May 17, 2006

California Gubernatorial Candidate Angelides says Education is Underfunded (at $18,000 per Student!)

I saw a TV ad last night for gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides, in which he claimed that education is underfunded. (Here's a link to an article quoting him saying the same thing.) Let me explain what blatant nonsense it is for him to say that.

LAUSD (the Los Angeles Unified School District) has over 710,000 students, and an annual budget that was $13.4 billion -- that's billion with a "b" -- in 2004. This translates into well over $18,000 -- per student -- per year!

When an answer was demanded, from School Board Member Julie Korenstein, as to why this astonishing amount was being spent per student per year by the LAUSD, she claimed that $11,000 per student was being spent on new school buildings. $11,000 per student is $7.8 billion. Evidently she's claiming that $7.8 billion per year is being spent each and every year on new school buildings -- because by law the LAUSD budget can never go down from one year to the next!

Angelides is working a scam. He wants the support of the Teacher's Union and he's bribing them with a promise of more money. There's no shortfall in education funding. There is a massive, absurd, overbudgeting in education funding. Clark Baker has observed that with a system of vouchers, schools would be able to chase that $18,000 per student by offering better service; Baker suggests that if vouchers were only $9,000 per student, a school with a mere 100 students would have a more-than-adequate budget of $900,000 per year.

A similar system is being used successfully in San Francisco right now.

I'd like to see an accounting of where that $18,000 per student per year is going, because I doubt that it is going to educating the kids. There appears to be a giant ripoff of the people of Los Angeles going on, on the part of the LAUSD.