Like most doctoral students, when I got to grad school, I didn’t know what I wanted to focus on for my dissertation. I had an odd set of interests. As an undergraduate I’d studied philosophy of mathematics, focusing on set theory and mathematical logic, but I loved teaching. After graduation, I became a high school teacher and worked in Latin America during the Pink Tide of 21st century socialism, where, after the financial crisis of 2008, practical critiques of and alternatives to capitalism were in the air. 

By the time I got to TC’s program in philosophy and education in 2010 I wanted to somehow mix schooling, numbers, and critical theory into a project drawing from these experiences. But I couldn’t wrangle the disparate themes together. By 2011, at the start of my second year in the program, Occupy Wall Street burst forth and I was swept up in the movement moment, whose critical approach to wonky numbers was epitomized in the slogan “we are the 99%!” and its critiques of derivative markets.

The ingredients for a project focusing on education, numbers, and social theory were there but I still couldn’t cook them up into something. I wanted to use the imaginative and transformative power of philosophy to activate the nitty gritty of numbers and their social power in education. I decided to go down a different path for my dissertation. It wasn’t until three years or so later, at my first tenure track job, working with education justice movements in Philadelphia demanding more money for dilapidated school buildings, that I realized I had no idea how school money worked. I was a professor of education focusing on policy and I couldn’t explain to myself or others how to follow a dollar from beginning to end when it comes to the very brick and mortar of our school buildings. This question consumed me, and I began studying school infrastructure finance from a Marxist and critical perspective, orienting my writing towards organizers and activists on the ground in Philadelphia though a public newsletter and blog. 

I’d finally found the constellation of themes to train my interests in critical theory, numbers and education in the form of school finance. After six years, I put my public writings together into a book that just came out called As Public As Possible: Radical Finance for America’s Schools. Through this book and other work I’ve tried to establish philosophy as a viable disciplinary path to contributing to school finance, and critical theory writ-large as a novel framework for insights therein. I even taught a summer seminar in 2025 at TC in my old program on this subject, called Critical School Finance, bringing critical theory as a set of tools to bear on school finance. The unlikely combination, which I’d had such difficulty rendering into a dissertation, has ended up being a powerful project. That’s why I try to be explicit in interviews and writings around the book that I’m a philosopher of education, and TC’s program provided a uniquely ecumenical, practical, and expansive sort of philosophical training to make this contribution.