SACRAMENTO, CA - The Golden State has given foreign observers new reason to regard California as the world’s largest outdoor insane asylum. Where else can you waste $200 million and in return get a one-year paid vacation plus a new job. That didn’t happen with a movie project gone bust or a huge military contract. Rather, it’s part of the concept that the state’s education woes can be solved by simply spending more money.

In Los Angeles, they built the Belmont Learning Center, the most expensive high school in history, at a cost of
$200 million. The trouble is, no learning will take place at the Center. The Los Angeles site, as it turns out, is an old oil field and the building cannot be made safe for students. But the project got approved and the school was built anyway, with one state official who approved it conveniently finding lucrative work as a consultant on the project. In classic style, the architect also worked both sides of the table.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District itself, the following five employees helped move the project along:
Diane Doi, deputy director of environmental health and safety; Beth Louargand, general manager of facilities;
Richard Lui, safety officer; Robert Niccum, director of real estate; and Susie Wong, director of the district’s
environmental health and safety branch. A sixth employee blamed for the disaster conveniently retired.

In the real world, those responsible for such a Chernobyl would be shown the door, perhaps with the aid
of a security guard. But in the never-never land of the education establishment, the employees were placed on
“paid administrative leave,” otherwise known as a paid vacation. They remained in that status from October
1999 to November 2000, at which time superintendent Roy Romer, the former governor of Colorado, announced that none of the employees deserved to be fired, and that they would all get, yes, new jobs. But as a number of
local taxpayers pointed out, the former governor was wrong.

All those employees deserved to be fired but weren’t because the education dreamworld long ago severed the
vital connection between actions and consequences. That is why it has become a vast collective farm of
ignorance, arrogance, and corruption, and why it will stay that way. Parents and students can leave it, of
course, but that presents a big problem.

Their tax money remains in the system. That would have changed, but the education establishment spent more
than $30 million to defeat the most recent school-choice measure. Had it passed, taxpaying parents would have been able, in effect, to fire the whole lot, from corrupt, windy bureaucrats through the curriculum quacks and politically-correct inquisitors, all the way down to semi-literate teachers who, despite their college degrees and education school credentials, need repeated tries to pass a 10th-grade competency test.

Until California establishes parental choice in education as a basic civil right, Californians will be stuck with a system that ranks them near the bottom of the 50 states, with little if any prospect for improvement. But as Belmont shows, the system remains effective for the transfer of wealth from working people to those who waste that wealth and get rewarded for their actions.

That’s California dreamin’, on such a winter’s day.

-K. Lloyd Billingsley