Or: SCHRÖDINGER'S BUDGET

Chicago Public Schools, TIFs, Tyler Tech, and the politics of assumptions.

In this episode: mayoral control and the 2013 school closures, the MEABF pension shift Lightfoot pushed onto CPS, the 2024 mass board resignation, the Tyler Technologies fiasco holding up $1.2–1.5 billion in property tax revenue, the difference between a bond and a note (and why "note" now means 20 years in Wisconsin), Illinois's Evidence-Based Funding formula and the super-regressive property tax it can't fix, and the tax ex machina: TIF surplus revenues that have grown 325% and could — if the mayor and alders decide — fill the gap.

CHAPTERS

- 00:00 Cold open (Rosh Hashanah 5787)

- 05:07 On being "a little stupid" in the face of complexity

- 12:38 Brandon Johnson, the "dog that caught the car"

- 18:23 MEABF pension shift and the 2024 board resignation

- 25:34 Schrödinger's budget

- 29:08 Credit ratings, TANs, and the "problematic borrower"

- 35:52 Bond vs. note (and Wisconsin's 20-year loophole)

- 48:00 Tyler Tech, Dorothy Brown, $1.2B in stuck taxes

- 1:07:26 Evidence-Based Funding and the adequacy target

- 1:16:35 The super-regressive property tax

- 1:32:29 TIFs as tax ex machina

- 1:44:40 Enough money exists — will politics allow it?

BOOKS & WORKS MENTIONED

- Alberta Sbragia, Debt Wish (1996):

- Alberta Sbragia (ed.), The Municipal Money Chase (Westview, 1983)

- Pauline Lipman, The New Political Economy of Urban Education (Routledge, 2011):

- Jim Lebenthal, Confessions of a Municipal Bond Salesman (Wiley, 2006)

- Donald Barthelme, The Dead Father (1975)

- Natasha Myers, Rendering Life Molecular (Duke, 2015):

- David Foster Wallace, "This Is Water"

CHICAGO SOURCES

- CPS FY26 budget: https://www.cps.edu/about/finance/budget/

- Chicago Tribune on Tyler Tech: https://www.chicagotribune.com/topic/tyler-technologies/

- Capitol News Illinois: https://capitolnewsillinois.com/

- ISBE Evidence-Based Funding: https://www.isbe.net/ebfdist

- Cook County Treasurer (Maria Pappas): https://www.cookcountytreasurer.com/

- 2013 CPS school closures (Chicago Reader background): https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/chicago-school-closings-2013/

- Chicago TIF district maps: https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/dcd/supp_info/tif-district-profile-maps.html

- Chicago Teachers Union: https://www.ctulocal1.org/

- Mayor Brandon Johnson's office: https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/mayor.html

- Oct 2024 CPS board mass resignation (Chalkbeat): https://www.chalkbeat.org/chicago/2024/10/04/chicago-public-schools-board-resigns-pedro-martinez-brandon-johnson/

CREDITS

Music: Carsie Blanton — https://carsieblanton.com

Artwork: Soumya Dhulekar — https://www.soumyadhulekar.com/

Request form: https://linktr.ee/budgetcommittee

Guest: Geoff Alexander of the Trade Movies podcast.

Our first cross-pod episode. Geoff — aka "the woker" — asked us to look at Roane County, TN, where he grew up, with a focus on the "technical path" that segmented kids toward trades as early as 13. In exchange he had us watch Peter Greenaway's The Falls, which turns out to be a spookily good analogue for what it feels like to reconstruct a district from budget documents.

We roam across the 1983 Perkins Act and the vocational-ed → CTE rebrand, McNamara's Project 100,000, the Kingston Fossil Plant coal-ash disaster ("the American Chernobyl"), Y-12 / Oak Ridge and the ORNL "traveling science fair," Tennessee's BEP-to-TISA shift, the new $50K teacher-salary floor as an unfunded mandate, why Roane County has to carry Oak Ridge Schools' debt on its books, the 2019 (and 2024) push to consolidate five county high schools, and TN Amendment 3 (2022) — the 13th-Amendment loophole that puts prison labor in the school-painting rotation.

