As Public As Possible—David Backer
David Backer has a fascinating new book out, As Public As Possible: Radical Finance for America's Public Schools (The New Press, 2025). It details the opaque funding landscape for public schools, and provides new frameworks and possibilities to think about dismantling long-standing inequities.
I just started it, and am really enjoying it. Later this spring and summer, I'll discuss it in book club with some of my friends at Minneapolis Families for Public Schools.
Schools need revenue, and that revenue needs to be spent well.
“The insight shouldn't sound new or groundbreaking. It's pretty obvious. But in practice these two things get separated: The people calling for revenue are different from the people calling for accountability. To move forward, we have to think of structure and agency, revenue and accountability, together rather than separately, recognizing that both revenue and accountability are necessary for good schools.”
“For instance, the right and center insist that the problem with schools isn't money: it's accountability. This accountability imperative ignores a shameful scarcity (like the fact that companies building and owning stadiums don't have to pay property taxes that would otherwise go to the schools and lays all the blame on principals). The way to make schools better, according to this argument, is not to spend more money but rather to hire and fire the right people.”
"...According to the revenue imperative, schools need money to do well. In other words, schools that have more money are better schools. Education is a human-resource-intensive process, and to do it well you have to spend. Schools can't do more with less. Given less, they do less. Further, calling for accountability without properly funding the school system blames the underfunded victims for the imperative of the larger, structural forces over which they have no control. To attribute failure to school systems without providing the resources for success is to set them up to fail. Thus, the revenue imperative says fund the schools," (pg. 29-30)