Will Brehm  0:47
David Backer and Akira Drake-Rodriguez, thanks so much for joining FreshEd.

David I. Backer  0:53
Hi there, thanks Will for having me.

Akira Drake Rodriguez  0:55
Yeah, thank you.

Will Brehm  0:56
You know, in your new article, you talk all about Philadelphia schools and financing of buildings, but maybe to start, could you just sort of describe the physical state of schools in Philadelphia?

Akira Drake Rodriguez  1:05
Yeah, sure. The state of the schools has been pretty well documented for at least a few decades at this point. The schools in Philadelphia, there are about 216 distinct school facilities that house about 279 schools. The schools were built largely between 1910 and 1950, so they’re at this point very old facilities. Some of them have been modernized, but for the most part, we’re looking at facilities that were built with a lot of what we now know are toxic substances. So the environmental hazards within these schools are millions of square feet of asbestos, lead in the paint and plasters of these buildings, lead in the water feeder pipes, which makes the water undrinkable for students, as well as mold, as well as pretty much inoperable air conditioning and HVAC systems in I would say about 90 schools. So right now, for example, we’re in the middle, this is the second week of classes, it’s about 95 degrees here in Philadelphia, and these schools that don’t have air conditioning are on half day schedules. So they dismiss around 12. And this is something that’s happened for at least the last four or five years as the summers get hotter and longer. You know, this happens as well when it’s too cold in the schools, the schools themselves, outside of the environmental hazards, the schools themselves are not very modern. So they were constructed that there are four librarians that are employed for all these district schools, you know, so a lot of these schools don’t have libraries, auditoriums, cafeterias, modern bathroom facilities. And so the state of the schools is not just the health aspect of it, of removing these environmental hazards, but in general, you know, modernize them for today’s educational needs, for today’s social needs. And that’s really kind of the big overall set of issues for the condition of school facilities.

Will Brehm  3:16
Why has the city sort of updated schools over the decades, right? It would seem that a lot of these issues should have been addressed sort of slowly over time, as they have become noticed. And the different types of facilities that school needs also need to just I assume that they would just sort of be updated over time. Like why hasn’t that happened?

Akira Drake Rodriguez  3:38
Money, honestly, again, when these schools were constructed, the city was growing by tens and hundreds of thousands of new residents. And just as quickly saw that population decline, particularly in the public schools. So in 1990, there were about 200,000 students enrolled in the school district. Now, you know, 2023, we’re looking at maybe 115 120,000 students and traditional public schools, another 70,000 are in charter schools. And so that that is roughly the same number, our population has increased during that time period. So we’re seeing not only are people opting out of public schools who have been in Philadelphia, but also this population growth is not changing it. So we’ve experienced as a city, a near bankruptcy declaration in the 90s, as well, a wage tax, you know, property tax abatements that kind of limit property tax revenue, and generally have been seen a very kind of overall draconian cuts in the school district’s budget. Pennsylvania is also one of the most regressive states when it comes to financing local school districts. And so very little assistance coming in from the state, the age of the buildings, the kind of needs of the students all kind of, you know, it’s like the worst of the situation, there’s really just not a lot of options. Federal governments are giving Title One funds. We are a Title One district, which means 100% of our students qualify for free or reduced lunch. However, that’s really like a drop in the bucket as it relates to the intense capital needs that these facilities need.

Will Brehm  5:23
Is there an estimate of what it would actually cost to sort of upgrade and modernize and make the schools safe?

Akira Drake Rodriguez  5:30
Do you have a recent number? There’s like a number that floats around of $5 billion, but at this point, it’s probably from 2017-2018. It’s kind of an older number.