WORKS MENTIONED

- The Falls (Peter Greenaway, 1980)

- The Saragossa Manuscript (Wojciech Has, 1965)

- Jared Sullivan, Valley So Low (Knopf, 2024)

- Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip (2014)

- Cormac McCarthy, Child of God / Suttree

- The Moynihan Report (1965)

- Kingston coal-ash spill

ROANE COUNTY SCHOOLS — DATA SOURCES

- District website

- Board meetings (BoardBook)

- 2024 Long-Range Facilities Planning Session

- FY25 Annual Financial Report (TN Comptroller)

- FY24 Annual Financial Report (TN Comptroller)

- County Budget Book 2026

- 2025 Long-Range Strategic Plan

- CTE program pages

TN SCHOOL-FINANCE REFERENCES

- TDOE TISA guide 2025-26

- CTAS TISA overview

- Sycamore Institute on TISA & local funding

- Education Freedom Scholarship (voucher law)

BUILDING CONSOLIDATION COVERAGE

- WBIR (2019 no-vote)

- WATE (2024 revote)

Live event: Budget Committee live in Chicago, Sat Sept 6 at 10am, Daley Plaza — recorded alongside the Socialism Conference.

Austin ISD is closing 10 schools and staring down a $181 million shortfall. Lake Travis ISD — a wealthy suburb of Austin — is running a much smaller deficit, laying off central office staff, and building stadiums. On the surface, nothing about the two districts looks alike. But "Austin and Lake Travis are caught in the same vice": Texas's tax compression mechanism, the firewall between operating and capital budgets, a state-level recapture mechanism, and what today's guest calls the dialectic of extravagance and extraction.

We walk through layoffs, high taxes, and what enrollment-vs-attendance funding actually means. Along the way: sinking funds, pre-refunded refund dollars, why every Texas school bond has to be signed off by Ken Paxton, and a detour into Robert Meister's synthetic-asset thought experiment. There are many detours.

Resources!

The district

• LTISD homepage — https://www.ltisdschools.org

• Board of Trustees — https://www.ltisdschools.org/leadership/board-of-trustees/trustee-biographies

• 2023 Bond ($143M) — https://www.ltisdschools.org/bond/bond-2023

• Enrollment update 2024–2025 — https://www.ltisdschools.org/bond/enrollment-update-2024-2025

• Financial transparency page -- https://www.ltisdschools.org/departments/business-services/financial-transparency

• 2025–26 Proposed Budgets Overview (August 2025) — PDF — https://resources.finalsite.net/images/v1754315784/laketravistxednet/c9ae27xy9sw2rgqnd2ob/Overview_of_the_Proposed_Budgets_for_2025-2026.pdf

• LTISD on the Texas Tribune schools portal — https://schools.texastribune.org/districts/lake-travis-isd/

Texas school-finance mechanics (the stuff you need if you want to read the bond docs)

• TEA — Texas Public School Finance Overview (PDF) — https://tea.texas.gov/finance-and-grants/state-funding/foundation-school-program/fsp-manuals/texas-public-school-finance-overview.pdf

• TEA — ADA & WADA one-pager — https://tea.texas.gov/finance-and-grants/state-funding/state-funding-manuals/ada-and-wada-one-pager.pdf

Recapture:

• Ballotpedia — Texas Prop 4 (2023): https://ballotpedia.org/Texas_Proposition_4,_Property_Tax_Changes_and_State_Education_Funding_Amendment_(2023)

• AISD explainer -- https://www.aisd.net/district-news/public-school-funding-in-texas-is-based-on-attendance/

• Every Texan — Enrollment-Based Funding (PDF) — https://everytexan.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Enrollment-Based-Funding.pdf

Vouchers

• Raise Your Hand Texas — School Vouchers 101 — https://www.raiseyourhandtexas.org/school-vouchers-101/

• KUT — Texas voucher bill / SB2 explainer (Feb 2025) — https://www.kut.org/politics/2025-02-05/texas-voucher-bill-education-savings-accounts-school-choice-sb2-legislature

Books & articles mentioned

• Robert Meister, Justice Is an Option: A Democratic Theory of Finance https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/J/bo55404718.html

• Liliana Doganova, Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (Zone Books, 2024) https://zonebooks.org/books/174-discounting-the-future

• David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House, 2011) — https://www.mhpbooks.com/books/debt/

• Mitchum Huehls, After Critique: Twenty-First-Century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age (Oxford UP, 2016) https://global.oup.com/academic/product/after-critique-9780190456221

• Luc Boltanski, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation (Polity, 2011) — https://www.wiley.com/en-us/On+Critique%3A+A+Sociology+of+Emancipation-p-9780745649665

• William A. Fischel, The Homevoter Hypothesis (Harvard UP, 2001) — https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674015951

• Jason Wozniak & Frances Negrón-Muntaner — https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article/124/3/606/400119/Indebting-Children-Context-Consequences-and

• Carissa Véliz, Prophecy — https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/759692/prophecy-by-carissa-veliz/

• David I. Backer’s own writing on Carmel Clay ISD (Indiana) and the extravagance-of-debt argument. → https://davidibacker.com/

Resources!

