Banking Methods: Education Finance for Radical Teachers

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[00:00:00] Welcome to Nothing Never Happens, A Radical Pedagogy podcast. My name is Lucia Hulsether and I'm here with my co-host Tina Pippin. We've been on a late spring and early summer hiatus as we upgrade some of our editing software, and as the hosts, especially me, smooth out various transitions in our lives, but we couldn't be more excited to be back and we have a really special guest joining us, who we interviewed in Spring 2025, and who we think is perfect to ring in the beginning of the school year. That guest is organizer, writer and teacher David I Backer.

David is currently an associate professor of education policy at Seton Hall University. He has a background in both high school teaching and community [00:01:00] organizing. He has written and published on critical educational theory, discussion pedagogies, school finance, and the effect of the climate crisis on schooling. You may already know of David from his wildly popular and informative subset act entitled Schooling in Socialist America, which we discuss in this episode.

Schooling in Socialist America is a public project in which David investigates and educates his readers about the ins and outs of school finance policy. David has a forthcoming book that's related to this. It is entitled As Public as Possible, radical Finance for America's Schools.

This book takes a deep dive into issues of school finance, including what's broken and what are our positive visions for what could change. David has also published very widely beyond this most recent work. One of the [00:02:00] things we find really interesting about his finance research is how it comes out of a rootedness and radical pedagogical theory.

David's first book. Elements of discussion is a practical, poetic work that emerges from his dissertation on discussion protocols. David's second book, Alou SE and Education, was praised by one of its reviewers as quote, the most comprehensive and nuanced reading of Alou, Sarah's thinking in the English language.

We are so delighted to have David on the show to dive into all of these themes, figures, and more. Welcome David to nothing. Never Happens.

Tina: To start with, we wanted to talk to you about what got you started in this kind of radical pedagogy that you do. How did you get started at Teachers college and into socialist and Marxist theory? So tell us about your beginnings.

David: [00:03:00] Great. My interest in education actually goes back to summer camps growing up, like Jewish pretty Zionist summer camps growing up. And one element of these summer camps, which were actually quite hippie dippy, crunchy kind of experience were these learning circles.

And in the learning circles, ~we, during, ~it was during a camp, but we would actually be studying together, if that makes sense. So it was a form of education and I found summer camp a very nourishing experience as a young person. ~And actually ~some of the experiences I had at summer camp, particularly during song sessions when we were singing altogether . And one thing I've come back to again and again, I come back to that feeling as a kid. It's what Hagel says about freedom. It's when you get mutual recognition that freedom actually happens between people through mutual collective recognition.

It was during those song sessions and ~during ~those study circles that I really felt like this is what life is all about, this is what being human can feel like. And that made a huge impression on me.[00:04:00]

And then in high school I was a part of some youth groups, Jewish youth groups. It's called Nifty in the Reformed Jewish Movement. And in that context the students, it was actually quite youth run because there were events where we would have programming that was a lot like those study groups at the summer camps. And it was the kids who would run them.

So we actually wrote. What now as a teacher and educator, I can recognize as a kind of lesson plan and a discussion plan, and we called it program format. But we would put on conclaves institutes that were a few days long or a week long that had a theme. And it was the older teenagers who would facilitate the small group discussions. You'd have to print out all the materials that you were to hand out to your small group. And you'd have to write out a sometimes 20 to 30 page script of every question and every potential answer that might come up to that question and the supporting handout that you would do at a certain moment. And [00:05:00] it was a line by line, moment by moment that they called program format. I participated in those events, as a young person in high school.

Basically anything outside of traditional institutions of schooling was very nourishing and enlivening for me. I found school quite a stultifying experience which is probably why I went into education.

Lucia: I am curious if you have reflections on the relationship between the pedagogy that you were learning at these summer camps and the Zionism that you mentioned as being central to the organizational apparatus.

David: I said that I grew up Zionist and then I came to, ~I, ~I sort of portrayed that image as being foundational, my socialist ideals, but it's not necessarily that I am Zionist. I've come out on the other side of that debate frankly, but, I was raised in that and I had that experience, ~but it's like a Zionist thing, ~even though it [00:06:00] happened in that context.

Lucia: Okay. Yes. Thank you for that. I didn't get the sense that you were saying that they were intrinsically linked, but given the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians and the role that major Zionist institutions and specifically political education structures have played in that, I thought it was important to give you a chance to follow up.

You also studied philosophy in college, right? How did that experience shape your entry into teaching and learning spaces?

David: Philosophy was compelling to me because I had a ton of questions that everyone found annoying and that in my courses that I was taking, they always seemed marginal, except when I went to philosophy class. I thought that philosophy was gonna save the world. it had enlivened me to such an extent that I thought that philosophy should be taught to younger people, like high school [00:07:00] students.

I think drawing from my experiences at summer camp and youth groups, I thought why don't we do philosophy with high school students in DC? So we started a group called the High School Philosophy Seminar, and we made relationships with local schools and we brought in students to campus at gw and we also went out to schools.

When I graduated, I decided to become a teacher because I loved it so much. And I got a job at a Catholic school and from there, like there was this sort of combined interest in philosophy deep questions and pedagogy, classroom stuff. And I started to see the classroom as almost a way of enacting the possibilities of philosophy. Like when you approach pedagogy philosophically, what you're doing is you're asking very fundamental questions about what you can do to educate.

And I really liked the activity of thinking about, okay, I have these students here in front of me what can I do that would be kinda like wild? I liked the sensation of examining and [00:08:00] widening the possibilities for pedagogical practice. I did that when I taught high school in Washington, DC at this, it was like a black working class, Catholic school Archbishop Carroll High School.

But then I had always wanted to travel abroad. And I met a teacher at Archbishop Carroll who had grown up in the international school system and he looked like a guy who was into football, but actually he was born in Mauritius and went to middle school in Cameroon and then ended up doing high school in the Hague, because his parents were international school teachers hopping from school to school.