David I. Backer  5:42
Right. And even in that report, they give a threshold that could be as high as I think $9 or $10 billion. The number that’s communicated kind of in the city, you know, is usually $4.5-$5 billion. But I think if you look under the hood of that number, that’s probably conservative. And again, yeah, as Akira had said, that’s coming from 2017-2018, and the district has not released the 2020 facilities assessment reports in full, so we actually don’t have those numbers. I was just going to add to a couple of things that Akira had said. There’s like this sort of a bird’s eye view, you know, the overall situation that Akira has provided. But another thing, the way that the buildings, their conditions is sort of known in the city is like narratively. And so there’s these stories, you know, in Philadelphia. One of the big headlines over the last few years is the teacher Leah DeRusso, who was diagnosed with mesothelioma, which was, you know, connected to the asbestos in Meredith Elementary, which the school district, you know, within I think a few years of that story breaking, knocked that whole building down and now is planning to rebuild it. You know, but then you have one of the sort of leading schools in the district, Palumbo, the ceiling caves in from rainwater a few years ago. And then every week, another school is shut down because of asbestos. They find asbestos and they have to shut the school down and then the students have to go somewhere else. They have to bus the students to other places and it’s extremely disruptive. And this is both traditional public schools and charter schools. The story of Franklin, Franklin Learning Center, you know, particularly for our paper in the climate crisis, they had just opened this really wonderful solar panel research center for students to do work on solar technologies, you know, as students. But then they found asbestos in the building and now the building, I think, is indefinitely closed or at least closed for a year and a half. So you try to make this kind of progress, but the buildings keep shutting down and every week is another headline. And it was happening before the pandemic. There was sort of this pandemic crisis in Philly before the coronavirus pandemic, and that was the asbestos situation.

Will Brehm  7:45
I mean, just going to some of those stories, when a school closes down, you say the students end up getting bused to other schools. Can those schools sort of accept that intake? Like, you know, obviously school buildings can only have so many people in it. So what happens when students get shipped out of their school because it closed from asbestos and get just plopped into another school? How does that work?

Akira Drake Rodriguez  8:05
From my understanding, it really doesn’t work too well. So there was a recent case of a high school that had asbestos exposure. This is Frankfurt in northeast Philadelphia. They had asbestos exposure. The school district’s like, okay, we have to close this school. Really didn’t communicate very well with these parents and students. This is March. There’s state tests that students have to undergo very frequently for the upper classes. This is getting into college and going to prom and graduation after kind of being on lockdown and not being in the school for most of their high school career. So this was kind of a big hit, and the suggestion was to send them to another high school, Strawberry Mansion, which because of under-enrollments in the 2013 closures was almost closed. This is a school built for 2,000 to 3,000 students, currently has about 250. It also has multiple loan back awards, teaching awards, a very successful college attendance rate. So they do a really good job considering those circumstances. But because they’re in an area of Philadelphia that is often narrated as having a lot of gun violence, parents did not want to send students there. Of the 200 or so who were supposed to show up, maybe 30 did on that day, and they opted instead to go to cyber school or a school online. And so that I think is really the biggest concern. Our schools can definitely absorb them. Maybe not well. We have a dual crisis of being schools that are underutilized, like Strawberry Mansion can hold 2,000, is actually holding 200, but also having overcrowded classrooms because there’s no operating funds to stack teachers for all of those unfilled classrooms, right? And so the combination of those schools, and that’s something that’s happened quite a bit in Philadelphia. I think we had up to 12 schools closed last year because of asbestos. They are kind of allocated into different areas, but you know, elementary schools, people like to walk and they have their routines, and that really is disruptive. Like Dave mentioned, high schools, if you have to pick up a sibling or you have a job, that’s also disruption. So it’s multiple ripple effects, which is why the cyber option is so attractive to parents and students. So it’s like, again, these tensions, right? Like if students go into these schools after they’re sent elsewhere, that contributes to the declining enrollments, which is declining revenues and really kind of accelerates the risk of closure.

Will Brehm  10:46
So before we turn to, you know, some proposed ways to try and fund some of these school infrastructure rebuilds and renovations, I’m curious to know, since this is sort of what you’re focused on in this paper, is how does this, let’s call it a school emergency in Philadelphia, as you were just describing, how does it intersect with the climate emergency and climate change and sort of green politics today?

