Yes, I will vote for every single school funding referendum that comes my way

And also, this is such a dumb way to fund schools

Top notes: Thank you all for being immeasurably kind to The Right Kind of White. So many members of this community stepped up for this big-hearted, out-stretched hand of a story. If you pre-ordered, sent me kind notes, shared it with friends, tried to finagle events in your community and just generally were very cool… Thank you. But also, let’s keep the momentum going! If you haven’t gotten your copy yet, there’s no time like the present! And if you have read it, please spread the word, both to your communities and on those sites where people review books. Don’t take my word for it, though (even though I’m currently hanging out with my mom, an unbiased source who assures me that it’s a great book). Check out some of these absolutely delightful interviews, with 

Kathleen McLaughlin

(we talked about class, amongst other things!),

Courtney Martin

(we talked about love, amongst other things) and

Meg Conley

(we talked about everything imaginable, to be honest).

Also, I’m writing this from Missoula, Montana, where TONIGHT I’LL BE READIN’ AND TALKIN’ AT SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY. 7:00 PM. As with all of my tour stops, I’m loaded up with fun activities for the kids, so bring the whole family. It’ll be a good time.

Oh, and one more note. The Right Kind of White covers a lot of ground, but do you know what it doesn’t do? Teach you how to organize for justice and build community while doing so. Do you know where you can learn that? Barnraisers Project Spring Mini Sessions. Registration goes live on Friday, so if you sign up for the interest list, you’ll be the first to know.

Whoa. That’s a lot of logistics off the top rope. You need a breather? Cool, let’s talk about school funding mechanisms.

Listen, you all. This is not a space where we romanticize American history. In case it’s not evidently clear, The White Pages, America’s favorite exclamation-point-riddled newsletter about White people, takes a very firm stance on settler colonialism (bad idea! a real mess!). More specifically, I have a hunch that the staunch Calvinists who originally governed the Massachusetts Bay Colony and I wouldn’t have seen eye to eye on most matters (I can 100% picture a stone-faced, black-garbed pastor pointing at me and decreeing “A WOKE SNOWFLAKE!" before preparing ye olde heathen burning stakes).

All that being said, I believe in giving credit where it’s due, and oh my God the Calvinists absolutely knocked it out of the park on two counts. The first is in the field of legislative nomenclature. You all, do we really live in a world where the best name for legislation that we can think up is “the Inflation Reduction Act?” Blech! Consider, instead, The Old Deluder Satan Act of 1647. It’s absolutely perfect. What’s the act about? Satan! You know, that old deluder. It makes me mad that I didn’t know about it before I had to come up with names for my pets (“The Old Deluder Satan Kittens of 2007”).

The name alone would have been enough. But it’s also neat that the Old Deluder Satan Act of 1647 marked the first time that a post-colonization U.S. legislature mandated the establishment of publicly funded schools. We won’t talk too much about why those dour witch burners wanted to start educational institutions (would you be surprised to learn that it had something to do with countering Old Satan’s delusions?). Again, I’m trying to be complimentary here. As a fan of public education, I’m glad that they gave it a shot. And I’m even more pleased that, when faced with a choice between a funding mechanism that would have put the burden solely on the consumers of education (a fee on parents) versus one that reinforced the idea of shared community care (a broader tax), they chose the latter. Take that, Old Deluder American Individualism.

There’s a “but” here, unfortunately. And you know there’s a “but,” because we all live downstream from that “but.” Back in 1647, there was no income tax. And the Calvinists actually did believe in so many tenets of individualism, such as the primacy of property ownership. So what revenue generation mechanism did they lean on for their government-mandated Satan-renouncing schools? Property taxes.

Ooh buddy. Speaking of great deluders…

You all, is there a seventeen-syllable German word for a political reality that you’ve known about (and decried) for your entire adult life but that still finds new ways to grind your gears? Because that’s my relationship to American education funding. This is not news! I grew up liberal in a post-Savage Inequalities America. Do you know how many potlucks and PTA meetings I’ve attended where, at some point in the evening, somebody intoned “and do you know what I really hate? Funding education with property taxes! How is that not just punishing the places that are already the poorest?”

Jonathan Kozol and all of the fired-up potluck attenders are correct, by the way. Back in 1647, a bunch of extremely intense religious fundamentalists came up with a single idea for how to fund public schools in a small number of ethnically, religiously and socio-economically homogeneous New England hamlets and we just… never got around to trying anything else. And of course we didn’t. For while the current system is self-evidently clunky and inequitable, it does one thing really well. It reinforces a cycle of hierarchy and privilege. Wealthy (disproportionately White) communities with high property values get to advertise their “great schools,” which in turn attracts a steady stream of well-heeled, meritocratic strivers. The suburbs flourish, another generation of upper middle class White kids get into Pomona and Vassar, real estate agents take home higher commissions by selling all these “terrific places to raise a family,” and the cycle remains unbroken.

That’s not to say that there haven’t been well-meaning efforts to fix the inevitable chasm in funding and resources. We’ve been trying our best to plug our fingers in the dam for generations now—from federal Title I funding to state aid formulas to well-meaning private philanthropy. But we’re perennially stuck reforming a terrible system rather than chucking it out the window, no matter how many times progressives breathily lament how the current system is “just so messed up.”