I always wanted to live abroad. And he told me, oh yeah, you just, you go to one of these hiring fairs and you see what job you get and then you live there for two years.

And so I did that and I got two job offers. One in Jada Saudi Arabia and one in Quito Ecuador. And a longtime teacher who was there to advise people doing this for the first time told me to go to Quito. And so I ended up in Quito.

Lucia: Those kinds of international private schools can be such a mixed bag. I'm [00:09:00] curious about how your perspective changed around teaching once you arrived there.

David: I was an unreflective liberal who had studied analytic philosophy, but was really into high school teaching and philosophy. When I went to Ecuador and I just wanted to get to know the area, because that's why I wanted to live abroad, was to experience a different place and a different culture.

I started reading about the history of Ecuador. Oil exploitation. Indigenous dispossession. The role of the United States in the oil industry, and particularly Shell in Ecuador. And I met a bunch of lefty lawyers and intellectuals ~. And I ~and I took a class I did a master's degree through Buffalo State University.

They sent professors down to Quito and we did two week courses which is a side story. It's how I escaped student debt because they only charged a hundred, $200 a class. And one of my teachers was a philosopher of education from Georgia actually. What was his name? Anyway, he taught Freire [00:10:00] in his multicultural education class.

And it just, as people talk about when they read a kind of moment. And I was just like, oh my God, I'm part of a neo-colonial capitalist order!

Lucia: Shit!

David: I'm an American in keto at the American School of Keto, but the American SchoQuitof Ketos students are all from the ruling class of Ecuador.

They're all Ecuadorians, but they go get their prom dresses in Miami and they're all bankers, children in Ecuador. And now I'm starting to understand why there are armed guards at the gates of my school and there's barbed wire suddenly I was like hold on a second. Like my job here, I guess is to impart the American hegemony to these students who wanna be part of this global ruling class whose parents want them to be part of the global ruling class.

As an American getting paid double what the teachers were getting paid. I found out when I talked to them about it. My job was literally to just be American and have them absorb that. It didn't matter that I didn't speak [00:11:00] Spanish very well. It didn't matter that I didn't know anything about Ecuador. but I was upset and then I started thinking to myself, how do I short circuit that? Because I don't like the way that feels. I don't like the way that is.

And I was also simultaneously having a lot of problems with my students because I was this young gringo who didn't know anything about these students in this place. I had these seniors in high school. I was teaching the theory of knowledge in the IB curriculum, which people out there who are listening, or maybe you're familiar, like people don't know how to teach that course. It's a confusing class. But as a philosopher, I found it very exciting, but I had these seniors and they were too cool for school and they were on their blackberries all the time speaking in Spanish that I didn't understand and they didn't wanna listen to me.

And I was like, you know what? That's cool that you don't wanna listen to me because that short circuits the whole project of reproduction of hegemony. ~But how can I, ~but I didn't feel good as a teacher to just be ignored. I felt like I wanted to teach them and I had a job to do. And so to solve that pedagogical problem, a friend of mine told me about something called [00:12:00] Harkness Teaching Student Discussion.

And I was like that's interesting. So the students talk to each other more than they talk to the teacher. I think my students would like that, number one. And then number two, that could like tinker with the whole reproduction of the, American neocolonialism thing in the classroom. So I got really into Harkness teaching.

It was 2010 when I was in Ecuador for my last year. And then I got into grad school at Teacher's College. And by that time I'd gotten a heavy dose of left Philosophy Marxist thinking but I had no organizing experience, no movement experience. But I was on the lookout. Oddly enough I went to see the movie Avatar. And the wild thing about seeing Avatar in Ecuador is that it's an allegory for oil exploitation.

And after seeing that film, it just put, I don't know, there was some moment I got so mad and I had read Carl Palani and I'd read Marks and I thought, man, it's the problem is Wall Street, the problem is Wall Street. And I thought maybe when I move to New York, I'll go to Wall [00:13:00] Street.

~I don't know. ~This was in May of 2010. And then in September of 2011, there was an advertisement ~in ~in the independent weeklies to go down to Wall Street and Occupy Wall Street. And so I went and~ that, and then ~that was a whole thing. That sort of guided my research agenda on horizontal pedagogy.

We were in Trump Tower for a year doing pedagogical experiments. Because we thought that Trump exemplified ~what was every, ~what was wrong with America. That was in 2012. A lot of my dissertation came outta that. So that's a long story. But then that's how I got here.

Thank you for walking us through all of that. I'm struck by how your narrative from childhood to encountering Marxian liberation pedagogical theory to your work on Occupy Wall Street leads you to this point of critiquing and investigating school finance structures. Can you tell us a little bit about your work [00:14:00] on school finance?

David: I think how I'll do that, I answer that question, is just do a part two to what I just said. , Because it's a continuation. And it draws from very old, things in my experience.

I had this experience doing philosophy of math and logic and analytic philosophy and in undergrad~ I ~I didn't like the analytic continental divide. I really liked analytic philosophy, but I came to understand just how, apolitical and strange it is particularly, as I got my left politics but I retained this interest in kind of math and numbers and logic and the knife of analysis, Fraga the German, philosopher mathematics and logician.,~ He ~his concept of analytic philosophy is to think of analysis as a kind of diagnostic. You diagnose what's going on. And to me that's very important. You can really reveal tons of stuff when you just get into the formal structures that you're analyzing. But I didn't know what to do [00:15:00] with that. So like, when I was in grad school teacher's college, ~I ~I wanted to write a dissertation on like quantity and education and Marx and power. But I didn't know how to get all these things together. Like I didn't know how to wrestle them together into a dissertation that would be compelling and that I could get a job.

