I think in terms of implications I don't know if anyone else was necessarily helped by this, but it did clarify I think a lot of things for me, which is that if I'm trying to fight against something, right? I should know the nature of what I'm trying to fight against. And so knowing that there are these structurally racist conditions helps me to understand that the problem actually extends beyond any single individual, right? And so my target then isn't just a person. It's a policy, a political and a political structure.

But then also knowing that there are these powerful people exercising their agencies means that the structure isn't just like this nebulous, faceless, nameless thing that I'm fighting against. But there are actual people who are gonna be the target in our organizing work. And there are some real people that we need to get out of office, but the work doesn't end there because it also extends beyond those single individuals in those single positions.

David Backer: Yeah this is a great question. And I think the project that I did right before I started really writing about school finance was a rereading of Althusser’s educational theory and seeing how it influenced people like Stuart Hall and theories like racial capitalism that would come after. And one of the images that I found, because one of the huge debates in, in rereading things about Marxism and education, social reproduction theory is this tension between structure and agency. It was concluded by the critical pedagogues in the eighties and nineties that people like Althusser, but also Bowles and Gintis, or Bourdieu or Basil Bernstein. They were all too deterministic. Too economistic, too reductionist in their thinking. And that actually culture and cultural production was this sort of more warm, agentic way to focus on education and capitalism was the way to go. And so you had this break and what I found was that distinction is completely false.

It doesn't, it does not map to those theorists at all. It was just a function of, to some degree, I think Michael Apple, and Henry Guru being very influenced by EP Thompson in his late very angry moment at structuralists. And anyway, like the image that I came to at the end of that book was I kept thinking about a river because Althusser in the concept it's much more of a geological kind of schema than a mechanical one, which the previous generation of Marxists had been using. And that geological schema, I kept thinking about rivers for what social structure is because a river, you have water that's moving very quickly.

And it's moving over surface, constantly changing form and going in this way, going in that way. But the river is held by the river bed, which is earth and stone and sediment and but there is this, there is this interaction between the two of those. They each have their different temporalities.

But they're both always changing, I think the reason why I went to the river is because Marx wrote his dissertation on Heraclitus, right? Heraclitus was very famous philosophically for saying that you can't put your foot in the same river twice. Such that everything is always changing, there's only ever change. There's nothing that is stable. And that current runs very deeply in Marxism as well, which is that contingency is the name of the game. And what we're trying to do when we're thinking and when we're organizing is I think this is Jamison's line, wrest freedom from necessity, which is to say to, and to be able to understand that what feels immutable, what feels unchangeable, what feels like it's just fixed and naturally occurring is not, is subject to the forces of history. And I think my understanding of structure and agency is a lot like that river. So I imagine agency being the sort of quick moving water and the structure being the sediment that is in and around it.

But water is very powerful in its impact on rock. But rock is also extremely obdurate and moves at its own temporality. And the implication here I think is that one of the things about school finance is that it feels so complicated. It's so abstract. And not only that, but who can do anything about it?

Who could change this. You try to, you start to try to understand it and then, and you say, oh my god. But the way that most people will talk about it, who do understand it, quote unquote, is they understand it in a very technocratic sense, which is, this is just how it works. And the way that this approach to structure and agency, which I do write about in my book too and I try to use Abbott Elementary, the pilot episode of Abbott Elementary, to articulate my understanding of this distinction. Like when we understand that we are agents within a structure and that we are moving at a certain temporality in our own individual pacing of decision making and actions, but also that those actions in the ways in which we bear the structure or the structure bears us, there's this dynamic between them and that they can't change. They do change, which is actually why I think one of my, I found the historians of school finance in this wave that Roseann is mentioning a new critical approaches to school finance. I found the historian's work to be extremely helpful because not only do they tell stories about characters, but also what they show is that things have been different.

