“If you want to know why teachers are being laid off in California (even if teaching has remained one of the most secure jobs nationwide) you might want to check out this new $578 million high school in LA Unified School District. As we’ve written before on JPGB, buildings don’t teach kids, people do. Given the way school districts squander their resources, maybe they’ll soon need another $26 billion in Edujobs from Congress (read: taxpayers).” — Jay P. Greene, Professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas
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The other fun thing is they built two other mega high schools for another $500M. They dropped over $1B for a grand total of three high schools. For that kind of coin, they could have built the Trump Tower and had a couple hundred million left for a NBA-class basketball arena and a major-college level football stadium for the athletic department.
Also, the Trump Tower would have been cheaper than these three high schools in terms of total square feet.
I actually voted yes on that stupid bond measure, figuring the money was going to fix up crappy high school buildings and do seismic retrofit - as the measure stated. If I’d known it was going anywhere near “world-class architects”, it would have been an automatic “no”.