What do advocates for educational justice need to know about school financing? What's the relationship between the critical pedagogy and the budget sheets that get passed around at school board meetings? What kinds of community organizing do we need to change how school financing works?

In this episode, we welcome writer and organizer David I. Backer to discuss these questions and more. David is best known for his substack, Schooling in Socialist America, a public project in which he investigates (and educates his readers about) the ins and outs of school finance policy, with an emphasis on the politics of racial capitalism, climate change, and infrastructure. His forthcoming book, As Public as Possible: Radical Finance for America's Schools (The New Press, 2025), is a deep dive into these issues--and a positive vision of what can change.

David has also published two other books. The first, Elements of Discussion, is a "practical-poetic" reflection emerging from his PhD dissertation on pedagogical theories of discussion. The second, Althusser and Education was praised by a reviewer as “the most comprehensive and nuanced reading of Althusser’s thinking in the English language.”

Currently, David is an Associate Professor of Education Policy at Seton Hall University.

Links to recommended stuff!

WPRB - Princeton Public Radio (great music)

China Mieville, The Scar (book)

The Debt Collective (organizing collective)

Nick Doox, The N-Word of God (book)

Democracy Now daily podcast

Behind the News with Doug Henwood (podcast)

Beef and Dairy Network (podcast)

EMEL (musician)

Mustafa (musician)

Astrid Sonne (musician)

Episode Credits:

Co-hosts and co-producers: Lucia Hulsether and Tina Pippin

Editing and Production Manager: Aliyah Harris

Intro Music: Lance Haugen and the Flying Penguins

Outro Music: Akrasis

Banking Methods: Education Finance for Radical Teachers

[[rush transcript, lots of typos!

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Schooling in Socialist America is a public project in which David investigates and educates his readers about the ins and outs of school finance policy. David has a forthcoming book that's related to this. It is entitled As Public as Possible, radical Finance for America's Schools.

David's first book. Elements of discussion is a practical, poetic work that emerges from his dissertation on discussion protocols. David's second book, Alou SE and Education, was praised by one of its reviewers as quote, the most comprehensive and nuanced reading of Alou, Sarah's thinking in the English language.

We are so delighted to have David on the show to dive into all of these themes, figures, and more. Welcome David to nothing. Never Happens.

Tina: To start with, we wanted to talk to you about what got you started in this kind of radical pedagogy that you do. How did you get started at Teachers college and into socialist and Marxist theory? So tell us about your beginnings.

And in the learning circles, ~we, during, ~it was during a camp, but we would actually be studying together, if that makes sense. So it was a form of education and I found summer camp a very nourishing experience as a young person. ~And actually ~some of the experiences I had at summer camp, particularly during song sessions when we were singing altogether . And one thing I've come back to again and again, I come back to that feeling as a kid. It's what Hagel says about freedom. It's when you get mutual recognition that freedom actually happens between people through mutual collective recognition.

And then in high school I was a part of some youth groups, Jewish youth groups. It's called Nifty in the Reformed Jewish Movement. And in that context the students, it was actually quite youth run because there were events where we would have programming that was a lot like those study groups at the summer camps. And it was the kids who would run them.

Basically anything outside of traditional institutions of schooling was very nourishing and enlivening for me. I found school quite a stultifying experience which is probably why I went into education.

Lucia: I am curious if you have reflections on the relationship between the pedagogy that you were learning at these summer camps and the Zionism that you mentioned as being central to the organizational apparatus.

Lucia: Okay. Yes. Thank you for that. I didn't get the sense that you were saying that they were intrinsically linked, but given the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians and the role that major Zionist institutions and specifically political education structures have played in that, I thought it was important to give you a chance to follow up.

You also studied philosophy in college, right? How did that experience shape your entry into teaching and learning spaces?

I think drawing from my experiences at summer camp and youth groups, I thought why don't we do philosophy with high school students in DC? So we started a group called the High School Philosophy Seminar, and we made relationships with local schools and we brought in students to campus at gw and we also went out to schools.

