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

What role did education play in the US civil rights movement? What did it look like for anti-racist organizers to build radical schooling and organizing spaces that could evade the harsh surveillance lights of white supremacy and Jim Crow? What lessons can we learn from them today?

Our March 2025 episode features journalist Elaine Weiss, who speaks about her new book, Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement, published by Simon and Schuster this month.

Spell Freedom traces the educational program that was the underpinning of the civil rights movement and voter registration drives. The Citizenship Schools originated from workshops in the summer of 1954 at the Highlander Center, a labor and social justice training center, located on a mountain in Monteagle, TN, just after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. The heart of the book is Elaine’s vivid retelling the stories of the four main leaders of the citizenship school movement, Septima Clark, Bernice Robinson, Esau Jenkins, and one of the founders of the Highlander Center, Myles Horton. She traces the path from this mountain center to Charleston and the sea islands of South Carolina, all framed by the segregated and racist South and the leaders who rose up to organize and resist Jim Crow and create a new South.

As is often said in southern movement building (from the World Social Forum in 2006), “another South is possible; another South is necessary,” and Spell Freedom connects the histories and voices of the movements that continue to be necessary today.

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: "Plato's Republic" by Akrasis

What is education for? What modes of study become possible beyond the frameworks of formal schools and universities? How does radical studying fit into the work of grassroots liberation work?

As we enter the new year, educator, writer, and organizer Eli Meyerhoff brings us back to foundational questions about radical pedagogy. His book Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World rejects narrow, romanticized, disciplinary modes of education. It elaborates the concept of “modes of study” — which cracks open possibilities for how we might learn, teach, transform, and organize together. He is one of the co-collaborators on Abolition University and Cops Off Campus Research Project. Recently Eli has written important critiques of the "Antisemitism 101" trainings held by universities in response to Palestine liberation and anti-Zionist organizers.

Currently, Eli currently works at Duke University at the John Hope Franklin Center Humanities Lab. He has previously worked as an adjunct instructor at the University of Minnesota and at Duke. He earned a PhD in Political Science, with a political theory focus, from the University of Minnesota in 2013.

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: "Plato's Republic" by Akrasis