David I. Backer  11:12
I mean, to me, the crises, you know, they call it now a poly crisis, right? So there are multiple crises happening at the same time in the same space, but because they’re kind of articulated like that together, they also present a kind of, I don’t like to use the sort of techno optimistic language or technocratic language, but it’s a kind of opportunity. And what I mean is that these buildings are dilapidated, they’re dangerous, and the other thing about them is that they emit a ton of carbon into, you know, our atmosphere. And I think the numbers on a recent Harvard study is that the school buildings in the United States generally emit something like the same amount of carbon that 15 million cars do every year. It’s quite a lot. And not only that, but the energy consumption that these schools have is one of their highest costs on a year to year basis. So not only are they spending a ton of money on these facilities, that the facilities are also putting a ton of the carbon into the air. And, you know, I think about this, and I haven’t actually found a really clear way to articulate just what a kind of mind bending problem this is. But, you know, for instance, you have in these schools where the windows don’t open, and there’s no HVAC on these increasingly hot days where the temperature is just rising, rising, rising, people are unable to breathe clearly. And there’s also particulate matter in the air of all kinds that is unhealthy. We, you know, we have research to show that if HVAC is improved, if air is cleaner in classrooms, that attendance improves. And it makes a lot of sense. Actually, if you can imagine, you go into a place and it’s harder for you to breathe there, you’re not going to want to go back. But at the same time, like the buildings are emitting this carbon to atmosphere, and it’s like choking off the students futures at the same time, if that makes sense, right? Like these buildings are supposed to be the spaces for these young people to prepare themselves to learn so that they can participate in a future society. But the building that they’re in is contributing to the chaos and dystopian quality of the future that they’re supposed to have. And, you know, I think that the reason I say that this is an opportunity is because, and this is where this paper kind of comes in a little bit, is there’s a lot of, you know, in the climate movement or environmental movement, you know, there’s been a bit of a shift into like, let’s do this, let’s actually, what is this going to take to try to decarbonize? And taking these buildings that need a ton of work seems like a great opportunity to put in decarbonized types of infrastructure. And then it becomes quite a hopeful situation, actually, when you start thinking about it in that framework. So that, like the polycrisis in this particular aspect, you know, is quite dystopian in one sense, but the flip side of it is like that it’s actually quite hopeful.

Will Brehm  14:07
And what you show in your article is that there were community groups, activist groups that actually did come together and propose solutions to the funding problem in this regard. And it was quite amazing. But as your paper shows that these two groups had slightly different takes on how to do it. They approached the problem from slightly different perspectives, even if they agreed with sort of what they were trying to achieve in the end. And so let’s start with the group that I think you sort of call the Green New Deal for K-12 schools in Philadelphia. What was this group and what solution did they propose to funding this massive gap in Philadelphia’s education system to renovate all of these buildings and build new infrastructure and make sure that it addressed these climate issues as you were just addressing, David?