If this is such an evergreen source of consternation, why am I uniquely angry right now? Simple, it’s because I live in Milwaukee, a majority Black and Brown city with one of the highest percentages of children in poverty in the entire country. My kids are Milwaukee Public Schools students. Their school, officially deemed failing by websites like greatschools.org, is home to some of the most dedicated, creative, loving educators I’ve ever met in my life. On April 2nd, myself and other Milwaukee voters will choose whether to approve a referendum to fill a $200 million hole in the MPS budget. If we don’t, our school will fire teachers, increase class sizes, and cut crucial programming (like academic interventions for struggling students). The same will be true for every MPS school across the city.

Milwaukee isn’t the only Wisconsin city that’s forced to appeal to voters to plug holes in its budget. There are 92 separate school referendums on the ballot across the state this spring. For as much as the current system creates winners and losers, as any suburban superintendent would no doubt reassure me, even the “winners” have to get out their tin cups and beg for the largesse of their neighbors. And while there is Wisconsin-specific context for this current flood (the Republican-controlled legislature has refused to increase state school funding consistent with inflation, all while sitting on a $7 billion surplus), the larger root cause is that, across the entire country, we’re stuck with a system that everybody hates but that we’ve never built momentum to change. That’s what happens when you build a system that benefits Whiteness but makes all of us miserable in the process.

Notably, while there are ninety-two different referenda across the state, none of the requests have received as much scrutiny as Milwaukee’s (not coincidentally, the state’s Blackest, Brownest district). A number of my neighbors (including people I respect dearly) will be voting against the referendum. And in a vacuum, I get it. When you’re the poorest city in a state, increased property taxes are a tough pill to swallow, not just for the corporate land-holders who run astro-turf campaigns, but also for working class homeowners and renters. I understand the impetus to say “no more money for MPS until they cut fat and “make tough choices” (read: close schools).

But also… oh my goodness do we hear ourselves? Not to again devolve into “It will be a great day when the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber” talk, but it’s true. What other American institution, public or private, has to run an austerity gauntlet simply to justify “keeping its current level of services?” We don’t even apply that same level of scrutiny to other property tax-funded municipal services. When crime rates go up (or even when crime rates don’t go up but there are increased headlines about how hard it is to run a Walgreens in San Francisco), police departments claim that they were “defunded” and immediately get showered with additional riot tank money. In the meantime, my neighbors are on the cusp of telling my kids’ school, “we are going to fire your school’s beloved librarian unless the superintendent preemptively promises to close school buildings in the poorest, Blackest parts of town?”

And yes, I can hear the chorus of ed policy voices in my ear already. It is more complicated than that. There’s declining enrollment and something does need to be done about half-empty buildings. Big city school districts are not perfect institutions who make universally perfect choices in the name of equity and liberation. Institutions that serve the public good should be held to a high standard.

But also… it’s not complicated. We live in a world of literal billionaires. Public school systems should be funded to a level that they never have to make hard choices. They should be funded to a level where they can afford to think creatively, not just stave off disaster. They should be funded to the level that they don’t have to make every single choice correctly in order to keep teachers employed.

Why? Because public schools are full of children. Period. And if we can’t care for children, generously and without reservation, then we’ll never build a society that gives a damn about all of us.

So of course I will be voting yes for a referendum that would never, in a truly just world, have any reason to exist. And I’ll do so proudly. I can’t imagine a school funding referendum that wouldn’t get my vote.

But more broadly, I hate this. I hate that the one system that should inspire our most communal influences, the one focused on the dignity and potential of all kids, is the one that is put at the whim of our most small-minded, individualistic identities.

But in another sense, I’m grateful that the choice is that stark, because at least we’re being honest. The history of America (and to a lesser but still meaningful extent, every White Western country) has always been about the seductive myth of individual property ownership vs. the oft-ignored invocation to neighborliness. The former has always had the upper hand, because it is the one driven by capitalism and White supremacy and patriarchy. But that myth doesn’t actually love our children. Its just another trick to pit us against one another.

And so please, vote for your local school levy. All of them. Even if you don’t like your superintendent that much. Even if you’re worried that your school spends too much on its football field and not enough on its special education department. But then, please don’t stop there. Particularly if you live in a place that has officially been anointed as one of the winners in this domination-enabling miasma, don’t let the fact that it's an old political truism stand in the way of adding your voice to the chorus. We can do better than this. We should not be funding education with local property taxes. Schools shouldn’t depend on referenda to avoid fiscal disasters. I don’t know about Satan, but there’s definitely an old deluder in our midst, and there’s no reason why we should keep accepting its lies.

End notes:

I took some time off from song of the week, but we’re back! With the banjo stylings of Frank Proffitt, who has some things to say to that old deluder, specifically that his kingdom must come down.

As always, the song of the week playlist is on both Apple Music and Spotify.

Book tour dates! Some of these are readings, some of these are workshops. All of them will be fun (again, I’m loaded up with kids’ activities). And if that looks like an unconventional set of locations, there’s a reason for that! This “tour” is about community— about me working with groups that are trying to make their cities and towns more loving places for all. Are you connected to a group or institution that would like to host an event and you don’t see your city on here? Holler at me!