When I graduated, I decided to become a teacher because I loved it so much. And I got a job at a Catholic school and from there, like there was this sort of combined interest in philosophy deep questions and pedagogy, classroom stuff. And I started to see the classroom as almost a way of enacting the possibilities of philosophy. Like when you approach pedagogy philosophically, what you're doing is you're asking very fundamental questions about what you can do to educate.

But then I had always wanted to travel abroad. And I met a teacher at Archbishop Carroll who had grown up in the international school system and he looked like a guy who was into football, but actually he was born in Mauritius and went to middle school in Cameroon and then ended up doing high school in the Hague, because his parents were international school teachers hopping from school to school.

I always wanted to live abroad. And he told me, oh yeah, you just, you go to one of these hiring fairs and you see what job you get and then you live there for two years.

And so I did that and I got two job offers. One in Jada Saudi Arabia and one in Quito Ecuador. And a longtime teacher who was there to advise people doing this for the first time told me to go to Quito. And so I ended up in Quito.

David: I was an unreflective liberal who had studied analytic philosophy, but was really into high school teaching and philosophy. When I went to Ecuador and I just wanted to get to know the area, because that's why I wanted to live abroad, was to experience a different place and a different culture.

I started reading about the history of Ecuador. Oil exploitation. Indigenous dispossession. The role of the United States in the oil industry, and particularly Shell in Ecuador. And I met a bunch of lefty lawyers and intellectuals ~. And I ~and I took a class I did a master's degree through Buffalo State University.

And it just, as people talk about when they read a kind of moment. And I was just like, oh my God, I'm part of a neo-colonial capitalist order!

Lucia: Shit!

David: I'm an American in keto at the American School of Keto, but the American SchoQuitof Ketos students are all from the ruling class of Ecuador.

They're all Ecuadorians, but they go get their prom dresses in Miami and they're all bankers, children in Ecuador. And now I'm starting to understand why there are armed guards at the gates of my school and there's barbed wire suddenly I was like hold on a second. Like my job here, I guess is to impart the American hegemony to these students who wanna be part of this global ruling class whose parents want them to be part of the global ruling class.

And I was also simultaneously having a lot of problems with my students because I was this young gringo who didn't know anything about these students in this place. I had these seniors in high school. I was teaching the theory of knowledge in the IB curriculum, which people out there who are listening, or maybe you're familiar, like people don't know how to teach that course. It's a confusing class. But as a philosopher, I found it very exciting, but I had these seniors and they were too cool for school and they were on their blackberries all the time speaking in Spanish that I didn't understand and they didn't wanna listen to me.

And I was like that's interesting. So the students talk to each other more than they talk to the teacher. I think my students would like that, number one. And then number two, that could like tinker with the whole reproduction of the, American neocolonialism thing in the classroom. So I got really into Harkness teaching.

David: I think how I'll do that, I answer that question, is just do a part two to what I just said. , Because it's a continuation. And it draws from very old, things in my experience.

So I wrote about discussion and I went on ~a kind of what I would think of long as ~a long sort of pedagogical detour through discussion and facilitating discussion. And I was fascinated by it. But there was a quantitative element to that though, which~ it ~was in my discussion grading formulas where I tried to come up with a kind of communist grading formula for discussion, which I published in an article called Socialist Grading.

But, I retained this interest in quantity. And when I found Marx and ~got really into Marx, when I ~got really into Althusser and the concept of structural causality. Because that helped me answer the question, how could something like discussion pedagogy relate to something like capitalism? ~Like what?~

Lucia: And of course your book Althusser and Education makes many of these points and reintroduces us to althusser as a pedagogical critic with a whole lot of potential. Am I right that it was this reading of Alser that led you into your education, finance work?

It was a doctoral program. I thought to myself, ~what would be the thing about education, policy, and law that alser would be really like, conducive for understanding what would it be? What would a thing, ~what would be a good thing to apply this theory to? I was really interested in applying the theory.