So I wrote about discussion and I went on ~a kind of what I would think of long as ~a long sort of pedagogical detour through discussion and facilitating discussion. And I was fascinated by it. But there was a quantitative element to that though, which~ it ~was in my discussion grading formulas where I tried to come up with a kind of communist grading formula for discussion, which I published in an article called Socialist Grading.

But, I retained this interest in quantity. And when I found Marx and ~got really into Marx, when I ~got really into Althusser and the concept of structural causality. Because that helped me answer the question, how could something like discussion pedagogy relate to something like capitalism? ~Like what?~

It didn't mind taking poetic risks, but it was quite complex. It got to the heart of things, but it was in a poetic sort of novel, almost novelistic, [00:16:00] polemical way. And it was ultimately about Marx. And Marxism, what's so great about Marxism is that you've got Hagel and Smith. I mean you've got political economy and you've got dialectics. But all the people that I had read in critical pedagogy, like Michael Apple, Henry Giroux, they would all write off Althusser. They would say, Althusser is part of social reproduction theory. It's deterministic it's economistic, it's functionalist, it's bourgeois. And I was like, that's totally wrong. That's absolutely wrong.

Lucia: And of course your book Althusser and Education makes many of these points and reintroduces us to althusser as a pedagogical critic with a whole lot of potential. Am I right that it was this reading of Alser that led you into your education, finance work?

David: As I was finishing up that book, I had been hired at Westchester to teach policy. They [00:17:00] were starting an EDD program in education, leadership and policy. One of the courses I had to teach was education policy. I'd studied social and political philosophy, and I was conversant, in basic education policy, but I wanted to go really deep.

It was a doctoral program. I thought to myself, ~what would be the thing about education, policy, and law that alser would be really like, conducive for understanding what would it be? What would a thing, ~what would be a good thing to apply this theory to? I was really interested in applying the theory.

At that point, I was less interested in just doing the philosophical work, and I really wanted to apply it. At the same time, I was getting involved in the education justice movements in Philadelphia and the We Caucus, working Educators Caucus was doing a lot of work around the school buildings in Philadelphia, falling apart.

Teacher was diagnosed with mesothelioma from being exposed to untreated asbestos in the building. ~Like talk, like ~toxic buildings, and ~like an action. ~I went on an action with the Working Educators Caucus, and this was in 20 17, 20 18, before the pandemic. But we all wore masks, surgical masks to city hall, and we wore PPD ~like the, ~because we were trying to communicate and it was very strange. Nobody wore masks inside, right? But it was [00:18:00] very strange because there was already a pandemic in the Philadelphia schools, and that was the poison of asbestos and lead in the water, et cetera. And we weren't calling attention to that.

And then ~I just, ~I realized to myself like, I don't understand how the money works. Like in 2017, Philadelphia had an independent audit done of its school buildings. It turns out there was about a $5 billion deferred maintenance, which meant there was a backlog at that cost of maintenance needed on the buildings.

And I was like, how does this money even work? Like, where does the money come from? And the people in the movement understood, but also didn't, they were targeting the mayor. They were targeting the superintendent, but what was going on here? And I thought to myself, school finance would be the perfect thing to apply the out cesarean theory to help the movements seek the justice that they're seeking.

With the school buildings in Philadelphia. That's how I articulated it to myself. At the same time, we were planning on having a kid my partner was pregnant, and I needed to really tone down the amount of meetings I was going to, the amount of [00:19:00] DSA meetings and my activism. I needed to get smart about how I was apportioning my time, and I wanted to make my organizing and my research much more closely related.

I thought, what if I studied school finance as a Marxist and directed my output to the movement? To try to ~get, ~help people understand the people and the money behind why the buildings are like this in general. And also what are the touch points? Like one of the lines I came up with is a pun, which is that like in Freire we hear a lot about the banking method, right?

The banking method of pedagogy, but we never hear about the banking of pedagogy, like the actual touch points with the banks, the money like, like Freire is talking about banking as a metaphor for pedagogy and content, but actually what's the relationship between the schools and the banks? And I became interested in applying critical pedagogy to school finance. No one else was doing that that I could tell even though this [00:20:00] long, rich tradition of leftist thinking about education. Very few people were looking at the money, the material conditions of pedagogical existence. Like when I was a teacher, the very money that funded my salary, the money that funded the lights that were lighting up the classroom, the walls the floors the desks~ the ~the air conditioning the heating and ventilation.

This money is, essential. And that's always something that Marxists point to.

This was right about as ~when ~the pandemic ~was hap ~was breaking out. As the economy was crashing in as everything was shutting down, I started, I just doubled down on this finance thing. I'd been poking around a little here and there, ~but I really ~and I'd been teaching school finance in my policy courses, but I just, I had wanted to read business news, listen to business podcasts, become conversant in the language of finance because to me it was becoming more and more the language of power.

Lucia: Indeed finance is very often the language of power, and you have been really involved in translating how finance as Power works in your [00:21:00] amazing newsletter, schooling and Socialist America. Can you tell us a little bit about how that started and why that title?

David: I thought it would be fun to riff on Bulls and Gintis and call it schooling in Socialist America because their book is Schooling in Capitalist America. But I wanted to envision what it would be like to have a socialist America, to have a school.

What would a socialist education policy look like in America? ~What would, ~what's the positive side of that project? The last chapter of their book~ it's ~all about revolutionary ~like ~transformation in a democratic socialist way. They're writing, in the wake of ~a ~Allende's victory and whatnot.

And I thought let's go there. Let's see what policies exist and what we would need, the policies we would want, and then what it would take politically to change them. I started writing this newsletter and~ I started ~advising ~candidates, ~socialist candidates who were running for office.

Nikhil Val won his state Senator race in Pennsylvania. I helped work on his platform during his campaign. And Kendra Brooks, working families party candidate who won city council race. ~I think ~I [00:22:00] worked with her office on a few things. And yeah, it's just been off to the races on finance since.