Akira Drake Rodriguez  14:56
Yeah. So prior to the kind of creation of the Green New Deal for public schools research report done by Climate and Community Projects. So Dave and I are authors on that report that was translated into legislation introduced by Representative Jamal Bowman in July 2021. And from there, you see groups kind of forming around this kind of network of Green New Deal support and legislation at different levels at the state level and at the local level. So in Philly, there are a number of groups that sort of organized and Dave and I both talk in the article about Our City, Our Schools, which is a member coalition of different educational justice groups. Part of those different sort of educational justice groups is a group called the Philly Healthy Schools Initiative. And Philly Healthy Schools Initiative is really kind of co-active. It’s a multi kind of stakeholder group of, you know, technical experts, members of unions, environmentalists, et cetera, parents all coming together to think about what is needed to transform Philly schools from a really kind of like technical people-centered approach. So these are the hazards that are named and have to be renewed. This is the data that we need. This is the sort of planning that is required, planning and thinking about, you know, that student that has to leave to pick up their sibling before they go to work and where their school’s located and how they get there. So they are really organizing and lobbying for this because of these frequent closures, whether they’re permanent or temporary that happen in Philadelphia schools. After the Green New Deal legislation is introduced, you see a few more groups coming in line, Philly DSA, a few other groups that kind of came together to really focus on getting safe and healthy schools within the city of Philadelphia. And so the Green New Deal is more of a large scale intervention. So the money that is allotted as grants opposed to loans or bonds are very much intended to go to these high-need, high-vulnerability school districts, right? So a Philadelphia, but also a San Antonio and a Los Angeles and a Miami. Unity is that, as we call them, are on the front lines of the current climate crisis, right? But also, as they’ve alluded to, these sort of like policy crises of racial injustices, educational injustices, climate injustices, et cetera. So they are, you know, drowning in debt, can’t cover their operating costs, definitely don’t have like the capacity, both from like a technical and state and bureaucracy perspective, or the financial capital to sort of deploy these interventions that are needed to green these schools. So by retrofitting, putting in more energy efficient, getting to zero net carbon for all of our public school facilities, we’re helping them reduce their operating costs, as they’ve alluded to, with energy being such a high cost for them. And again, bringing more students and staff, lessening turnover with teachers and principals and students as well by having schools that are comfortable that they want to be in and stable enough that they’re open, you know, for the full duration of the school year without interruption. So that was really, again, as I kind of mentioned, in the beginning of this, because the federal government is giving such a small proportion, you know, less than 1% of school district budgets come from the federal government. This was like an ideal intervention, right? We’re considering schools as infrastructure, the climate crisis is going to impact everyone. There’s 100,000 public schools in the United States. There’s one in every neighborhood, right? This is a way to make green, healthy, safe spaces for the community and function as resilience hubs in times of crisis and emergency. Really trying to put all of that, we see it as a jobs program, we see it as, you know, something that warrants the large federal intervention that was requested. And so certainly, and Dave can talk more about the alternative approach funding green interventions and green infrastructure for public schools. But this one was really meant to leverage the spending capacity of the federal government, what that looks like, like at the local and state scale, we can talk about later as well.

Will Brehm  19:21
Yeah. And so and before we turn to the the alternative side, you know, you call this approach the fiscal approach to a big green state, I think is the phrase you use, you know, you’re talking about how this this is reliant on federal grants. Now, was this money actually available? Or was it sort of trying to advocate the federal government to open up new avenues for grants to sort of fund schools as part of its sort of, you know, climate emergency funding that I think the Biden administration had been talking about at some point?

Akira Drake Rodriguez  19:50
Yeah, this was definitely meant to take advantage of the federal government’s desire to spend on infrastructure. COVID is happening, people are trying to get things back online, where we have this infrastructure crisis that’s been in existence for a while, we were starting to have a labor crisis, continue to have a labor crisis. So this was really, we thought, going to land in a way that resonated with a diverse group of interests and stakeholders. Because of COVID, I wouldn’t say even though it’s kind of like risky, but I don’t think it’s inappropriate. There was a huge backlash on public school spending. The first came with, you know, funds for COVID for schools, particularly for facilities that came with the CARES Act and ARP. And most school districts couldn’t spend the funds that were allotted to them. And so as a result, the money is seen as, you know, these districts don’t want it when in reality, they can spend it in the two to four years that they had. So, you know, there was money in the infrastructure bill for schools, and that was the first thing cut. And so politically, it just made it very difficult to advocate for it. I do believe that these funds can be made available. They’re, you know, in a school over the course of 10 years, considering the benefits that will come out of it. But yes, the idea was to kind of lean on the federal government because it’s spending power relative to the school districts, localities, and states.

Will Brehm  21:21
So David, I want to bring you in to talk about the alternative to this big green state. You sort of contrast it with something called big green finance. And it’s what you say is more of the, I think it’s the monetary route, rather than the fiscal approach. How does this big green finance address or could address some of the issues in Philadelphia school spending and infrastructure?

