Far too many US public schools suffer from a lack of adequate funding. Solving the problem will require ending public education’s dependence on local property taxes, a funding mechanism that heavily reproduces inequality.

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 dra

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