For schoolteachers, bus drivers, and other education support professionals, it’s back to school time. But the organizations we pay attention to and sometimes work with have been busy all summer long. Here’s a brief sampling of some recent news and research from organizations doing good work.

Local Progress Impact Lab and the Congressional Progressive Caucus Center issued the policy brief Cash for Communities: Leveraging Historic Federal Funds for Racial, Economic, and Climate Justice. The brief“provides strategies for channeling funding from the IRA’s Direct Pay tax credits toward climate-friendly infrastructure projects and recommends building publicly owned energy resources, encouraging state legislators to provide up-front funding for climate projects, and creating grant funds, revolving loan funds, and technical assistance programs for communities in need.”

On Labor Day, the Impact Lab also released a new resource with Terri Gerstein, Director of the NYU Wagner Labor Initiative, How Local Government Can Stand Up for Workers When States Try to Stand in Their Way, that outlines concrete opportunities for local governments to protect workers

Want to know how Wall Street fuels the climate crisis?  The Public Accountability Initiative – known more broadly as LittleSis – a nonprofit public interest research organization focused on corporate and government accountability (think Big Brother, but the opposite) has you covered. Its recently-created Fossil Fuels Finance Hub, a microsite of LittleSis, Rainforest Action Network, Private Equity Climate Risks, and Vanguard SOS, allows you to plug into ongoing campaigns resisting fossil finance and locate tools and resources so you can research Wall Street actors.

For a look at what’s new among state legislatures, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) offers  Five Tax Takeaways from 2024 State Legislative Sessions. “State lawmakers across the country navigated budget challenges and slowing revenue growth in 2024”, according to ITEP. “This challenge was made worse by the winding down of temporary federal pandemic aid, coinciding with deep, permanent tax cuts. The impact of those tax cuts becomes clearer as they weigh on the ability of places like Arizona and Ohio to fund crucial public services.”

An issue brief from the Center for American Progress “provides new analysis of economic trends and federal revenues that explain how the Trump tax cuts’ low revenues make it difficult for the country to invest in people and their neighborhoods.”

“The tax legislation that President Donald Trump signed in December 2017,” it concludes, “significantly reduced federal revenues, with the largest tax cuts going to the richest Americans.

Good Jobs First, whose report on cyber charter schools we recently highlighted, has a variety of databases of government financial incentives for business and corporate misconduct that starts out as a bit entertaining and ends enraging. The organization’s trackers track subsidies, tax breaks, and various legal violations of well-known corporations in the U.S. and UK, plus a tracker devoted just to public subsidies of Amazon and a Covid Stimulus Watch.

And then there’s the feel-good story of Worcester, MA, and its school transportation needs, which were finally filled with the help of the teachers’ union. The district brought its transportation in house and was able to fill all available positions—with bus drivers who are now city employees—and members of the teachers’ union–with full time pay, health insurance, and retirement benefits. “I’m going to greet them with a smile and I’m going to make their day,” says bus driver Howard Connerly.

Now is also a good time to remind readers of the invaluable services provided by education support professionals, which In the Public Interest highlighted in the report we issued at the beginning of last year’s school year, School Support Services Outsourcing: The Original Privatization of Education. Let’s hope the Worcester experience is the beginning of a nationwide insourcing trend toward making and keeping such important roles in-house.