And they can be different again. Mike Glass, for instance, has a great new book called Cracked Foundations. Esther Cena's work on North Carolina. Kelly Goodman is working on her book. Matthew Gardner Kelly's book dividing the Public, Andrew Carl, the Black Tax. Like these historians, I think really show that the, I think, demonstrate or illustrate this kind of implication, I think for structure agency and school finance in this more fluid transformative way.

Christopher Saldaña: So we've talked about people and we've talked about structures. Let's talk a little bit about place. You've both spent some time in Philly, in Philadelphia, and in Pennsylvania.

And we talk a lot about education policy. There's a lot that happens at the state level, and there's a lot that happens at the local level. And what can the story of education finance in Pennsylvania and Philadelphia teach us about finance --education finance -- generally?

David Backer: Yeah. I really, Philadelphia has taught me almost everything I know about the school finance project that I have.

And in that way I'm extremely grateful to the movements and the history of that place. It's made an extremely, an indelible impact on me and my thinking. It was. It was the Working Educators Caucus Toxic Schools campaign of, I believe, 2018, where we all dressed up in PPE and masks and went into city council handing out masks to protest the conditions of those schools after Leanne Deruso was diagnosed with mesothelioma from the untreated asbestos at Meredith Elementary.

That I had been teaching at Westchester. I had been interested in school finance because I had a sense that the movements were always demanding money, and I didn't know how the money worked. I was a professor of education policy at that point, and I did, I could, I didn't have good answers for myself when I asked myself how to articulate to follow a dollar particularly for the school buildings.

And it was that those movements that compelled me to try to understand it. And then it was the understanding of Pennsylvania as a case. That has been the what's to say? It's like the sort of touchstone for me in my understanding of other states and Philadelphia as the touchstone municipality for understanding other municipalities and the deep thing about Pennsylvania as opposed to next-door New Jersey or next-door New York.

For instance, or even further south in Virginia, Pennsylvania just has an extremely libertarian ungenerous approach to these questions. And then, and there's, I'll just one other anecdote. I, when I met Jeff Vincent, who is a very established person in researching of school buildings and infrastructure, I was telling him about my work. We were sharing things about my work and he said from the national perspective, Philadelphia is the canary in the coal mine for school buildings across the country. And he confirmed something that I had been suspecting, which is that the country school buildings are falling apart and nobody really understands how or why.

And so that the, to such that the toxic finance is what I ended up calling it in Philadelphia, the toxic finance being behind the toxic infrastructure of those schools. Whether it was mold in the water or whether lead in the water, mold in the walls, the water coming into Palumbo, the like chunk of ceiling that fell out of one of my master's students. She's a teacher, chunk of ceiling, fell out into her classroom while they were out at lunch. And the ceiling had fallen onto a chair, a student's chair. So if the student was sitting there, would've been hit with this piece of building, literally crumbling around them to, to just like the sort of portrait and the struggle of Philadelphia was this case that just completely arrayed aligned my understanding of school infrastructure in a way that I continued to draw from and then not to mention that the school funding case in Pennsylvania, that was just decided in ‘23 and the work of the Education Law Center and how that all works with the courts, and I don't know, I think the case of Pennsylvania is extremely instructive.

And it's helped me be able to interpret school finance generally.

Roseann Liu: Yeah. Very similarly, right? I the book is a case study of Pennsylvania for all the reasons that Dave just mentioned, the canary in the coal mine. I did, interestingly for the study, I didn't get to, to interview a whole lot of state legislators outside of Pennsylvania, because Pennsylvania was the focus. But I did have a chance to interview two state legislators, one in Maryland and one in Delaware. And I found it so interesting that they essentially described very, a very similar process to Pennsylvania. And they may have called it something different and some of the really nitty gritty details might have been different, but the mechanisms were very eerily similar.

And so one state legislator from Maryland who was actually quite honest and which always astounds me but I guess people just wanna talk and if you ask them questions they'll talk. But he really honestly told me that he had successfully lobbied for his school districts to get a school subsidy because he had these power plants that were closing down, and so then there was gonna be less of a tax base, and he was worried that there would be less school funding because of that.

