Review of As Public as Possible: Radical Finance for America’s Public Schools by David I. Backer (The New Press, 2025)
As the carnage wreaked by the Trump administration on the federal government continues apace, the relevance of progress by other means assumes greater importance. The United States happens to be blessed, or saddled, with the most decentralized public sector among relatively rich nations.
So the time of state and local governments is coming to the fore. The hope for “municipal socialism” in New York City under a Mayor Zohran Mamdani is only the most dramatic example. Opportunities for constructive reform are legion among the nation’s more than 80,000 state and local governments.
One of my long-standing pet peeves with the US left is its indifference to our country’s federalism. State governments have a lot of sway here, given that under the Constitution they are sovereign entities. Now some of them are trending into redoubts of anti-Trump activism.
Federalism has always been a double-edged sword. State governments are free to do awful things, too, as Florida and Texas demonstrate. Reforms that presume national uniformity are constrained by the diversity of politics in the states. There are nice things that states can provide outside of the constraint of national policy — like free college, as I have argued previously.
In As Public as Possible: Radical Finance for America’s Public Schools, David I. Backer, an associate professor of educational foundations and policy studies at West Chester University in Pennsylvania and the author of the Schooling in Socialist America newsletter, provides a cookbook for socialist reforms centering on what has been called the object of the public’s most intimate connection with government: the local public school.
The book’s objectives are twofold. He discusses in some detail incremental reforms in school finance, but he contextualizes them in a Marxist framework. Backer asserts that the…
Auteur: Max B. Sawicky
