I've been trying to better understand how Roe v. Wade got overturned. Something I didn't know until now is that school finance--specifically, efforts to preserve tax exemption for segregated christian schools & perpetuate a white lifeworld--is at the heart of the story.🧵 It was @KnowYrEnemyPod's recent series on "How They Did it" that tipped me off, citing @rickperlstein's Reaganland. If you haven't listened to the podcasts and read the book, I recommend them both.

The context is the formation of the 'new right'. 1/x

…ow-your-enemy-1682b684.simplecast.com/episodes/how-t…

While people were focused on the superintendent search and city budget processes in Philly, a group of students were measuring the CO2 in their classroom as part of a project with their teacher.

Then a district official came to hear their presentation and told them off.🧵 For context, architect and organizer @lizzies21 got national coverage for her work with her elementary school age son Luke. They were using a CO2 detector hidden in his backpack to see if the air was turning over properly in the midst of the pandemic. 1/x nytimes.com/2021/10/10/hea…

As professional class people move to cities and have kids in the US, we have to choose schools--which means participating in an intensely unjust system.

I’m a socialist, professor of education policy, and a parent in this position. Here’s my story.🧵 I grew up in a medium-sized town in western Connecticut. When I left for college, I promised myself I'd live in a city. I hated being in cars all the time, and hated the silent, soul crushing, isolated, anxious depression of the middle class scramble for status. 1/n

Omicron is surging and there's a crisis over whether to close schools. A key part of this issue is school building safety, specifically ventilation systems. I've been studying how these are financed so here's a 🧵with an explanation for how our school buildings got this way. There's a difference between regular operating costs (salaries, books) and big project costs.

Ventilation system maintenance and replacement are big capital extensive projects that take a lot of time and money to complete. These are called capital expenditures.

I've been looking up who's in charge of facilities stuff at the School District of Philadelphia given the buildings crisis. Who actually works on designing & financing things like school ventilation systems?

Poking around the Office of Capital Programs, I noticed Nicole Ward.🧵 Ward is the Design Manager for the district's capital management team. (She's the one behind 'ment' here.) She started in 2016.

There's a facilities crisis in the School District of Philadelphia. Buildings full of asbestos, garbage not being picked up, roofs caving in. So I got interested in the District's facilities leadership: who makes decisions about facilities? I found some weird things. (thread) The SDP's facilities are overseen by the Office of Operations, led by Reggie McNeil.philasd.org/operations/. They also have a twitter feed: @PHLschoolOps

Ever wonder why some schools have enough money for safe ventilation and others don’t?

A thread. @BisforBerkshire and @Edu_Historian have a new book called A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door. It’s about how if we’re not careful public education could be totally privatized. It’s great.

But when it comes to the schoolhouse itself—it’s infrastructure—the wolves already control it.

Now that a lot of universities are going online, we're gonna have to teach online.

I've done some thinking about this and have some tips if you want help preparing for the fall!

(thread) Big picture: you have to realize that teaching online is just a whole other kind of education with its own strengths and weaknesses. I think about it like a correspondence course, those old school-by-mail programs where teachers taught students through letters.