SACRAMENTO — The Los Angeles Unified School District, the state’s biggest and second-largest in the nation with more than 700,000 students, overpaid employees by $53 million, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. That will come as no surprise in a mammoth district, with a budget of more than $11 billion, know for incompetence and corruption. In a surprise move that should prove instructive to state policy makers, the LAUSD wants the employees to give the money back.

The district dished out the excess $53 million to some 36,000 employees. At the same time, the LAUSD underpaid other employees, or failed to pay some at all. Those who were overpaid have until December 10 to decide whether to pay back the money or fight the district.

The problem, according to some district officials, stems from a massive technology upgrade costing nearly $100 million. Apparently this computer program, though expensive, is not very good at math with it comes to paying the staff. Of course, no accounting program operates by itself. Some human being had to decided the amount of the checks, like the one for a full month’s pay that second-grade teacher Genie Penn received while she was on leave. She evidently decided to keep it, no questions asked. The district now wants $9,000 back but Penn wonders how the district arrived at that figure, which she thinks is wrong. Others are in the same boat, and if they fight and the district is proved correct, they could land in tax trouble. The district has trained 35 financial counselors and expects some 8,000 to avail themselves of the service.

“It’s just absurd. It’s mind boggling!” Penn told the Los Angeles Times. “But I guess when you work for LAUSD, nothing should surprise you.” That is certainly true.

This is the district that poured more than $200 million, by some accounts much more, into the Belmont Learning Center, the most expensive high school in history, but which had to be demolished. The place educated no students but many adults made money on the project.

Education is California’s biggest expenditure but before the money reaches the classroom, it must trickle down through multiple layers of bureaucratic sediment. The money the LAUSD spent on financial counselors may help rectify bureaucratic mistakes but it will not educate children.

The California Department of Education and State Superintendent of Public Instruction are supposed to have an oversight function, but they failed prevent any of the LAUSD’s prodigious waste. The state education bureaucracy is just as unaccountable. As PRI has documented CDE officials are on record that they have no idea where the money goes for some categorical programs. Nobody at the CDE seems eager to find out, but this much is certain. The money will keep flowing and nobody will be disciplined or fired. The results in the classroom will continue to disappoint, more evidence that public schools are not only Not As Good as You Think, as the recent PRI education book put it, but worse than they think.

State Senator Gloria Romero is on record that “The LAUSD bureaucracy is failing our children, and it’s time for fundamental change. It is possible to improve student achievement and cut the dropout rate, but only if we shake up the bureaucracy and move resources straight to the classroom.”

It’s hard to see how any kind of “fundamental change” will happen in the current culture of waste, incompetence, an unaccountability. Paying the staff, after all, is a simpler task than educating children, but the LAUSD can’t even get that right. As a result, many parents would prefer to send their children elsewhere. Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a former Assembly Speaker, chooses to send his own children to private, parochial schools. So do many public-school teachers, while opposing the right of low-income parents to do likewise.

Until California implements full parental choice in education, as a matter of basic civil rights, the waste, fraud and failure will continue in the LAUSD and statewide.