At that point, I was less interested in just doing the philosophical work, and I really wanted to apply it. At the same time, I was getting involved in the education justice movements in Philadelphia and the We Caucus, working Educators Caucus was doing a lot of work around the school buildings in Philadelphia, falling apart.

And I was like, how does this money even work? Like, where does the money come from? And the people in the movement understood, but also didn't, they were targeting the mayor. They were targeting the superintendent, but what was going on here? And I thought to myself, school finance would be the perfect thing to apply the out cesarean theory to help the movements seek the justice that they're seeking.

I thought, what if I studied school finance as a Marxist and directed my output to the movement? To try to ~get, ~help people understand the people and the money behind why the buildings are like this in general. And also what are the touch points? Like one of the lines I came up with is a pun, which is that like in Freire we hear a lot about the banking method, right?

This money is, essential. And that's always something that Marxists point to.

This was right about as ~when ~the pandemic ~was hap ~was breaking out. As the economy was crashing in as everything was shutting down, I started, I just doubled down on this finance thing. I'd been poking around a little here and there, ~but I really ~and I'd been teaching school finance in my policy courses, but I just, I had wanted to read business news, listen to business podcasts, become conversant in the language of finance because to me it was becoming more and more the language of power.

David: I thought it would be fun to riff on Bulls and Gintis and call it schooling in Socialist America because their book is Schooling in Capitalist America. But I wanted to envision what it would be like to have a socialist America, to have a school.

What would a socialist education policy look like in America? ~What would, ~what's the positive side of that project? The last chapter of their book~ it's ~all about revolutionary ~like ~transformation in a democratic socialist way. They're writing, in the wake of ~a ~Allende's victory and whatnot.

And I thought let's go there. Let's see what policies exist and what we would need, the policies we would want, and then what it would take politically to change them. I started writing this newsletter and~ I started ~advising ~candidates, ~socialist candidates who were running for office.

Tina: And that's led to your forthcoming book. ~This May as public as possible ~Radical Finance for America's Public Schools that the New Press is publishing.

David: That's right.

Tina: Would you talk about~ you've brought us this far, ~your vision for this kind of radical finance and public education and the things that you're doing to. Get to the kind of policy that you ~wanna, they ~want to happen in the public schools?

David: Yeah. As I was writing this newsletter, I was trying to keep my eye on two things, a critique of the status quo regime and a constructive vision of what I thought should happen and to be as nitty gritty as possible.

And I was really interested in doing a kind of wonky. Work to see what exact policies could be passed and how they exactly would work. ~And the plan the book the conclusion of the book, I'm actually working on it, as we speak ~conclusion of the book is called The Plan for Public Education.

The whole vision of the book is that over the last few decades, we've on the left focused a lot on protecting public education, reclaiming public education, but that is ultimately a defensive posture. Seeds, a lot of forward momentum to the right and the center in the political spectrum.

So that's the title as public as Possible, and the vision is Radical Finance. And in the book I go through critiques of the layers of the system, that I've come to understand. I try to lay out what I can from a racial capitalist point of view. And then I try to advocate for kinds of policies that I think would make education as public as possible. I call it a plan for public education.

I'm curious if in the course of your research you ran into any particularly salacious or dramatic examples of local fights over school financing. We know that a lot of times there are big stories in local politics that add texture to the account sheets that of course, you also know so much about.

David: Okay. Let me give you a gossip. So you know John Irving? Yeah.

Tina: Yeah.

David: I don't read John Irving anymore. And here's why.

Lucia: Okay, I think I'm understanding you. Lawyers are working state by state to try to create equity that has been undermined by the way that property taxes are structured to fund schools. What happens next?

David: These cases happened all over the country. Arizona has one, Wyoming has one, and they all result in a different kind of state initiative to fund the schools better and it's been the most effective way of getting more money for public education in the last 50 years hands down.

But in Vermont, they did the coolest thing any state has ever done. The judge in that case wrote this decision that is just a banger. He said that local control is a cruel illusion. Only school districts with high property value have local control.