Tina: And that's led to your forthcoming book. ~This May as public as possible ~Radical Finance for America's Public Schools that the New Press is publishing.

David: That's right.

Tina: Would you talk about~ you've brought us this far, ~your vision for this kind of radical finance and public education and the things that you're doing to. Get to the kind of policy that you ~wanna, they ~want to happen in the public schools?

David: Yeah. As I was writing this newsletter, I was trying to keep my eye on two things, a critique of the status quo regime and a constructive vision of what I thought should happen and to be as nitty gritty as possible.

I think one thing I had noticed in organizing with the DSA and observing the Sanders campaigns very carefully was that ~I think ~socialism was articulating itself into a viable political position in the mainstream [00:23:00] in the United States, but a lot of times ~I think ~socialists ~might lose, ~seem to be losing ground when it came down to the technocratic details of the policies that the slogans and the platforms were calling for.

And I was really interested in doing a kind of wonky. Work to see what exact policies could be passed and how they exactly would work. ~And the plan the book the conclusion of the book, I'm actually working on it, as we speak ~conclusion of the book is called The Plan for Public Education.

The whole vision of the book is that over the last few decades, we've on the left focused a lot on protecting public education, reclaiming public education, but that is ultimately a defensive posture. Seeds, a lot of forward momentum to the right and the center in the political spectrum.

So it's always the right wing that has the kind of kooky school finance ideas that end up becoming our reality. As long as Milton [00:24:00] Friedman's been writing about vouchers since 1950s, they have been getting into the nitty gritty of how the money of school works and how to undermine the public system. But the left hasn't had a counterbalance to that. ~In fact. ~The idea of the charter school came out as the unions initially and was recuperated by the right and the center. So the sort of the idea of the book is that here's what we need to do. We need to go on offense. We don't wanna protect public education. Actually, we want education to be more public. We want education to be as public as possible. It's not just about protecting what we have from a constant onslaught of people because that seeds so much agency and so much imagination and energy to our opponents. It almost removes ourselves from any kind of agentic creativity to fight for what we think of as public education. To me it's not just about understanding the terrors of the right wings voucher plan. It's about having our own dream and fighting for it [00:25:00] relentlessly.

So that's the title as public as Possible, and the vision is Radical Finance. And in the book I go through critiques of the layers of the system, that I've come to understand. I try to lay out what I can from a racial capitalist point of view. And then I try to advocate for kinds of policies that I think would make education as public as possible. I call it a plan for public education.

And it's under the banner of something I call green fiscal mutualism. Fiscal mutualism is a term that Michael Glass who has a book coming out that everyone should read called Cracked Foundations. Michael Glass and Sean Venetta I think they came up with it, to describe how public pensions in New York State in the 1950s and sixties invested in school bonds and created ~a fiscal, ~what they call a fiscal mutualism between public financial entities [00:26:00] to support the public project. And they contrast that with fiduciary duty. Fiduciary duty emerges later in the sixties and seventies as a paradigm for pension management that says we have to get the highest returns possible by investing in whatever we have to invest to get the highest return possible. It relinquish a commitment to the public sphere to just returns. I think if we think now of green fiscal mutualism, which is to say, to get big public pools of capital working together towards a public project of decarbonization in school infrastructure, physical and social infrastructure, I think that's the way to go.

Lucia: Thank you for that broad overview of what your book is doing. Of course, if listeners go read it, they will find that there are many examples of policies like The Green New Deal for Schools, work on current legislation introduced by Congress, people like. [00:27:00] Jamal Bowman, and much, much more that you delve into.

I'm curious if in the course of your research you ran into any particularly salacious or dramatic examples of local fights over school financing. We know that a lot of times there are big stories in local politics that add texture to the account sheets that of course, you also know so much about.

David: Okay. Let me give you a gossip. So you know John Irving? Yeah.

Tina: Yeah.

David: I don't read John Irving anymore. And here's why.

So coming outta the civil rights movement after the ~after ~San Antonio decision that said that because the word education doesn't appear in the constitution, the federal government doesn't have any obligation to fund it in any systematic way. That and Milliken devastated efforts to change federal school funding legislation to fulfill the vision of the civil rights movement. [00:28:00] What people had to do was go to the state level, lobby, the state courts, and public interest lawyers had to sue the state governments. To tell them that they were out of compliance with their state constitutions, because state constitutions have education clauses, but the federal constitution does not.

The civil rights lawyers all over the country started getting together class action lawsuits to sue state governments for school funding inequalities. When you base school funding on local property value that a school district that has a lot of high property value can tax it a little bit to get a lot of money back. And school districts that have low property value have to tax a lot to get just a little bit out of it. It's a super regressive system, which means that actually, like when rich suburbanites are saying, we still pay so much in taxes, I tell them they're wrong because it's the poor people in the medium-sized de-industrialized cities that pay the most in taxes because they're paying the highest tax rate on a low property value [00:29:00] to get just a drip for what they need for their schools.

Lucia: Okay, I think I'm understanding you. Lawyers are working state by state to try to create equity that has been undermined by the way that property taxes are structured to fund schools. What happens next?

David: These cases happened all over the country. Arizona has one, Wyoming has one, and they all result in a different kind of state initiative to fund the schools better and it's been the most effective way of getting more money for public education in the last 50 years hands down.

But you never know what's gonna happen. When the courts tell the governor and the legislature that they have to do something, it's never clear what they're gonna do because technically they're breaking the law but it's not like the state police are gonna go arrest all of the lawmakers and governors. There's actually really no reason other than a compunction to follow the courts. So sometimes states don't do anything. Ohio didn't do anything for 14 years. They just said, oh, [00:30:00] we're breaking the law, whatever. Wyoming decided to have the best school infrastructure financing policy in the country because they had coal that they could make money from.

