IN EDUCATION, NOTHING SUCCEEDS LIKE FAILURE – AT 11:13 A.M. ET:  Next time someone appears on television weepin' and wailin' over "underfunding" in American education, please remember this story, about Los Angeles, from The Wall Street Journal:

At $578 million—or about $140,000 per student—the 24-acre Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex in mid-Wilshire is the most expensive school ever constructed in U.S. history. To put the price in context, this city's Staples sports and entertainment center cost $375 million. To put it in a more important context, the school district is currently running a $640 million deficit and has had to lay off 3,000 teachers in the last two years. It also has one of the lowest graduation rates in the country and some of the worst test scores.

The K-12 complex isn't merely an overwrought paean to the nation's most celebrated liberal political family. It's a jarring reminder that money doesn't guarantee success—though it certainly beautifies failure.

And...

Set to open Sept. 13, the school boasts an auditorium whose starry ceiling and garish entrance are modeled after the old Cocoanut Grove nightclub and a library whose round, vaulted ceilings and cavernous center resemble the ballroom where Kennedy made his last speech. It also includes the original Cocoanut Grove canopy around which the rest of the school was built. "It wasn't cheap, but it was saved," says Thomas Rubin, a consultant for the district's bond oversight committee, which oversees the $20 billion of bonds that taxpayers approved for school construction in recent years.

Can't you see the positive effect of this on math scores?

Talking benches—$54,000—play a three-hour audio of the site's history. Murals and other public art cost $1.3 million. A minipark facing a bustling Wilshire Boulevard? $4.9 million.

The Kennedy complex is Exhibit A in the district's profligate 131-school building binge. Exhibit B is the district's Visual and Performing Arts High School, which was originally budgeted at $70 million but was later upgraded into a sci-fi architectural masterpiece that cost $232 million.

Even more striking is Exhibit C, the Edward Roybal Learning Center in the Westlake area, which was budgeted at $110 million until costs skyrocketed midway through construction when contractors discovered underground methane gas and a fault line. Eventual cost: $377 million.

Remember, it's for the children, it's for the children.  Don't ask any questions.

The Roybal center now ranks in the bottom third of schools with similar demographics on state tests...

Congratulations!  Hey, it's better than the bottom ten percent.

But even though many Roybal kids can't read or do math, at least they have a dance studio with cushioned maple floors and a kitchen with a restaurant-quality pizza oven.

For the kids, for the kids.

Expect more such over-the-top and inefficient building projects in the future. Los Angeles voters have approved over $20 billion of bonds since 1997 and state voters have chipped in another $4.4 billion of matching funds. Roughly a third of the cost of the Kennedy complex will be shouldered by state taxpayers.

COMMENT:  And that, of course, is the heart of the problem.  It's OPM – other people's money.  I guarantee you that if the families of the kids attending these schools had been given a three percent hike in taxes to pay for them, the pizza oven would have never been ordered.  Let 'em eat cake!

Education in America isn't underfunded.  It's overfunded.  And when is someone going to start questioning the vast cost of sending a kid to college?  Oh, but we must not ask.  It's for the...you know.

September 6, 2010      Permalink