David I. Backer  21:45
I’m convinced by modern monetary theory to some degree that, you know, in a sense that the, because the federal government has its own treasury, you know, and its own bank and its own mint, it prints its own currency. It’s not about finding new money. It’s just about placing political value on certain kinds of spending or not, you know, as we see that there’s a new billion dollars for Ukraine, war spending, every whatever, every time you read a headline. But you know, when it comes to school buildings, it’s like, Oh God, we need new taxes, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. So I’m pretty convinced by that. And, you know, the green new deal for schools legislation was a explicitly as the care of saying grant financed program with more than a trillion dollars put towards physical and social infrastructure towards these projects, you know, that we’re talking about. So the way that the grant works, right, is that the federal government, you know, through all of the twists and turns and Byzantine little channels, that it reaches out into all of the 13,000 school districts in the United States, you know, it sends the money, there’s all kinds of, you know, regulatory compliance features of this, but you get the money, you spend it, and that’s that. But the, and that’s, that’s typically what’s called the fiscal approach, you know, is a transfer of funds. And the other side of public finance, or if you watch Ferris Bueller’s day off, you know, the thing that’s going on behind Ben Stein on the chalkboard, there is like fiscal and monetary policy, like, that’s what, that’s what they’re so bored about. But the other side is monetary policy. And, you know, generally speaking, monetary policy has to do with the flow of credit, that is to say, like loans, money that comes, you have to pay back somehow, and how expensive credit is, let’s say, and the key institution there, rather than, it’s like an entirely different apparatus, like a section of the repressive apparatuses in the United States. And it’s also a totally different flow of revenue with a completely different kind of, I think, politics around it, even though we actually find in the paper, there’s some similarities, you know, in terms of the logjams and the problems that come from these two different approaches. But okay, so what’s the sort of finance approach, instead of grants from the federal government, you go through the Federal Reserve. And this, I guess I can talk about it in terms of the campaign and the grouping that was pushing for this kind of demand on the Federal Reserve. The context here is again, the pandemic. And in the pandemic, the Federal Reserve decided to, you know, take what they call a bazooka approach to the economic crisis. I think that thankfully, a lot of the bigwigs, the ruling class people kind of learned from the last big crisis of 2008. It’s like, let’s not be vanilla about our approach here. Let’s just, let’s just do everything we can. And they took out all the stops. And one of the stops that they took out in their approach at the Federal Reserve was to create facilities, programs that would create liquidity in different markets that were, you know, going to crash. Essentially, everyone was going to get freaked out in those markets, pull their money out, the bottom was going to fall. And then you have like a real, another huge financial crisis on your hands. One of these markets is the credit market for credit and loans where people buy and sell loans, you know, at interest prices and all other kinds of fees. And it’s a market of that is the municipal credit market, or what’s known as the municipal bond market, because the word bond is typically used, you know, when an entity like a school district is taking out a loan, they’re kind of bonded to their creditors using the full faith and credit of the of the district to pay back the money. And you know, everyone was freaked out that this source of credit that is going to places like public school districts in the United States, we tend to not think about it in the US, but actually public school districts have to sell themselves as commodities on the private credit markets to private creditors and lenders to be able to get the revenue that they need for capital expenditure, that is to say their school facilities. That’s where that’s where the revenue comes from for their buildings. Two thirds of school districts in the United States go directly to the municipal bond market as borrowers, you can find them as investment opportunities on Bloomberg terminals, you know, all kinds of geriatric retirees put their money into school bonds as fixed income investments. And you know, if your public elementary school needs a new playground, it’s typically being financed through Wall Street in precisely that way, which is a hugely expensive and in my own work, I call it a toxic finance. And we’re going back to our conversation before, you know, when you asked, what’s the problem with the Philadelphia, Philadelphia school buildings and Akira said money, you know, the kind of Destin Jenkins is a historian uses racial capitalism as a framework to talk about municipal finance. He says, it’s the bond market, that’s the spider in the web of this particular problem. So that’s just a sort of lay of the land. So going back to the pandemic, the Fed does something it’s never done before, which was something that was always within its legal purview to do, but never did, which was to create a facility for municipal liquidity. That is to say, municipal governments could go to the Federal Reserve and borrow directly from the Federal Reserve rather than going to the credit market, there was a facility where a public entity rather than selling itself as a investment commodity on the private credit market, it could just go to the country’s reserves and say, hey, could I have a loan and then structure it that way. And the kind of this just blew everyone’s mind, you know, who was who follows these things? Because it was like, yeah, I mean, to the people who’ve been doing heterodox finance, and all kinds of public finance, more left leaning people, they’ve been banging this drum for years, if not decades, it suddenly was a reality. And, you know, there was a lot of politics around this, because the conservative interpretation of this facility was, it’s just going to backstop the credit market, which just means like, we’re creating this as a safety net so that the private market can continue to do its thing. And nobody’s going to be afraid that it’s just going to all fall apart. But the thing about it is, is it had this we could call progressive interpretation, or maybe left interpretation where it’s not just a backstop, it’s a bank, you know, it’s a kind of national infrastructure bank, which is a proposal that, you know, has been in circulation for a little while now. So that would mean that the municipality of Philadelphia could go to this facility and borrow money directly to fix its schools. That’s the idea.