But in Vermont, they did the coolest thing any state has ever done. The judge in that case wrote this decision that is just a banger. He said that local control is a cruel illusion. Only school districts with high property value have local control.

You only have control if you have money, if you don't have property value, there's no such thing as local control. Because of this, we have to reform the system. The legislators in Vermont came up with a system that ~takes up and ~takes on the local property tax system in a way that, I thought it was a real class struggle kind of thing. That was what became known as Act 60. In 1998, the legislature and then the governor signed into law this thing that basically ~like it ~set a floor for the rate that the district can tax property [00:31:00] value mean it had a high floor, mean it had to be at least let's say $1 for every thousand dollars of assessed ~about ~property value.

Then it set a ceiling on per pupil expenditure based on an assessment of what the district needs demographically speaking. You don't need to spend more than a certain amount to educate your students properly. So they set that ceiling, okay? They took all of the excess off and redistributed it. Now, in Vermont, you had very wealthy ski towns who had a lot of money because people would go there to ski and those ski towns had high municipal revenue, but the farm towns right next door would be super poor because they didn't have the ski facilities that they could tax. What this did was it said to the rich districts, you have to tax yourselves at a high rate, at least one mil, because those rich districts can tax way lower to get a lot of money, right?

But after the state established ceiling threshold of what you need to educate your students, we're gonna take that excess money and we're gonna give it to the poorest districts. [00:32:00] Genius. What that meant was the rich towns were producing value of the social product for Vermont. The state of Vermont was taking that social product and reapportioning it to other Vermonters who needed it. Rather than the rich districts just hoarding it for themselves, which is how school finance is in the country. Now I'm getting to John Irving.

Lucia: Yeah. Let's go back to this.

David: There was a culture that emerges out of this finance policy. It is a real example of how school finance is a weak link in the chain of American racial capitalism. Because when you mess with this, you mess with a lot of society. There were towns that were receiving towns from Act 60 who got the money that was redistributed and there were giving towns who would contribute the money. But the giving towns were like the kind of bourgeoisie of Vermont . They were like, ~we don't wanna, we don't wanna do that. ~We don't wanna give those poor towns the money. They started calling those poor towns, shark towns and they would even put up ropes on the state highways to prevent people from driving across the district border. [00:33:00] One teacher had her tires slashed.

John Irving lives in Vermont says, I don't want my kids to be faced with trailer park envy. He said that. It's a quote, and he started his own private school using the money from his books to send his kids to the private schools so that they wouldn't go to the public schools. I can't forgive that. He was a part of a kind of bourgeois reaction to this policy that really got to the heart of this class struggle .

Goodness gracious. That is an appalling, and also, I hate to say it, but very mundane story of how rich people will protect their own hoarded resources. I also just wanna say that as you were telling that story, I was googling John Irving Private School, Vermont, and [00:34:00] I had a realization that somebody I used to date is on the executive staff of that school.

Maybe that relationship was always destined to end. Maple Street School! Still exists. Alright, I think Tina, you've got our next question .

Tina: we haven't gotten yet to your work on discussion. So if you could talk about the distortion of discussion as you call it and then some of the concrete things you do in your own classes?

David: . And I even have a way the discussion stuff informs the school finance stuff. as part of this finance work, you have to deal with numbers and you have to deal with quantitative analysis, which is, I think one of the important outcomes of some of my work is to realize that like critical theory, Marxist people in education need to start working with numbers.

So now I'll go to the discussion stuff. ~If you like rewind, ~if you rewind back to my time in Ecuador and I was faced with these students who, weren't listening to me. They were too cool for school. I was trying to figure out how to teach [00:35:00] them. And I was so interested in the politics of Harkness and how the fact of student-centered discussion, students talking to one another more than to the teacher actually had a kind of counter ideological power when it comes to the reproductive force of the classroom and the school ~is ~an institution.

The idea in Harkness teaching is to do whatever you can to facilitate discussion amongst the students themselves so that the students are creating their own kind of knowledge and discussion with one another and take yourself out of the picture. As a teacher, the whole idea is to fade into the background in a way. And the students are teaching ~them ~each other and themselves in the way that they do. And it involves a lot of letting them digress and it involves a lot of them learning how to talk with one another rather than to look ~at ~directly at the teacher.

A discussion is when the students are talking to each other and not to the teacher, right? Which is actually, and this is what I wrote my master's thesis on for Buffalo State University when I [00:36:00] graduated doing Ecuador, is that this is complete opposite of Socratic pedagogy.

~Actually. ~People say Socratic seminar as a sort of way of talking about like back and forth dialogue, but actually Socrates is always following up the interlocutor. Socrates ask a question, interlocutor says something, Socrates says, oh, interesting. Ask another question back and forth, right?

Socrates is at the center of the stage. Harkness is totally different than that. It like, actually, you're doing well if you don't ask any questions. Actually, as I, for my dissertation, as I researched, one of the things that shuts down student talk the most is a direct teacher question to which the teacher knows the answer. What does it mean then to have a student-centered discussion? It means that the students take the floor, but they have to take the floor in a specific kind of way. Because if the student takes the floor, but then the teacher takes the floor back if you're counting that, [00:37:00] then the teacher's taking the floor quite a bit. You like you give the floor to the students, you take it back, you give the floor to students to take it back, but that means you're getting every other. You want the students to have way more than you and James Dillon defined discussion as an equal and various sequence of turn taking.

That was very exciting to me because that's very concrete and it scratched my quantitative math itch. When you say that student-centered discussion is an ~equal in variance, ~equal in various sequence of turn taking, I think that defines exactly what we're looking for.

Lucia: Equal and various sequence of turn taking sounds really ideal, but it also was kind of abstract, so I'm wondering if you could maybe contrast it to what normative discussion looked like in your research.

