Trailer!

Welcome to the inaugural meeting.

Budget Committee! is a podcast about the least glamorous, most consequential
part of public education: the money. Each episode we take a listener’s school
district — a budget, a ballot question, a board fight — dig into the actual
documents, and try to figure out what's going on.

In this trailer

• How ~500 requests to “take a look at our school district” turned into a show
• Why school finance is “a weak link of American racial capitalism” — and what
  happens when you start pulling on district lines (it’s a bit like Jenga)
• The documents we live in: budgets, audits, bond filings, meeting recordings
• Why 13,000 districts each have their own story — but only a few real levers

Your hosts

• Dave Backer — philosopher of education and school-finance obsessive who
  started explaining district budgets on TikTok, then fielded hundreds of
  requests to “look at our schools.” Author of As Public As Possible: Radical
  Finance for America’s Schools
  (The New Press, 2025).
• Derek Gottlieb — a philosopher who backed into school finance when his own
  Milwaukee suburb started closing elementary schools, and the author of A
  Democratic Theory of Educational Accountability
  (Routledge, 2020).

Listen & subscribe

Find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — and get show notes
and the source documents in your inbox with the form below.

Got a budget worth a closer look? Send us a district, a ballot question, or a
board meeting and we’ll dig in.