Then it set a ceiling on per pupil expenditure based on an assessment of what the district needs demographically speaking. You don't need to spend more than a certain amount to educate your students properly. So they set that ceiling, okay? They took all of the excess off and redistributed it. Now, in Vermont, you had very wealthy ski towns who had a lot of money because people would go there to ski and those ski towns had high municipal revenue, but the farm towns right next door would be super poor because they didn't have the ski facilities that they could tax. What this did was it said to the rich districts, you have to tax yourselves at a high rate, at least one mil, because those rich districts can tax way lower to get a lot of money, right?

Lucia: Yeah. Let's go back to this.

John Irving lives in Vermont says, I don't want my kids to be faced with trailer park envy. He said that. It's a quote, and he started his own private school using the money from his books to send his kids to the private schools so that they wouldn't go to the public schools. I can't forgive that. He was a part of a kind of bourgeois reaction to this policy that really got to the heart of this class struggle .

Maybe that relationship was always destined to end. Maple Street School! Still exists. Alright, I think Tina, you've got our next question .

Tina: we haven't gotten yet to your work on discussion. So if you could talk about the distortion of discussion as you call it and then some of the concrete things you do in your own classes?

David: . And I even have a way the discussion stuff informs the school finance stuff. as part of this finance work, you have to deal with numbers and you have to deal with quantitative analysis, which is, I think one of the important outcomes of some of my work is to realize that like critical theory, Marxist people in education need to start working with numbers.

The idea in Harkness teaching is to do whatever you can to facilitate discussion amongst the students themselves so that the students are creating their own kind of knowledge and discussion with one another and take yourself out of the picture. As a teacher, the whole idea is to fade into the background in a way. And the students are teaching ~them ~each other and themselves in the way that they do. And it involves a lot of letting them digress and it involves a lot of them learning how to talk with one another rather than to look ~at ~directly at the teacher.

~Actually. ~People say Socratic seminar as a sort of way of talking about like back and forth dialogue, but actually Socrates is always following up the interlocutor. Socrates ask a question, interlocutor says something, Socrates says, oh, interesting. Ask another question back and forth, right?

That was very exciting to me because that's very concrete and it scratched my quantitative math itch. When you say that student-centered discussion is an ~equal in variance, ~equal in various sequence of turn taking, I think that defines exactly what we're looking for.

Lucia: Equal and various sequence of turn taking sounds really ideal, but it also was kind of abstract, so I'm wondering if you could maybe contrast it to what normative discussion looked like in your research.

In the literature on classroom interaction and classroom dialogue and discourse, that is called a recitation. ~I got, ~there's a guy named Courtney Camden who defines recitation as initiation, teacher initiation student response, teacher evaluation, repeat. And that's an ancient dialogue pattern when it comes to formal institutionalized schooling. Ideologically speaking, materially speaking that's undemocratic. It's monarchical, it's oppressive, it's the teacher has all this power.

When people say there's gonna be a discussion, but then something oppressive and monarchical happens, it promises a sort of democratic participation while maintaining a kind of oppressive control. The distortion of discussion is a neoliberal thing because what neoliberalism is promising is a kind of freedom. It's a kind of participation. That's why Milton Friedman's book was called Capitalism and Freedom, right? He thinks that markets are freedom, ~and, ~but actually what's going on is quite oppressive.

And so I described the discourse distortion of discussion, which is the presence of recitation when there's supposed to be a discussion or promised discussion as being distorted, as being neoliberal.

Tina: You do to mitigate that though, 'cause that's an easy form to fall into. ~Very easy.~

David: I, like in Occupy Wall Street, a very close friend of mine in the Horizontal Pedagogy workshop Chris Guccio, introduced me to Psychoanalysis and Freud at that time.

The practical question of how to avoid this is Freud says that mass formation and the replacement of the ego ideal is a partial hypnotic state. It's not a full hypnotic state, but it's partially hypnotic. And to me, that was genius. It perfectly described what's going on when you're in a lecture or you're in the classroom and you're just looking at the one person and you start to feel a little tired, a little bored, a little angry, and then you get into the mode of it, and you're locked in, right?