David: When I was taking classes in my coursework, ~I really, ~I became very curmudgeonly about how professors are teaching because to say, oh, today we're gonna have a discussion about topic, whatever X. [00:38:00] And then they proceed to speak a lot. And sometimes the student will raise their hand and then the teacher or the professor would say Yes, and then student would say something, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then the teacher would say, oh, good. And then say something else to the student and they'd go back and forth.

In the literature on classroom interaction and classroom dialogue and discourse, that is called a recitation. ~I got, ~there's a guy named Courtney Camden who defines recitation as initiation, teacher initiation student response, teacher evaluation, repeat. And that's an ancient dialogue pattern when it comes to formal institutionalized schooling. Ideologically speaking, materially speaking that's undemocratic. It's monarchical, it's oppressive, it's the teacher has all this power.

It's completely counter to what Dylan just defines as the discussion, and it's completely countered Harkness and that whole tradition, you have to do very different things [00:39:00] to make sure you're not getting into that recitation pattern.

When people say there's gonna be a discussion, but then something oppressive and monarchical happens, it promises a sort of democratic participation while maintaining a kind of oppressive control. The distortion of discussion is a neoliberal thing because what neoliberalism is promising is a kind of freedom. It's a kind of participation. That's why Milton Friedman's book was called Capitalism and Freedom, right? He thinks that markets are freedom, ~and, ~but actually what's going on is quite oppressive.

And so I described the discourse distortion of discussion, which is the presence of recitation when there's supposed to be a discussion or promised discussion as being distorted, as being neoliberal.

Tina: You do to mitigate that though, 'cause that's an easy form to fall into. ~Very easy.~

David: I, like in Occupy Wall Street, a very close friend of mine in the Horizontal Pedagogy workshop Chris Guccio, introduced me to Psychoanalysis and Freud at that time.

~I read Freud's Mess Psychology and. In Freud's mass psychology. He's says that a mass, it's actually called, it's actually called group psychology. But he's theorizing ~mass psychology. he says A mass is formed when a group of people all interject the same ~ego, ideal as each other. Single ego ideal. ~So his examples were the church [00:40:00] and the army. ~So ~in the church, everyone's interjecting Christ through the priest figure. ~The priest, ~they swap out their super egos for the priest in the name of Christ, in the army, everyone's following the general or the commander, they swap out their ego ideal for the commander. ~They follow. ~And then you have a mass, that's what you call mass formation. And Freire would later call massification. That's in that tradition, conscientization for ~rera ~being the opposite.

So what I thought I was like, this is also education like this is what's going on in the classroom, okay? You've got rows and rows of people and they're all interjecting, replacing their ego ideals with the teacher. and you've got mass formation there in the classroom, and that's what's happening during a recitation and a lecture. ~Okay? ~Everyone facing forward in the rows. Even freud had a diagram of all of these lines of egos all interjecting the single point. And to me it just looked like a classroom. It just had to flip it a little bit on its side. What I realized was like, okay, this is why Harkness and student-centered discussion in James Dillon's work is so cool because it disrupts [00:41:00] that mass formation. Why? Because ~in an equal, ~in various sequences of turn taking nobody is interjecting the same ego ideal as everyone else. Everyone's interjecting each other weirdly.

The practical question of how to avoid this is Freud says that mass formation and the replacement of the ego ideal is a partial hypnotic state. It's not a full hypnotic state, but it's partially hypnotic. And to me, that was genius. It perfectly described what's going on when you're in a lecture or you're in the classroom and you're just looking at the one person and you start to feel a little tired, a little bored, a little angry, and then you get into the mode of it, and you're locked in, right?

Like you're in this partially hypnotic state with this lecturer. But also there's all these little things when this sort of breaks down, like classroom misbehavior, like when students are just like elbowing each other. Freud says that actually the massified ~co- ~psyches ~actually ~become aggressive towards one another because they're competing for the attention of the one.

Anyway, [00:42:00] what you have to do when you're facilitating discussion, what I say, non distorted discussion is to ensure that the students do not become partially hypnotized by you. You have to escape the position and the role of the one that they interject, and you have to get them interjecting one another.

And that involves a lot of eye contact and body language , which means that, like when, so in Harkness teaching, one thing that people do is they take notes. So the teacher takes notes on what the students are saying. Very assiduous notes, word for word. So ~when I would, ~when I facilitate discussions, even to this day, I draw a circle, I write everyone's name around it. When someone speaks to someone else, I draw a line, I count with little hash marks.

And what that does is it makes my face unavailable for interjection. Suddenly now, the students, because you'll see this when you're teacher, you probably know, you walk into the room to start the class, everyone's eyes are on you, you say something [00:43:00] and everyone's they don't say anything, but who's gonna, who's gonna talk, who's gonna respond?

And ~they're all confronting you. ~They're all staring at you. That process of interjection and massification is happening just within the first 30 seconds. ~But if you were to say, okay. ~And this is ~what, ~how I do it. If you were to say, listen, here's how we're gonna do this. I gave you some readings and ~I always assign students is another thing.~

I always assign students to write their own discussion questions to bring to class. That's key. You have to have them read and write a question for discussion. And Sophie Harini and Gordon's work on what an interpretive question for discussion is, as opposed to a factual or a evaluative question is essential. You have to do something interpretive, something that's gonna get conversation going. Something to which there's no answer. And so when I teach, I come in and I say, who wants to start?

I look down and I don't look up. I also wait. The other thing that's really important for this pedagogy is wait time. Teachers, we all know this, after you ask a question, there's silence and it's awkward as hell and you have [00:44:00] to wait. You can't just jump in again. Because if you ask a question and then you say something else, you're establishing yourself as the one to interject.

There are two silences that are important to focus on. The first silence is after you say the first thing. So you say who wants to start and then you wait.