Will Brehm  28:21
That’s right. You know, in principle, the school district of Philadelphia, who has a CFO and a business office, and their whole job, in addition to putting the budget together is to actually create these very complex loan deals to be able to get this credit revenue for their buildings, instead of paying credit rating agencies and paying bond consultants and financial investment firms and underwriter discounts to private banks like Wells Fargo and JP Morgan, these are all the people who are involved in public school finance, by the way, you know, instead of doing all that, in principle, they could just go to the Fed, you know, but the thing about it, and this is this is where the movement comes in. I was a part of a sort of smallish socialist group called the local initiative, local action committee, democratic socialist group that was our sort of thing was to join coalitions. And we had a little education working group. And our idea was like, why can’t we target the Fed to make the demand to let the municipal liquidity facility open, be open to school districts as borrowers, and make the terms of the loans that they provide at the MLF very good, that is to say no cost long term. So there’s no interest rate. And you don’t have to pay it back in two years, you don’t have to pay it back in 20 years, you can pay it back in 99 years, because it’s all possible. I mean, effectively, you kind of have to pay it back. But it’s, it’s, it’s like it’s seen as alone, because it’s going through the conduit of the federal of the Federal Reserve through a monetary policy rather than that fiscal approach, right? But yeah, I mean, in a way, it’s us trying to get the government to help us help us please, you know, and run route of doing that is the fiscal route, you go to Congress, and you try to have all the Congress people hash it out, it goes back to the Senate to the executive branch, blah, blah. But the Federal Reserve has an entirely different political structure, it’s subject to, you know, obviously, it’s subject to policies that come out of the Congress, but they can act in with this independence. Well, what happened was, we got into, we were almost like a sub coalition. So lilac was a member of our city, our schools, too. And as another group, the Action Center for race and the economy, another member of that coalition, and they had a campaign called cancel Wall Street. And the whole idea behind cancel Wall Street was precisely what I was just sort of saying, which is to say, we shouldn’t be going to Wall Street for these things, let’s just dump them and use the power of the state, essentially. And so lilac and acre, the Action Center, got together and decided to kind of combine these projects into a cancel Wall Street for transformative green infrastructure financing for Philadelphia schools. And what we planned was we had a political education workshop event where we were just sort of like working through all the ideas of this because it’s so esoteric, there’s so many levels to it, it’s complex, and it’s meant to be complex, you know, the ruling class maintains power this way. And then the other thing was we had a and all of this is online because of all the shutdowns and the Coronavirus. And then we had a kind of an email action. And it was it was an email action on a zoom event where we had people come and talk about these issues. And then we were targeting the president of the Philadelphia Federal Reserve, Patrick Harker, and board member, very prominent board member john Fry to advocate for these demands, that is to say, MLF, the Fed let in school districts and give them very generous loans, because the school buildings are so terrible. You know, we sent him a bunch of emails, and it really it blew up their email box. And you can imagine people like at the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank aren’t used to being targeted in this manner, they don’t get a lot of these kinds of emails. And so there was an immediate response from them, like, you know, requesting a meeting, like, let’s talk about this. But you kind of plug back into the political political situation of 2020. Very contentious presidential campaign happening, nobody knows what’s going to happen, is the country going to fall apart? In November of 2020, Biden versus Trump, that was sort of the crucible in which this conversation would happen between people like me and Akira, who are working, I was working on this MLF thing, but I was also helping with the Green New Deal. And she was a member of OCOS, knew what we were doing on the Fed side, but also working on the grants, you know, where we just sort of noticed this thing, which is like, this is these are two very clear paths that we have to decide what we’re going to do, because it takes a certain amount of energy, resources, people and time to be able to craft the campaigns that would push for these kinds of demands. When it came to this big green finance route that I’m describing now, there was that political fight over the MLF that I was talking about before the backstop versus direct lending debate. There was a Pennsylvania senator named Pat Toomey, who’s just an arch conservative, just pro capitalist, a nightmare. He, you know, wanted to just kill the MLF, end it, it shouldn’t exist, he said. And he was able to smuggle in the, I believe it was like, one of the relief package legislations at the end of 2020 in December, he was able to get to pressure Schumer to include a piece in that legislation that ended the MLF and sort of salted the earth for it to never come about again. So then the demands of the campaign obviously became moot because the facility was killed, I would say prematurely.

