This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, August 24th, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Spending on school construction routinely gets left out of per pupil spending figures,

and no locality makes that fact more meaningful than Los Angeles, which has spent

more than half a billion dollars on a single school project. Adam Schaefer

education policy analyst at the Cato Institute is author of They Spend What, the real

cost of public schools available at Cato.org.

There's a huge controversy in LA right now over a massively expensive and very large high school the Robert

F Kennedy Community School Center. The project is expanded in scope and it's cost

five hundred and some million dollars now it's at at a time when obviously

California's budgets are imploding and LA as well at the state and local level.

They're adding not only a huge facility

that will be expensive to upkeep,

but they're loading massive debt

in the form of bond initiatives

onto taxpayers in the future.

So this has really caught the attention of, I think,

taxpayers across the country and really focused attention

on something that most people don't understand,

which is that all expenses in in public

schools are not counted in per people spending figures. They leave out these

massive building projects this five hundred and $518 million project will not be counted in the official

...