The Most Expensive School in the Known Universe
Around here school-board levies are a chance for the citizens to show they’re good, caring people: if it’s for kids or education, there can’t be any possible reason why you’d oppose it, unless you want them shivering in underheated rooms with pails on the floor collecting water from the leaky roofs, reading textbooks so outdated the US only has 48 states and the alphabet stops at Y. If you raise a peep about the non-teaching portion of the education budget - the bureaucrats, administrators, the junior undersecretary assistants to the senior oversecretaries - you get rolled eyes and huffed-up retorts about large class sizes and poor grades in certain schools, things which money is always expected to solve. Pour in enough money, and grades will surely rise.
If that’s so, then this school in LA should produce an endless string of Einsteins.
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.
At some point they were discussing building benches for students to sit, and someone said: haven’t we had enough benches that do nothing but provide a flat surface? Isn’t it time the benches assumed a pedagogical purpose so long confined to the classroom? And so:
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.
I am a peripatetic sort, so the idea of sitting on a bench for a lecture whose duration exceeds the entire “Longest Day” movie does not appeal, but what’s $54K when the budget is over half a billion dollars?
Last summer when I went home to Fargo I stopped off at my old elementary school, a post-war structure whose construction cost was probably less than the cost of the garrulous benches. Cinderblock, brick, glass-block windows, minimalist architecture, with bright ceramic tiles around the drinking fountains for a splash of color. It was a rational space-age machine, designed for clear modern instruction - no classical details, no motto engraved over the door. Millions of kids across the country in the 50s and 60s moved through schools like these, and learned the basics: math, history, the exports of Peru (Zinc, llama wool) and the names of the oceans.
The high school was a bit more expensive, built in the early 70s, but the city saved money by using the plans twice: one on the North Side, one on the South Side. (North Dakotans being practical people, they were named North High and South High.) (They replaced Central High.) The quality of instruction was tremendous, and if you were inclined to listen, a good education could be had. Looking back, though, I see I was deprived:
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.
Mr. Rubin admits that the Roybal Center project was "a tremendous screw-up" that "should have been studied closer beforehand." The project was abandoned for several years, only to be recommenced when community activists demanded that the school be built at whatever cost necessary in order to show respect for the neighborhood's Latino children, many of whom were attending an overcrowded Belmont High School.
The Roybal center now ranks in the bottom third of schools with similar demographics on state tests, while Belmont High ranks in the top third. 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.
Well, that won’t last long, I’m sure; all that money will bring up test scores eventually. It has to, right? That’s the only thing that matters. Perhaps if they just took raw cash and rubbed it directly on the students’ foreheads, it would work even faster.
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Jul '10
Re: The Most Expensive School in the Known Universe
The problem with test scores is that they don't test for the right knowledge.
Sure, our kids don't know math or science or history or geography, but who cares about that old stuff?
They do know about Harriet Taubman and America's shameful Imperialist past and our squalid history of racism and how we dropped the atom bomb on blameless Japan and how sexism and racism are still rampant...
Just get rid of the old, racist test criteria and you'll see how brilliant our educational system really is.
May '10
Re: The Most Expensive School in the Known Universe
James, your example of your old school in Fargo really rings true with me. Maybe it's time to slash public schools' funding to the point that they appreciate the value of $54K and learn to do something useful with it.
Here's what $54K is: it could mean central heating and air for my son's charter school building. It could help plug a large budget gap caused by our state's intentional and cruel underfunding of public charter schools. It could mean a start on a school library or a decent computer lab. It could mean increasing our teachers' salaries closer to parity with their counterparts at neighboring public schools.
What do public schools do with $54K these days? They install talking benches, build putting greens for their golf teams, or install field turf in their athletic arenas. I refuse to listen politely to public schools' cries of poverty as long as frivolous expenditures like these continue. Frankly, the whole thing makes me sick.
May '10
Re: The Most Expensive School in the Known Universe
May '10
Re: The Most Expensive School in the Known Universe
Jun '10
Re: The Most Expensive School in the Known Universe
I live in Utah, which has by far the lowest per pupil spending in the nation. Mormons, including me, have lots of kids and our legislature is not a subsidiary of the teacher's unions. Our spending is a little more than half the average and about one-third of the highest states.
Yet we have good schools and Utah's test scores are consistently in the upper half.
