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15 Responses to "‘Some of the most expensive schools are found in low-performing districts’"

Phineas says:

August 23, 2010 at 6:28 pm

What you’re seeing here in LA (and in other big urban school districts) is the inevitable result when voters don’t pay attention to school board elections. Board members use them as stepping stones to higher office and pander to the teacher’s unions to till the soil for future donations. Meanwhile, they can point to a nice, shiny new temple…er… school and crow about all they’ve done for “the children.” (One of the Ultimate Moral Authority cards! Collect them all!) And yet, as a recent LA Times* series shows, for all the neat new buildings, the kids are still getting lousy teachers.

Great job, LAUSD!

*(And, yes, I really am shocked the liberal Times published that series. Great work on their part!)

EDIT: And just think what that $578 million could have done, just distributed over, say, the 50 worst schools in the district. But then the school board wouldn’t have this huge monument to itself.
Splendiferous says:

August 23, 2010 at 10:11 pm

Apparently these people have never heard of the adage “You don’t need a Cadillac to deliver newspapers”.
Carlos says:

August 23, 2010 at 10:45 pm

But y’all misunderstand the whole thing. It isn’t about getting the kids a top-flight education. We all want that.

What it’s about is making the teachers, administrators and school boards happy.

Ya see, just THINKING that it would be nice if the kids really did get an education is enough for lying progressives because it’s the THOUGHT that counts, not some foolish thing like hiring qualified teachers.

Sheesh. Get real.
Vatar says:

August 24, 2010 at 12:24 am

Off topic – CNN host says leadership in ‘sorry condition’ and inability to ‘protect the American consumer’ is ‘sufficient reason to impeach a president.’ … The “Lou Dobbs Tonight” host placed the blame for the recent salmonella outbreak squarely on President George W. Bush, calling for his impeachment on the June 19 broadcast.
6/20/2008
JRob says:

August 24, 2010 at 6:12 am

Actually, Sister, you just need to head down I-77 about 45 minutes to Fairfield County, South Carolina if you want to see a real nightmare. Most expenditures/student and almost worst in the state. That is because out school tax dollars pay for junkets to San Diego for BOARD MEMBERS, keeping incompetent, yet popular, teachers on the pay roll and having a revolving door at the superintendents office. Those are just the surface problems.
Zippy says:

August 24, 2010 at 7:43 am

While our school system ranked #3 in the state this year, there’s so much money being spent on schools that don’t even have a quarter of the graduates that we do. Money squandered? Turf fields in inner city schools that don’t even produce graduates. ugh. It makes me want to scream. My tax dollars are supposed to be effective, not merely make things look good.
Jo says:

August 24, 2010 at 8:05 am

Along with beautiful, ‘state of the art’ buildings, we in South Carolina area also funding that absurb, expensive, unnecessary TERI program where lousy teachers who are eventually promoted to administrators may retire, collect their full retirement benefits and return to ‘work’ making a full salary on top of it all. One such lousy former teacher turned millionaire TERI recipient bought a luxury beach home in Myrtle Beach for $350,000 in addition to his primary residence. But ‘it’s for the children’!!!!!
Will says:

August 24, 2010 at 8:27 am

It’ll be covered with grafitti inside a month.
Cato: The reality of money and jobs in public education | Radio Vice Online says:

August 24, 2010 at 8:54 am

[…] cost of more than $575 million. It’s been a hot topic in the alternate media here, here, here and […]
Zippy says:

August 24, 2010 at 9:23 am

@ Phineas: “…the school board wouldn’t have this huge monument unto itself.”

@ Carlos: “…because it’s the THOUGHT that counts.”

That about sums it all up. It’s not about quality it’s about appearances.
Tango says:

August 24, 2010 at 11:47 am

…the HS I attended in L.A. (in the 70s) was built during the depression (in the late 1920s). It was a combination of very old buildings and temporary Quonset Hut structures (temporary since the 1940s). Not a great facility – some crowding, lots of obsolete books and equipment.

Amazingly, though, almost all of my classmates and I graduated. Not only that, we knew how to read, write, do math, and had a basic understanding of US and World history.

Go figure! :d
Jon says:

August 24, 2010 at 2:19 pm

I see it as a colossal monument to memorialize a failed school system.
MissJean says:

August 24, 2010 at 7:13 pm

@JRob and Jo, I heard about the SC buildings this summer. A teacher who’s also a college instructor said she’d never seen such impressive school buildings, but wondered what the education was like.

@Phineas, you are so right about school boards. I teach at a Michigan public school that was built in 1963. It was remodeled just this summer after a millage renewal (NOT an increase). The school board has always hired superintendents who are careful with their money. Several years ago, teachers took a 10% paycut and there is NO longevity pay or increases for education beyond a master’s degree. We must justify every expenditure we make during the school year, and the custodial/bus garage staff have done amazing work at refurbishing everything from buses to pencil sharpeners. (Transfer students are often perplexed because some of them have never used anything but electric sharpeners.) We have a good graduation rate and a terrific track record for our graduates – not just in attending college but also in advancing in their military careers.

In contrast, one of my cousins works in New York state and told me about how hard it is to get concessions. Teachers get raises every time they take classes and it’s not unheard-of for a teacher to earn six figures! Meanwhile, some of the buildings are truly rundown.
TexasDoc says:

August 24, 2010 at 7:33 pm

Our entire school district budget is 10% of the cost of that high school, and yet they are on the state’s top 10 lists for academic achievement every year since 2000. And our taxes have not increased in three years and we have little or no labor troubles to speak of. Of course, LALAland will never know that kind of good management.
Intervention needed for barking mad California bureau-nuts | Thinklets says:

August 25, 2010 at 1:04 am

[…] and see if you can come up with a better explanation. A gaggle of California bureau-stoners are in charge of educating hundreds of thousands of kids. Fifty percent of them drop out, though. But that’s okay, […]

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