Will Brehm  34:51
So that sort of closed the door to receiving funding through the MLF. What about the Green New Deal? Has Philadelphia received any money for school infrastructure through that program as a grant? And maybe Akira, I’ll bring you back in.

Akira Drake Rodriguez  35:07
Oh, yeah. So the Green New Deal didn’t actually pass out of the House. It was amongst the sort of Green New Deal legislation that’s been introduced, it does have the highest number of sponsors. However, there is another kind of longstanding facilities bill that was introduced. And it is the Rebuilding American Schools Act, sorry, RASA, as it’s called. And that has full support of all the House Democrats. It’s standard, it just really kind of establishes the federal government as having a role in supporting school infrastructure, you know, largely on the bonds and loan spaces, making that funding and support available. No sort of distinction about greening or climate. Of course, those, you know, entities like the Center for Green Schools was involved in RASA, so it’s not like it’s anti-green. It’s just not specified in the language of the bill. It doesn’t necessarily target high vulnerability, you know, low wealth school districts in the way that Green New Deal was focused on that. So there’s just sort of two distinctions between those two bills. But that bill has been an effort that has also like bipartisan support, but is because of the kind of overwhelming unpopularity of the federal government getting involved with public schools, has also stalled. So there is not currently funding available for the school district. The school district has only benefited from CARES Act and ARP funding. There are some smaller programs at the state level introduced by our state rep, Elizabeth Hewler, who’s been a big supporter, you know. And so there are advocates in the state legislature who are eager, including state Senator Williamson Hughes, who are very eager to provide funding from the state to the Philadelphia School District for facilities improvements. But the kind of tensions that have always existed between the city of Philadelphia and the state of Pennsylvania means that that money is often tied up and not actually coming through when needed.

Will Brehm  37:19
So it’s such a tragic sort of story on the one hand, where there’s clear problems, health problems, environmental problems, learning problems, these two solutions that are proposed, and then neither of them really take hold. So it is rather tragic on the one hand. But on the other hand, it’s kind of quite interesting about how innovative some of these groups have become with how they’re going to try and solve problems that are, like you said, part of this poly crisis. So I guess to end the conversation, you know, what do you think some of the implications are of this story that you have sort of lived through and researched, and now you’re telling in an academic paper? What are the implications both for, you know, the Philadelphia school system, but more broadly, about how we think about the climate crisis, the school crisis and finance?

