LOS ANGELES, CA - "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.

"These results" is a reference to the Belmont Learning Center, a $200 million high school, the most expensive in history, that turns out to be unusable. It seems they built it on an old oil field so it’s unsafe for students and will never be occupied. But for those who made piles of money on it, Belmont is a huge success. It has also given policymakers insight into how the educational system really works. Though called "public," it’s really a for-profit system, driven by greed, in which children are simply the vehicle to keep the money flowing and key players work both sides of the table.

For example, as a school-site analyst for the California Department of Education, Betty Hansonapproved the Belmont site as suitable for a campus. Then she went on to perform lucrative work as a consultant on the very project she approved.

Likewise, Belmont architect Ernesto Vasquez started as an evaluator of those competing to build the school. Then he conveniently joined one of three competing teams as its architect. Surprisingly, the outfit he joined got the project. What a cozy world. This type of activity exists on a massive scale at the state level, where officials make it all possible by blaming failure on a lack of spending.

They say we are spending $6,025 per student per year, but carefully exclude federal money, which brings the figure to $7,535, with many districts spending more. Los Angeles spends $9,028 per student but has little to show for it in terms of achievement. Belmont simply took the waste and failure to new heights.

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. As the U.S. Department of Justice knows, 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. That’s how it should be for all.

Besides being wasteful and corrupt, 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 be handed a stake and sledgehammer of their own.

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. Before they cast their vote, Californians should decide whether they want to give even more money to a system that spent $200 million on a learning center where no learning will take place.

--K. Lloyd Billingsley