Like you're in this partially hypnotic state with this lecturer. But also there's all these little things when this sort of breaks down, like classroom misbehavior, like when students are just like elbowing each other. Freud says that actually the massified ~co- ~psyches ~actually ~become aggressive towards one another because they're competing for the attention of the one.

And that involves a lot of eye contact and body language , which means that, like when, so in Harkness teaching, one thing that people do is they take notes. So the teacher takes notes on what the students are saying. Very assiduous notes, word for word. So ~when I would, ~when I facilitate discussions, even to this day, I draw a circle, I write everyone's name around it. When someone speaks to someone else, I draw a line, I count with little hash marks.

And ~they're all confronting you. ~They're all staring at you. That process of interjection and massification is happening just within the first 30 seconds. ~But if you were to say, okay. ~And this is ~what, ~how I do it. If you were to say, listen, here's how we're gonna do this. I gave you some readings and ~I always assign students is another thing.~

I always assign students to write their own discussion questions to bring to class. That's key. You have to have them read and write a question for discussion. And Sophie Harini and Gordon's work on what an interpretive question for discussion is, as opposed to a factual or a evaluative question is essential. You have to do something interpretive, something that's gonna get conversation going. Something to which there's no answer. And so when I teach, I come in and I say, who wants to start?

There are two silences that are important to focus on. The first silence is after you say the first thing. So you say who wants to start and then you wait.

You have to wait and you just keep waiting. And I think it's funny it's a little misanthropic, but I like how uncomfortable everyone is. ~And I like how, to me, ~the longer I wait, ~the more, ~the better. ~It's gonna be later. ~Like 60 seconds of full awkward silence is gonna get me 15 minutes of rich discussion, but I just have to wait.

The thing is, we're trained as teachers to jump in. We want the recognition, we want to be interjected. That's the power of being the teacher, ~psychoanalytically. ~We wanna become their consciousness. ~That's part of the head trip, psychoanalytically of being a teacher that's, we're driven to that just as much as they are. ~They're taught to interject us, we're taught to interject them, et cetera. But you have to wait and waiting is really pulling on those little threads and saying i'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna let you interject me. I don't wanna be interjected. ~That's gross. ~That's not educational.

I still teach that way. I try to infuse that principle into everything I teach. And I think bringing that into school finance teaching is also super important. In finance to be able to empower people to take on these complicated things that are the material conditions of education. You have to give them space to think, you have to assume that they're intelligent and you have to, I think, do that work of ~not ~not being interjected which informs my pedagogy now.

Lucia: Does the connection also connect to the school finance measure that you were going to talk about in relation to your discussion pedagogy

I was thinking out loud with the students. I made it a discussion topic. For one days class of how we should grade discussion because I didn't know how to do it and I wanted to know what they thought. And I started to try to operationalize things to myself in a way and say one thing that I can count during discussion is who talks and when.

And so I can say that, Johnny talked five times and Lizzie talked three times and et cetera. But the instinct when grading participation, it tends to be like whoever talks the most gets the best grade, right? If you talk a lot, you get a high participation grade. Okay, but that didn't feel right to me because that's not communist at all.

I really wanna do this because the participation grade that suits really wanted grades. Like they really ~wanna, they ~wanna get the A, they want to know what they're getting. And that makes sense to me. I know a lot of people in critical and lefty kind of politics with grades so oppressive. Everyone just gets a good grade. And I think that too. But also at the same time, the students have a material interest in their grades because those grades go on a piece of paper that determines so much in their lives. It determines material factors like where they can get into college, whether they can get scholarships.

It determines~ what their parents, ~how their parents treat them, how their peers treat them, how they think of themselves. Like those grades are extremely potent material quantities. And we need to take those really seriously because they also have an ideological power that, if you just buy into the way that the system trots them out, it just like creates exchange value in the classroom and hierarchies and competitive stuff.