Budget/governance issues from Spring 2026

• FY24 audit flags enrollment overestimate
• Whoops, mistaken carryover cuts into fund balance
• FY27 budget projects a $2m deficit
• A spreadsheet error (budgeting in Excel) adds 800k to deficit.
• Two of five board members resign May 2026
• 
  

State Funding Stuff

• Technical overview
• Citizen's guide
• The state Permanent Fund
• Permanent Fund's ERA running low?
• Political battle about funding dividends or services
• Alaska Municipal Bond Bank Authority (AMBBA)

Secure Rural Schools Funding

• Sitka Assembly gives schools 100% of retroactive payments
• SRS lapse and restoration coverage

Thank yous!

• Soumya Dhulekar for the artwork!
• Carsie Blanton for the music!
• Gabbie Costanzo for the additional research!

We look at a district where the annual budget seems to be in pretty good shape -- but where bigger issues around district consolidation, building closures, and state-level policy changes are stirring underfoot.

What consolidations/closures/mergers, you ask?

• In response to VT's Act 46, ACSD was initially formed only a decade ago.
• But there was a problem in the initial Articles of Agreement that formed the district: closure decisions would be left to the board alone.
• Ripton, one of the towns in the district, worried that the board would close their school, so they voted to withdraw from the district in 2021
• The state board and the legislature intervened, worried Ription couldn't operate independently, and Ripton rejoined the district in 2022 -- but amending the Articles of Agreement to require town votes, not just board votes, for future closures.
• And then the board did vote to close Ripton in 2025, and a town vote ratified it.
• ACSD's facility plan makes it sound as though other schools (Cornwall and/or Weybridge) might also close.

Why all this pressure?

2024 tax revolt opposing large property-tax hikes

Vermont Act 73, reforming school funding (explainer here)

Statewide consolidation pressure

VT suspended state aid for construction in 2007, creating a massive backlog.

As always, thanks to

• Carsie Blanton for the music
• Soumya Dhulekar for the artwork
• Gabbie Costanzo for the research help

In this episode, we talk school district boundaries, funding mechanisms, and structural challenges, using Williamson County and Franklin Special District in Tennessee as case studies. We dissect how historical laws, political decisions, and financial strategies shape educational access and equity.

• How district boundary drawing impacts racial and economic segregation
• The financial interplay between county and special districts, including taxation authority and borrowing power
• The implications of district borrowing, debt, and capital expenditures on educational budgets
• The effects of state funding formulas and incentive structures on district spending
• The role of demographic shifts, enrollment changes, and austerity measures in budget planning
• The importance of participatory budgeting and community involvement in fiscal decision-making
• Ethical considerations in resource allocation and the politics of school finance

Thank you to Soumya Dhulekar for the artwork
Thank you to Carsie Blanton for the music
Thank you to Gabbie Costanzo for the research help

LINKS

• The Color of Property by David Freund
• Williamson County School District Official Website
• Franklin Special School District
• John Rawls' Theory of Justice
• Participatory Budgeting Resources
• Trade Movies Podcast

Hickman Mills C-1 is facing a triple whammy: Property assessment issues, evaporating ESSR funding, and an adverse audit finding. What's going on?

Some resources!

District website

NCES CCD demographics
ACS 2024-2025 profile

Audit and budget info (present and past)
MSBA EMMA
2026 Ballot results (and upcoming info)

State/Federal regulations

Milliken v. Bradley: 418 U.S. 717 (1974)

Missouri v. Jenkins: 515 U.S. 70 (1995)
Missouri DESE School Finance page
Hancock amendment
MO voting to get rid of income tax?

Property assessment/tax incentive coverage
Jackson County assessor's office
News coverage of property tax rollback
KCUR story on the local history of district boundaries
The Cerner project, article 1 and article 2
News coverage of superintendent transition
Thank you to Soumya Dhulekar for the artwork!
Thank you to Carsie Blanton for the music!
Thank you to Gabbie Costanzo for the research help!

Allow ourselves to introduce... ourselves.