“In As Public as Possible: Radical Finance for America’s Public Schools, David I. Backer, an associate professor in the Department of Education Leadership Management and Policy at Seton Hall University and the author of the Schooling in Socialist America newsletter, provides a cookbook for socialist reforms centering on what has been called the object of the public’s most intimate connection with government: the local public school...
When it comes to fears of incipient fascism, Donald Trump tends to suck in all the oxygen. We would be wrong, however, to ignore the roots of MAGA. For example, in 2021, the loathsome Steve Bannon said, “The path to save the nation is very simple — it’s going to go through the school boards.” Backer’s book is a valuable guide to our response.” —Jacobin
“For each of these crumbling pillars of our public education system, Backer suggests ambitious policy fixes. As the book’s title might suggest, 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….
When I showed my mom [a veteran teacher] an early draft of this essay, she told me she didn’t totally grasp my paragraph on pensions. We had a good chuckle: A unionized teacher thought that a progressive writer’s critique of education policy was too hard to understand? Shocking. But the distance between us only testifies to the role of teaching itself, the importance of having people in our lives whose job it is to find the right ways to impart new knowledge. This is the institution that the American right seeks to destroy; As Public As Possible is the lesson plan for what saving it requires.”—Crow’s Nest, Advait Arun