And one of the students was like, I, his name was John Edgarton, I'll never forget him. He said, what if the person who got the average number of turns gets the A?

And I was like, what do you mean? And he was like, okay, let's say there's 10 people in the room and I talk 10 times, but other people talk zero, but someone else says five things in between the zero and the 10, the highest and the lowest.

So on the bell curve the 68 to 75% is where everyone ends up. That's why it's a bell curve, because you've got the middle that's wide and high. And we've decided at some point that 75% is a C ? That it's middling, that it's mediocre. It's mediocre to be right in the middle. And everyone else who deviates from that is a deviant, okay?

And the people who are getting apps or failure deviants and the people who are getting as or gifted deviants and the eugenics all flows from there. But what this student of mine had just done was disarticulate the middlingness of the average and put the average as the best, the collective, as the best, the group, the community as the best.

Tina: I feel like you brought us full circle back.

David: And when I presented that at the Exeter Humanities Institute, one of the ~like ~trainers was like, that's some kind of wonky communism. And I was like yeah, it is. I'm grading for communism here.

You've got a city center with a lot of poverty, a lot of diversity, but also a lot of wealth. And you've got suburban districts bordering it. And those suburban districts tend to, historically they've had there's a distinction now between outer ring and inner ring, but ~like suburbans, his ~suburban districts historically have had higher property value.

People commute into the city, but they go out to their suburbs and there's, the white flight and everything like that. I imagined the metro region of school districts as a discussion, if that makes sense. Students sitting around a table and all the districts are sharing a social product.

The value that they create economically together. That's what Smith and then Marx talked about, right? Like when we're all together, we're making a social product, but the economic system is the thing that divvy up that social product. And the way that we currently think about ~it, ~distributing that social product is ~like ~very individualistic, right?

So I was like, what if we came up with a quantitative measure for, ~one of the grading, ~one of the ways I graded discussions was not just individual grades, but collective grades. By assigning the class a collective grade based on the standard deviation of turn taking, such that if the class got zero standard deviation, everyone got a hundred.

And I was like what if we did that for school finance measures? And so I put together this sort of 13 variable calculation.

Lucia: Dang. You really brought it together there for us. You're making me think of one of my favorite lines from your ER book that I'm gonna read. You say that you intend the book for educators in the expansive sense of that term, organizers that teach teachers that organize campaigners, that study students that campaign.

Thank you for this. I think we need to transition to our last question now because we've been going on for quite some time. So I will ask our standard, which is what are you reading, listening to, consuming watching that you would like to recommend to our listeners?

I listen to podcasts on my regular podcast, die ~at ~Our Democracy now. It's required listening. I listen to Behind the News with Doug Henwood. I listen to the Beef and Dairy Network podcast, which is a humor podcast, which is the funniest podcast I know. It's been going on for years and years, and it's about a fictional podcast affiliated with a fictional newsletter that just focuses on the beef and dairy industry.

Lucia: Great, Tina?

Tina: I've been reading, just got this new book by this iconographer artist, marks Dukes. ~DOOX. ~He's an African American artist that has several shows in New York right now. He looks at anti-blackness, racism in the church and in society.

And Lucia

Some of my favorites were MRA or the album MRA by the Artist Emel makes an appearance. ~Let's see. ~Mustafa had a new album this year that I thought was great, and there's a new album by Astrid, ~so who's does a lot of percussion that ing to. ~So those are three picks from me for listening, which we don't often do. We don't often do music on the recommendation that's we'll link all those in the show notes.

David: Thank you so much for having me and giving me the opportunity. And I'm a big fan and I hope to stay in touch.

Tina: You've been listening to Nothing Never Happens, and our interview with David Backer. Our wonderful audio engineer is Aaliyah Harris. Our intro music is by Lance Eric Hogan, performed by Lance, along with Aviva and the Flying Penguins. Our outro music is by a crisis. It's called a Good Spy Reprise from children's Singing in Hell.

Max Bowen Raps guitar and Mark McKee Beats and trumpet available on bandcamp.com. Thank you so much for listening.