You have to wait and you just keep waiting. And I think it's funny it's a little misanthropic, but I like how uncomfortable everyone is. ~And I like how, to me, ~the longer I wait, ~the more, ~the better. ~It's gonna be later. ~Like 60 seconds of full awkward silence is gonna get me 15 minutes of rich discussion, but I just have to wait.

The thing is, we're trained as teachers to jump in. We want the recognition, we want to be interjected. That's the power of being the teacher, ~psychoanalytically. ~We wanna become their consciousness. ~That's part of the head trip, psychoanalytically of being a teacher that's, we're driven to that just as much as they are. ~They're taught to interject us, we're taught to interject them, et cetera. But you have to wait and waiting is really pulling on those little threads and saying i'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna let you interject me. I don't wanna be interjected. ~That's gross. ~That's not educational.

So let's say you wait and somebody finally says something. [00:45:00] The second silence comes when you have to wait for someone else ~to say, ~to respond to them. You can't follow up. And if you wait again, ~then they'll get, ~then they get the idea. Everyone starts to understand and it's uncomfortable and they don't wanna do it at first. You never know what's gonna happen. But when students start talking to one another and ~then ~they start to figure that out, they're making their own concepts, they're teaching themselves.

I still teach that way. I try to infuse that principle into everything I teach. And I think bringing that into school finance teaching is also super important. In finance to be able to empower people to take on these complicated things that are the material conditions of education. You have to give them space to think, you have to assume that they're intelligent and you have to, I think, do that work of ~not ~not being interjected which informs my pedagogy now.

Lucia: Does the connection also connect to the school finance measure that you were going to talk about in relation to your discussion pedagogy

David: Okay. I came up with a grading scheme. [00:46:00] And the grading scheme is I, had read Freir, I had read Marx. I was now a socialist, anarchist, whatever, and I wanted to grade my discussions in Ecuador.

I was thinking out loud with the students. I made it a discussion topic. For one days class of how we should grade discussion because I didn't know how to do it and I wanted to know what they thought. And I started to try to operationalize things to myself in a way and say one thing that I can count during discussion is who talks and when.

And so I can say that, Johnny talked five times and Lizzie talked three times and et cetera. But the instinct when grading participation, it tends to be like whoever talks the most gets the best grade, right? If you talk a lot, you get a high participation grade. Okay, but that didn't feel right to me because that's not communist at all.

Like the person who just takes the most space and just talks the most and hoards it all for themselves gets the [00:47:00] best grade like that. That's not what I want. That's not the world we're trying to make. But I was like, how do we do this? Like how do we grade? I don't wanna just flub it and just give everyone a good participation grade.

I really wanna do this because the participation grade that suits really wanted grades. Like they really ~wanna, they ~wanna get the A, they want to know what they're getting. And that makes sense to me. I know a lot of people in critical and lefty kind of politics with grades so oppressive. Everyone just gets a good grade. And I think that too. But also at the same time, the students have a material interest in their grades because those grades go on a piece of paper that determines so much in their lives. It determines material factors like where they can get into college, whether they can get scholarships.

It determines~ what their parents, ~how their parents treat them, how their peers treat them, how they think of themselves. Like those grades are extremely potent material quantities. And we need to take those really seriously because they also have an ideological power that, if you just buy into the way that the system trots them out, it just like creates exchange value in the classroom and hierarchies and competitive stuff.

And [00:48:00] it's just like you have to take that up and take it on. You can't just leave it in place.

And one of the students was like, I, his name was John Edgarton, I'll never forget him. He said, what if the person who got the average number of turns gets the A?

And I was like, what do you mean? And he was like, okay, let's say there's 10 people in the room and I talk 10 times, but other people talk zero, but someone else says five things in between the zero and the 10, the highest and the lowest.

What if that person who said the five things got a plus. You took off points for being far from that. And I was like, that is just genius. It's the collectivization of the participation grade. ~It. ~What that means then is this uncouples the [00:49:00] tight articulation between average and middling, if that makes sense.

So on the bell curve the 68 to 75% is where everyone ends up. That's why it's a bell curve, because you've got the middle that's wide and high. And we've decided at some point that 75% is a C ? That it's middling, that it's mediocre. It's mediocre to be right in the middle. And everyone else who deviates from that is a deviant, okay?

And the people who are getting apps or failure deviants and the people who are getting as or gifted deviants and the eugenics all flows from there. But what this student of mine had just done was disarticulate the middlingness of the average and put the average as the best, the collective, as the best, the group, the community as the best.

And to me it was almost a quantitative [00:50:00] rendering of that vision that I had back at summer camp to go back to that image of everyone altogether lifting each other up, singing together, becoming a kind of one , recognizing one another each as individuals. But being a collective, like what he had just done was created like a formula for that where the numbers. Measured the extent to which that collectivity was happening and a way of grading it, like a way of actually encouraging students to say, Hey, you want an A plus? Make sure you don't say more or less than anyone else. ~Yeah. ~Make sure you share and cooperate in the discussion space.

Tina: I feel like you brought us full circle back.

David: And when I presented that at the Exeter Humanities Institute, one of the ~like ~trainers was like, that's some kind of wonky communism. And I was like yeah, it is. I'm grading for communism here.

~Like I'm, I am, ~I want to be teaching that. And so okay going back to where I started, where I was like, I wanna measure for myself from school finance, like I thought to myself, okay, [00:51:00] hold on. ~I imagine the. ~I imagine the metro region of school districts where a lot of inequity happens.

You've got a city center with a lot of poverty, a lot of diversity, but also a lot of wealth. And you've got suburban districts bordering it. And those suburban districts tend to, historically they've had there's a distinction now between outer ring and inner ring, but ~like suburbans, his ~suburban districts historically have had higher property value.

