No learning will take place at the $200 million Belmont Learning Center but at least one official has taken a strategic lesson from the disaster.

“Our intention is to drive a stake through the heart of the culture that produced these results,” said Howard Miller, chief operating officer of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

That culture is the current educational establishment, a system that is failing at its appointed task, the education of California’s children. But it succeeds as a for the redistribution of wealth.

California students performe below the proficiency level on the National Assessment for Educational Progress math and reading exams. But in the Los Angeles Unified School District, as in many others, students get promoted whether or not they achieve passing grades.

Social promotion, on a massive scale, is one reason why 54 percent of freshmen in the California State University need remedial math and 47 percent remedial English. But not all advance even that far. The state Department of Education says the drop-out rate is 13 percent, but its really more than 30 percent. And at least 30 percent of California high-school students fail to graduate in a four-year period.

These and other indications of failure draw the same response from the state’s educational establishment. If only we spent more, they say, the problems would disappear.

State officials says we are spending $6025 per student per year, but carefully exclude federal money, which brings the figure to $7535, with many districts spending more. Los Angeles spends $9,028 per student but has little to show for it. Belmont simply took the waste and failure to new heights. But for those who made piles of money on the deal, the project is a huge success.

As a school-site analyst for the California Department of Education, Betty Hanson approved the Belmont site as suitable for a campus. Then she went on to work as a consultant on the project, on what turns out to be an unsafe and unusable site.

Likewise, Belmont architect Ernesto Vasquez started as an evaluator of the those competing to build the school. Then he conveniently joined one of three competing teams as its architect, and it was no surprise that this team was awarded the project. Working both sides of the table is not a local issue but how the entire system functions.

For example, John Mockler, executive director of the California State Board of Education, is the author of the 1988 Proposition 98, which made education the state’s biggest expenditure, currently more than $40 billion yearly. As a lobbyist, Mockler also represented a number of high-profile clients, including the Association of American Publishers and the Los Angeles Unified School District, the people who brought you the Belmont Learning Center.

Howard Miller’s call for accountability is well intentioned, but tinkering with the system will not do the job. As long as the system transfers billions in taxpayer dollars directly to an education establishment, corruption, waste, and parasitism will flourish. That establishment is a wasteful and corrupt monopoly providing a bad product at a high price. The solution to a monopoly is never to extend its powers but to dissolve it.

That can be accomplished by empowering students and parents instead of a bureaucracy. This is the pattern in higher education, and in successful programs such as the G.I. Bill. The state funded the students, and they picked the school.

The current bureaucratic system gives every indication of being unreformable and to have a stake driven through its heart is the only fate it deserves. Legislators of both parties have failed to show the necessary courage but Californians may soon have a stake and sledgehammer in hand.

Next year there will likely be two education initiatives on the ballot. One is backed by the education establishment and calls for increased spending. The other will empower parents through school-choice vouchers. Californians statewide would do well to remember the useless, $200 million Belmont Learning Center before casting their vote.

Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley is editorial director of the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco and the author of From Mainline to Sideline: The Social Witness of the National Council of Churches. He can be reached via email at klbillingsley@pacificresearch.org.