As Public As Possible
a book by David I. Backer
A witty and provocative treatise on the financial policies we’ll need to make our public schools work for all children
From the anti-CRT panic to the wholesale destruction of the federal Department of Education, the right-wing attack on education has cut deep. In response, millions of Americans have rallied to defend their cherished public schools. But this incisive book asks whether choosing between our embattled status quo and the stingy privatized vision of the right is the only path forward. In As Public as Possible, education expert David I. Backer argues for going on the offensive by radically expanding the very notion of the “public” in our public schools.
As Public as Possible proposes a concrete set of policies aimed at providing a high quality and truly public education for all, regardless of wealth and race. With witty and provocative prose, Backer takes the reader on an enlightening tour of the unjust system of school finance and proposes a set of radical policy alternatives. He shows how we can challenge the tyranny of property taxes, evening out inequalities across districts by sharing resources according to need; he argues for public credit and direct federal grants instead of the predations of municipal debt markets; and he offers eye-opening examples spanning the past and present, from the former Yugoslavia to contemporary Philadelphia, which help us to imagine a radically different way of educating all of our children.
“Backer is an excellent tour guide showing us not only the inequities in how we pay for schools, but also how the system supports and perpet- uates them. Like a docent at the Johnstown Flood Museum, he helps us admire the scale of the disaster, while also suggesting smart reforms to prevent another. Astute, frank, angry—he’s exactly the guide you want for this trip.”
—Tom Sgouros, fellow, The Policy Lab, Brown University
Praise For As Public as Possible
“David I. Backer has written the book that school finance consultants hope you’ll never read. As Public as Possible brings to light the privat- izers, profiteers, and policy pushers who have long treated education not as a public good, but as a revenue stream for the already-rich. With humor, rigor, and radical hope, Backer demands that we stop fighting over scraps and start demanding the feast—a public education system as fully public as our children deserve.”
—Noliwe Rooks, author of Integrated and Cutting School and L. Herbert Ballou University Professor and chair of Africana Studies at Brown University
“David Backer has accomplished the seemingly impossible here, making the complex issue of school finance not just accessible, but provocative and inspiring. You’ll come away from this book convinced of the urgent necessity of a radical transformation in how we pay for public education and armed with a road map for how to get there.”
— Jennifer Berkshire, co-author of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door and The Education Wars
David i. Backer
David I. Backer is 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 Harvard Educational Review, Journal of Urban Aff airs, Journal of Education Policy, Journal of Educational Human Resources, Journal of Educational Administration and History, as well as popular venues like Phenomenal World, African American Policy Forum, The American Prospect, n+1, Dissent, and Jacobin. He can be found on social media @schooldaves.