Weak Link Policies

Underneath the culture war headlines so familiar to educators in the United States in the 2020s is a more complex class war over the material conditions of schooling. As the post-pandemic economy settled in, a wave of budget crises erupted in school districts, leading to closures, mass firings, and program cuts. Teachers have had to work under these conditions, with the constant threat of loss of livelihood, yet the threat can feel opaque: the public finance policies determining the struggle are often hard to understand, even for the district officials tasked with making the decisions which could potentially shutter a school, throw whole departments out of work, or put much needed programs on the chopping block. The same is perhaps more true for teachers. Faced with one of the most significant challenges to public education in generations, it thus became more important for teachers to know about policies at the heart of budget crises in their districts to be able to push back, defend, and expand public education in the United States. In this chapter, I give three examples (from Michigan, North Carolina, and Massachusetts) of what I call weak link policies, esoteric load-bearing policies in the struggle over school resources. These policies, while hard to understand, massively influenced teachers’ working conditions in these districts. While demands to change these policies could mean the difference between large-scale firings or retaining staff, closing a school or keeping it open, the policies were not widely understood in such a way as to organize successfully around them. Using a framework of critical school finance and integrated social reproduction theory, I argue that teachers and allied movements must surface and reframe such policies to fight wonky on in the class struggle over educational resources.