And so he successfully lobbied for it, understanding that that meant that other school districts would have less. And he used the term you could fudge the formula. He said, fudge the formula in any way to manipulate it to what you want it to say. Pennsylvania state legislators, some of them who were honest, right? essentially said the same thing. There was one legislator from Lancaster who didn't necessarily, didn't use the term fudge the formula, but the process that he was describing was essentially the same. And I think in Pennsylvania, a lot of it for a long time was quote unquote protecting hold harmless, right?

That was the policy mechanism. And so whether it's like fudging the formula or protecting hold harmless, right? There are ways in which these processes that reproduce inequalities are very similar across different contexts. And so as I was promoting the book last year, I actually got to visit different states.

And it was really interesting for me to give these presentations and then to hear from people, a lot of them academics who maybe were studying school funding themselves, and to hear, like in the case of New York, in Washington and Wisconsin that it could have been something that was named differently.

And again, the details might have been a little bit different, but a lot of these processes had great resonance with 'em. And I really like what I think a student in my methods class who was a physics major, right? She came at, it was a qualitative research course. And so she was really in a lot of ways out of her epistemological elements, right? And she was trying to figure out like how do you make truth claims? What counts as knowledge production? And so she was coming at it very differently, but she had this aha moment where she was like, oh you're trying to tell a story and the people who read that story get to decipher themselves whether there's something here, right? that's worth that, that connects to them, right? That has resonances for themselves. And I think that's essentially what, or at least my approach to ethnography is.

Christopher Saldaña: I think that's a great segue into our last question too, which is what do you hope listeners take away from your work? And if there's one thing that you wish people knew more about school finance, what would that be?

Roseann Liu: So some of what I'll say is just repeating some of the things I said before, but what I think, one of the things I really hope that people take away is that is the importance of organizing for change when it comes to these issues. And I think Dave already really nicely and eloquently talked about this, but I think that means to stop hoping in a way that's transactional.

My feeling and like my observation is that these days and that's a phrase that Tressie McMillan Cotton talked about it's this idea that transactional hope is this idea that if I win this, then I'll continue to hope. But if I lose, then I'm gonna lose hope. And I think we have to develop more stamina for the long fight because the fight for equitable school funding, essentially a fight against structural racism, and that's not something that's going to easily topple.

And so I think in talking to various people who are a little bit newer to this, right? And just to organizing that, a lot of what I hope that people take away is that that they develop the stamina for the long fight ahead. And I hope that by learning from the work of some of the organizers who I talk about, I write about, I feature in the book, we all learn to exercise more of a radical imagination of what we want and what we deserve, right?

So I think too often people have been fed this myth of false scarcity, and I think this is something that the state legislators were really great in doing, right? We don't have the money for this. That's not possible. Where there's like literally billions of dollars in the stake coffers, right?

But somehow you're still crying poverty and we don't have the money for this. And too often I think people who are in this work are fighting for what's quote unquote practical or viable, right? It's this idea of a reduction of injustice. But Ella Baker, right? I love this quote. I have it in my book where she says the reduction of injustice is not the same as freedom.

And so I think what I hope people take away is that it's freedom that we want and deserve, right? And the second part of the question, right? So what's something that I hope people understand more about school finance. I think I'll again reiterate a point that I made earlier and pitched this maybe more towards like school finance scholars who may be more of the audience for this podcast. But it maybe applies more broadly too. I think school finance scholarship has, and I think I understand why, but it really has tended to be this white male dominated space. And the scholarship has produced a lot of blind spots, I think because of that.

And this strange denial in some circles that there is a racial school funding gap like that is denied. And that money actually matters when it comes to providing a quality education like it is beyond me, how that's disputable, right? And so I feel like I have nothing to offer them if that's the starting point, right?

But then there are these other school finance scholars who I think care about issues of equity, but have but somehow like their technical know-how has obscured everything else. And they've lost sight of, or maybe have never fully grasped the larger problem.

