US higher education was a crown jewel, generating knowledge, wealth, prestige, and power unrivaled by anyone. And the US is throwing it away, because Americans elected a govt ideologically opposed to truth, science, merit, and racial/gender equality, preferring to weaken the country to reduce that.

NEW: 1,400 student workers at Portland State University are unionizing with @seiu.org @seiu503.bsky.social.

Schools all over the Twin Cities are being forced to develop safety plans to protect their students and families *from federal secret police.* St. Paul will close for two days so than can scramble to implement a virtual option to protect kids from their own government www.spps.org/news-details...

I'm usually against state takeovers but I'll make an exception here. This district has been grossly mismanaged, with vast sums going to support private schools to the detriment of its own students. It's outrageous, and has been for a long time. www.nj.com/news/2026/01...

800 people at Whittier International Elementary right now to coordinate ICE resistance. EIGHT HUNDRED, at one little school. Recall there are only 2,000 ICE agents in the entire metro. Puny!

IA: District Axes 100 Year Old Orchestra Program open.substack.com/pub/curmudgu...

Interesting, the New York State teachers union is proposing a bond act statewide that would decarbonize school buildings. This entails a ballot initiative, which is a cool way to approach the issue. As always, I'd be interested to know how the debt will be structured. www.nysut.org/news/2025/de...

“Rainy day fund” is ideological because it’s a metaphor. There’s no actual fiscal rain that falls that everyone knows is falling this requiring the expenditure. Who decides when it rains? How hard is the rain? That’s a power question.

First public event of the Toronto Tempest Organizing Collective. On Socialism from Below at York University Thursday, January 15, 4pm.

The Supreme Court’s Decision Will Affect More Than Trans High School Athletes www.forbes.com/sites/peterg...

In this month's NEPC Talks Education podcast: An interview with Roseann Liu and David Backer about their unique approaches to K-12 school finance research @schooldaves.bsky.social @cmsaldana.bsky.social bit.ly/49kRTbp

Science and Society student essay contest docs.google.com/document/d/1...

I’m on a great dissertation committee and the student is looking for early childhood educators to validate an instrument for a study on play-based pedagogy—fill it out if that’s you!

This looks great www.amazon.fr/-/en/World-P...

On January 8, NEPC published my essay Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle over Educational Goals as its blog post of the day. nepc.colorado.edu/blog/public-...

We are joined by David I. Backer, associate professor of education policy at Seton Hall University, to discuss his new book: As Public as Possible: Radical Finance for America’s Schools. moneyontheleft.org/2025/12/01/r...

2026 starting strong! School Finance Regime Workshop organized by the best of the best @schooldaves.bsky.social @noranafaa.bsky.social at @univ-amu.fr

In the opening of @schooldaves.bsky.social’s new book, he invites us to “enliven the polis of policy—that is, to re-politicize policy and take it back from the technocrats” and I think that captures what the best education writing is doing now: humanizing policy contexts, making them legible

Oh my god I can't believe this meme is of someone arguing against paying more taxes for public schools @schooldaves.bsky.social buttondown.com/davidibacker...

DIALECTICS FOR KIDS yesssssss dialectics4kids.org/index.htm

Next Monday at 2pm I’ll be at the Ecole Des Haute Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris to talk about US school finance, with the great @esthercyna.bsky.social enseignements.ehess.fr/2025-2026/ue...

I know there’s regime change happening but if any followers or friends of friends are in Paris next weekend DM me! I’ll be around with some free time and would love to meet up.

The private school connection always gets me: “A man who would become the world’s most famous sex trafficker by the summer of 2019 had figured out a few things about the rich in the 1970s when he obtained a teaching job at an elite prep school.” substack.com/inbox/post/1...

Oil capex guidance is now a very big deal. #OOTT

I know there’s regime change happening but if any followers or friends of friends are in Paris next weekend DM me! I’ll be around with some free time and would love to meet up.

For anyone following the 2025 xmas critical theory kerfuffle (notably against the backdrop of regime change in Venezuela) www.counterfire.org/article/not-...

As a big Libby user I’m pretty stoked there are three ppl waiting for my book at the BPL.

“Most directly, we should not waste children’s time. The motivation for making school more rewarding and less stultifying should not primarily be its effect on outcomes later in life, but rather that childhood is itself part of life, a very important part.”

During Zohran’s speech you might have heard an air horn going off—I did, it was annoying but not that bad— apparently that was a small group of Zionist protesters.

Happy to be on this list!!

Gonna make a bunch of teachers mad but I guess the political calculus is that local control is too tough a fight or it benefits the people when the people’s candidate is in charge

They’re turning a third of the Netherlands’ pension system to “defined contribution,” which in my book I call “defined isolation” because it’s the opposite of solidarity. So it’s a bit rich that the official says they’re trying to keep some solidarity.

Samuels also has experience merging schools, a task that is often complex and controversial.

The reason this Harvard history professor decided he was done with one of the best and most privileged jobs in the world was, in his own words, because he was forced to lecture in a mask during peak Covid. I’m not making this up.

“In the case of subprime specifically, racialized norms of housing consumption are a dimension of the uneven distribution of the value of labor power.” www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

This looks like an awesome course law.ucla.edu/academics/cu...

I don’t know how Chinese local govt debt works, but it’s increasing. Apparently they securitize stuff and sell the securities for liquidity.

It has been a bracing moment for American federalism, with both unprecedented efforts to extend executive control over state and local govts, novel forms of subnational resistance. Where is federalism going? Paul Nolette and I have edited a new issue of Publius on that question. Short thread:

We are joined by David I. Backer, associate professor of education policy at Seton Hall University, to discuss his new book: As Public as Possible: Radical Finance for America’s Schools (The New Press, 2025). moneyontheleft.org/2025/12/01/r...

grateful to @schooldaves.bsky.social for reposting this right when I sat down at the laptop. I’m finishing an educational “policy review” of the first year of Trump II, and I have to make some recommendations for LEAs/SEAs—which come down to avoiding capture. Even for ppl aligned with admin goals:

“the only way to make American schooling as equal as possible is to make it as public as possible: Pool the taxes, the funding, the administration, the risks―and keep schools, teachers, and students far away from capture by private interests or discipline by private financial markets.” Hell yes.

Who wants a monster pine cone massage by a guy in a hat at the Mermaid Spa in Brooklyn?

You’ll never guess who’s number one

They’re not perfect, but golly, public universities are one of the best engines of economic mobility we have

New @barbarabiasi.com just dropped! Looks like a banger! www.nber.org/papers/w34590

What’s happening in Yelm, WA www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8yAb7VC/