How can this happen? Careful spending on the right things, strong parental involvement in the classroom and at home, etc., etc.
Just throwing money at a problem never solves it.
Aug '10
Re: The Most Expensive School in the Known Universe
Yeah.
Having found that it's perfectly possible to pass an AP science exam by borrowing a teacher's old college textbooks and meeting with her once a week after classes, I'm amazed about how much money public school systems say they need to "educate", particularly for science.
There's rarely a real need for the latest, say, textbooks, especially below college level. And if an old, say, biology textbook is just missing a section or two on some newer, vital topics like mitochondrial DNA, how hard is it to supplement that with photocopied notes, etc, if that's cheaper than getting new books?
A gifted and dedicated high-school biology teacher I knew once wanted to teach AP Bio and had a classworth's of students ready to learn it. They coordinated their schedules and he offered to provide all instruction materials on his own dime. He was still refused by the administrators.
May '10
Re: The Most Expensive School in the Known Universe
Midget Faded Rattlesnake
A gifted and dedicated high-school biology teacher I knew once wanted to teach AP Bio and had a classworth's of students ready to learn it. They coordinated their schedules and he offered to provide all instruction materials on his own dime. He was still refused by the administrators. · Sep 5 at 1:59pm
Grrr. That's where parent involvement is crucial because we don't depend on the system for our salaries. They can't fire us and they can't make us go away.
May '10
Re: The Most Expensive School in the Known Universe
I look first to the teachers unions and administrators. For teachers unions, schools are not primarily educational institutions - they are jobs programs. For schools administrators, schools are primarily construction zones.
Jul '10
Re: The Most Expensive School in the Known Universe
This in L.A., California? Reminds me of the couple who knows bankruptcy is imminent and begins to max out the credit cars....
Re: The Most Expensive School in the Known Universe
My favorite article on the topic is from Lance Izumi, Pacific Research Institute's education guru. Read it and discover that overspending on gold-plated buildings is the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Consider the following gems:
" . . . when construction-related and other noncounted costs are included, the district's real per-pupil funding figure was $29,790."
"In January, the district's inspector general found that LAUSD paid $200 million in 2009 to 1,700 employees no longer on the job."
And speaking of textbooks:
"In July, auditors found that unnecessary textbook purchases and other snafus cost the district nearly $10 million from 2008 to February 2010. In one case, half a million dollars worth of unused textbooks sat in a district warehouse for years. More frightening, the audit only sampled 21 high schools in the district. District high schools have an outdated and substandard textbook inventory system, while elementary schools have no system at all. One can only imagine the enormity of district-wide losses."
Read the entire article, but brace yourself.
Edited on Sep. 5 at 9:18pmSep '10
Re: The Most Expensive School in the Known Universe
In my red state, my daughter's middle school is photocopying handouts 4 to a page, at nearly microscopic size, to save money. Oh happy day! Thanks to the Federal government, I get to subsidize the educational palaces of profligate states at the same time as my children learn to squint through jewelers loops and fill in tiny handout blanks with cramped little sentences.
Jul '10
Re: The Most Expensive School in the Known Universe
As I have in other examples of government waste, I keep waiting for a story detailing the bureaucratic heads that rolled. Instead, as before, the guilty parties will be "transferred to other duties" or otherwise given a chance to screw up more before at last they begin to collect the munificent pensions Democratic legislatures have put over on the public.
May '10
Re: The Most Expensive School in the Known Universe
Diane
Midget Faded Rattlesnake
A gifted and dedicated high-school biology teacher I knew once wanted to teach AP Bio and had a classworth's of students ready to learn it. They coordinated their schedules and he offered to provide all instruction materials on his own dime. He was still refused by the administrators. · Sep 5 at 1:59pm
Grrr. That's where parent involvement is crucial because we don't depend on the system for our salaries. They can't fire us and they can't make us go away. · Sep 5 at 2:26pm
Of course, there is always a way if you are determined enough. Borrow a Sunday School classroom from a local church, schedule class for 5:00, tell students when and where, and blow the rest of the school away. Sometimes you can't get the locally-union-owned schools to do anything.
In Minnesota, we are lucky- our post-secondary-educational-options (PSEO) program lets students in good standing take classes at local colleges instead of high schools. My kids both went through community colleges for two years before graduating from HS, all I needed to do was provide transportation.