And I'm not denying, I think that we need that technical know-how, right? I was hugely grateful for people who understand how to make a fair funding formula. I think that is hugely important, right? But that I, I don't that can't be, that can't obscure the larger issue.

And I think it's really important to remember that school funding, again at its core, it is not a technical problem that just needs a technical fix, right? It is actually a racial and political problem. And it's about the differential valuing of children's lives, right? Who we think counts more and how we make these material investments in those, based on those values and those lives that we think are more valuable.

And so if that's the problem, then the people with technical expertise need to learn from the people who have lived expertise about what racism is and what it feels like, so we can really better understand the core of the problem.

David Backer: Nice. That was great. I think, okay, so takeaway from my work and about school finance. So the title of this book I wrote that just came out last week is as public as possible. And the reason why I called it that is because, and it's an image that I open with in the book somewhat. I think that I got a little sick of always protecting public education always reclaiming public education, always in this sort of defensive posture that was always just reacting to the more offensive moves of the right wing in the battle over education such as it is.

And I think what we wanna do is not, and also buried within the, in the idea of protecting public education is that we wanna keep it the way that it is, which we don't want, we don't want to keep it how it is. We actually, we want to make it better. And I think we should want to make it public education as say, as public as possible. That is to say whereas the right wing is really trying to make it as private as possible, we wanna make it as public as possible. And if there's something that I want people to take from my work, it's that the way that we do that is by making the finances as public as possible.

That is to say we have to fund the, we have to make the material conditions of educational existence for everyone. And to do that, you have to get, you have to get as I say, under the tug of war in the headlines about education. The, I don't like the term culture war, but these culture war issues, the flashpoints or whatever, there is a, underlying plumbing and concrete infrastructure beneath this back and forth, that is where we need to be fighting to make education as public as possible, not just protect it. And if there's something I wish people understood about education, finance, I guess I'll just. I'll pitch the sort of kicker of my book or the kind of place where I end up in terms of a policy that I like.

Throughout the book, I have policies that I say that I like as a socialist in school finance. I talk about the fiscal disparities programs in the Twin Cities Vermont's X60 from 1998. But in the end, what I really like is this idea of green fiscal mutualism. And green fiscal mutualism is when a green bank, of which there are now many in the country at the state level, a green bank de-risks that teacher pensions purchase of school bonds.

So what happens then is you get a public entity whose bottom line is not necessarily just profits, but full stop. But it is degeneration of revenue for decarbonization and the addressing of environmental racism and justice writ large. That's the Green Bank is a financial entity that has that mission.

That I think the Green Bank, I think is a reverse charter school. That's how I like to talk about them, because what they do, whereas charter schools, they take public money out of the public system into a non-public space for education. What the Green Bank does is it actually takes private money and organizes and galvanizes it into public purpose.

And when we get the Green Bank working with a teacher's pension, which is a huge pool of capital that can serve as an underwriter just in the same way that a Wells Fargo or a Bank of America or JP Morgan could act when it comes to school infrastructure. If the Green Bank sort of de-risks as to say, like entices the pension into the purchase of school bonds, then what you have is a more publicly accountable way of structuring deals so that schools can get infrastructure money, less cost over a longer period of time, and also not put carbon in the atmosphere to ruin the future that we're supposed to be preparing them for. And I'm I've been working with people in and around the Mamdani incoming administration here in New York City.

I was working on that campaign. And this is an idea that I just push a lot. And I try to get people thinking about, because we can have virtuous cycles of public investment that does not necessarily rely on a fascist federal government. We can use the big pools of deferred wages in the pensions to actually invest in the infrastructure that current and future students, educators, school people benefit from. And so I try to talk up green fiscal mutualism as much as I can.

Christopher Saldaña: Thank you, Dr. Backer and Dr. Liu for being on this month's podcast. As always, we hope you're safe and healthy. And remember, for the latest analysis on education policy, you should subscribe to the NEPC newsletter at nepc.colorado.edu.