David I. Backer  38:11
I was just going to say, just as a sort of postscript to that previous conversation that, and Akira might disagree with this, I’m not sure. But I’ve been going around thinking and saying anyway, that the Inflation Reduction Act has what could be thought of as like ghosts of these two tendencies, you know, these two pieces, approaches in it, though they are completely differently configured. Actually, there are opportunities for the school district of Philadelphia to receive fiscal and monetary support for green infrastructure through that legislation, whether it’s effective, whether the district will go for it, whether the conditions will be right for it to exceed, we don’t know. But I do think that those energies aren’t quite lost. And I guess as a way of kind of backing into an answer of your question now, you know, maybe one implication of telling this story in this paper is that though these movements failed, you know, though they did not succeed in their demands, forgetting her name, Eve Weinbaum, I think, has a great concept in the history and theory of movements called the successful failure. Which is their failed failures and their successful failures. And I’m wondering if, you know, the things that survive in the Inflation Reduction Act, you know, could be evidence of a kind of successful failure of these movements, you know, in the sense that there’s always people on the ground who are really pushing for this kind of stuff, thinking through this stuff, trying to take it on from a movement perspective, rather than this technocratic, esoteric kind of approach. And so I think, yeah, I think that that’s one lesson, you know, that movements fight, movements create a lot of important political energy, even in these very erudite realms.

Akira Drake Rodriguez  39:56
Yeah, no, I agree with Dave that this was a successful failure. One of the goals, outside of like making schools healthy, healthy and safe for students and teachers, was really just kind of getting more eyes on the problem and framing it within the context of these different crises. Like if you don’t solve, you know, this is a really kind of intersectional issue here of, you know, thinking about race, thinking about gender, thinking about class, ability, climate, all at one time. And understanding that the schools are really kind of like a low tie for that. And investment in these schools can really just have the same way that a school closure has such devastating ripple effects for communities and cities. You know, investing in a school as like a healthy and safe space can also kind of have these positive ripples. And so the more we kind of get people thinking like that, that investing in public schools is a good thing and closing public schools is a bad thing. That to me, like that ideological win is also really helpful. And I feel like every year we kind of gain a bit more momentum. You know, we have movements like Gen Z for Change and Sunrise who are really supportive. And I think that’s kind of where it needs to be is very kind of centered on youth voices, on workers voices, teachers voices, parent voices. And so that’s kind of what I’m hoping at least to see transpire over the next few years.

Will Brehm  41:24
Well, David Backer and Akira Drake-Rodriguez, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. Really a pleasure to talk today.

David I. Backer  41:30
Thank you.

Akira Drake Rodriguez  41:31
Yeah, thank you.

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Related Author Publications/Projects

Financing a green new deal for schools in Philadelphia

A green new deal for K-12 public schools: Transforming education

The racialized history of Philadelphia’s toxic public schools

Addressing the US’s toxic school infrastructure in the wake of COVID-19

Mentioned Resources

School district of Philadelphia facilities crisis: Updated report

Philly’s 1990s bankruptcy

Lea DiRusso: A dying wish for schools

Timeline: Asbestos crisis in Philadelphia schools

Envisioning the future of Strawberry mansion school

Green new deal for public schools (GND) 

Green New Deal for Public Schools Act

Jamaal Bowman

Philly Healthy Schools Initiative (PHSI)

Philly DSA

Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC)

Green finance platform

What are municipal bonds? 

Municipal liquidity facility

Histories of racial capitalism – Destin Jenkins and Justin Leroy

Monetary versus fiscal policy

Action Center for Race and the Economy (ACRE)

Cancel Wall Street

Rebuilding America’s Schools Act OF 2023 (RASA)

CARES Act: Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund

American Rescue Plan (ARP) funding

Inflation Reduction Act guidebook

Recommended Resources

School buildings, teachers and asbestos exposure

Big Green Inc. 

Managing shrinkage by ‘right-sizing’ schools: The case of school closures in Philadelphia

Quantification, inequality and the contestation of school closures in Philadelphia

Eight unions and the green new deal

How Philly schools are funded

2023-2024 Pennsylvania education budget

School closures and the unmaking of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods

Mass school closures and the politics of race, value, and disposability in Philadelphia

Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com