People commute into the city, but they go out to their suburbs and there's, the white flight and everything like that. I imagined the metro region of school districts as a discussion, if that makes sense. Students sitting around a table and all the districts are sharing a social product.

The value that they create economically together. That's what Smith and then Marx talked about, right? Like when we're all together, we're making a social product, but the economic system is the thing that divvy up that social product. And the way that we currently think about ~it, ~distributing that social product is ~like ~very individualistic, right?

Like whatever district can get for itself that's what it gets. [00:52:00] And ~the ~they're all competing and taking from one another. Esther Sena historian called it kleptocracy. It's theft. We shouldn't say inequity. We should say theft. And I imagine that taking action as being the ~same way, ~same thing that happens in a discussion when someone just dominates the discussion, doesn't let other people talk, which I hate. I can't stand that.

So I was like, what if we came up with a quantitative measure for, ~one of the grading, ~one of the ways I graded discussions was not just individual grades, but collective grades. By assigning the class a collective grade based on the standard deviation of turn taking, such that if the class got zero standard deviation, everyone got a hundred.

And I was like what if we did that for school finance measures? And so I put together this sort of 13 variable calculation.

Perfect cooperation would be a zero kind of coefficient here, where there weren't any differences between any of the districts.~ I ~as I went along, I was using my grading discussion formula to talk about school finance. I called it a super expropriation index, which is ~the ~an ~in ~index for the extent to which a region of school districts were stealing from one [00:53:00] another school finance wise. Then I looked it up and it's a classic school finance measure. Coefficient of variation is something that people use. But I had interpreted in this Marxist way for cooperation against expropriation.

Lucia: Dang. You really brought it together there for us. You're making me think of one of my favorite lines from your ER book that I'm gonna read. You say that you intend the book for educators in the expansive sense of that term, organizers that teach teachers that organize campaigners, that study students that campaign.

This moment where you enfold all of these modes and selves and practices that teachers have. I've been thinking about it since I read it, and I think that the idea within that sentence is modeled in the stories you've been telling about your own learning and how that learning shapes your teaching, how your teaching shapes ~your philosophy, reading how ~your philosophy, reading [00:54:00] shapes your organizing and so on.

Thank you for this. I think we need to transition to our last question now because we've been going on for quite some time. So I will ask our standard, which is what are you reading, listening to, consuming watching that you would like to recommend to our listeners?

David: I love good stuff that people are listening to. ~Okay. I'll, ~I just wanna give you ~like, ~stuff that I'm into, so WPRB, Princeton Republic Radio, best Independent Radio station in the country. When I'm working, I stream them and that's how I find out about ~new music. ~New music I'd never hear about. I'm really big into fantasy and sci-fi fiction. And right now I'm reading China Mayville second book of the BAS log series called The Scar. The first book of that series is called Perdido Street Station and the third book is called Iron Council. So I'm ~like ~getting my way through the scar and it's genius, it's brilliant. He's a great leftist fantasy writer, of which there are a few, I would say. ~I ~fantasy tends to be a [00:55:00] kind of reactionary genre.

I listen to podcasts on my regular podcast, die ~at ~Our Democracy now. It's required listening. I listen to Behind the News with Doug Henwood. I listen to the Beef and Dairy Network podcast, which is a humor podcast, which is the funniest podcast I know. It's been going on for years and years, and it's about a fictional podcast affiliated with a fictional newsletter that just focuses on the beef and dairy industry.

And I am a kind of a consumer of celebrity gossip. And so I listen to who weekly. And yeah, let's see. Now for my own work, there's a, the author that I'm really into right now named Alberta Saia. She's a political science professor in Pittsburgh who has the clearest writing about municipal finance i've come across from the seventies and eighties. She has a book called Debt Wish. I have it right here. And it's like she writes with a clarity, a punchiness and a rigor [00:56:00] about how local finance works in a way that I haven't found anywhere else. And I organize with the Debt collective, and so I follow Debt Collective on all the social media. And the DSA too.

Lucia: Great, Tina?

Tina: I've been reading, just got this new book by this iconographer artist, marks Dukes. ~DOOX. ~He's an African American artist that has several shows in New York right now. He looks at anti-blackness, racism in the church and in society.

~And ~he has a new book called The N Word of God. It's a graphic novel with a lot of iconography. It's really pretty stunning . He also does dancing Saint Icons and John Coltrane church projects and that kind of thing.~ I'm also I ~just finished watching somebody somewhere. . Just brilliant about friendship and life in Manhattan, Kansas is where it set fictionally. [00:57:00] So I wanna recommend both those things.

And Lucia

Lucia: so every year at the, rolling into the new year, I'm a little late this year. I make a. New Year's playlist that I send out to my friends of music that came out in 2024 that I thought was really good. I think my alternate career is dj which is a not a known thing about me. So I've been like really just reveling in the last several weeks in re-listening to all the albums that I loved from this year.

Some of my favorites were MRA or the album MRA by the Artist Emel makes an appearance. ~Let's see. ~Mustafa had a new album this year that I thought was great, and there's a new album by Astrid, ~so who's does a lot of percussion that ing to. ~So those are three picks from me for listening, which we don't often do. We don't often do music on the recommendation that's we'll link all those in the show notes.

Tina: Thank you David [00:58:00] Backer for being on Nothing Never Happens. We've really enjoyed this conversation and learned a lot.

David: Thank you so much for having me and giving me the opportunity. And I'm a big fan and I hope to stay in touch.

Tina: You've been listening to Nothing Never Happens, and our interview with David Backer. Our wonderful audio engineer is Aaliyah Harris. Our intro music is by Lance Eric Hogan, performed by Lance, along with Aviva and the Flying Penguins. Our outro music is by a crisis. It's called a Good Spy Reprise from children's Singing in Hell.

Max Bowen Raps guitar and Mark McKee Beats and trumpet available on bandcamp.com. Thank you so much for listening.