Daniel Wood:

A football-field-sized lawn – lined with walks and trees – stretches from the street to a five-story, glass-front building in this otherwise scruffy neighborhood just west of downtown skyscrapers.
On the site of the Ambassador Hotel, known as the site of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1968, now sprawl 23 acres of elementary, middle and high school buildings which will serve the poorest, most congested, and diverse district of America’s second-largest school system.
It’s price tag of $578 million makes it the most expensive public school in American history and an easy target of criticism. The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has laid off 3,000 teachers in the past two years and is cutting academic programs this year to close a $640 million budget gap.

Christina Hoag:

Next month’s opening of the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools will be auspicious for a reason other than its both storied and infamous history as the former Ambassador Hotel, where the Democratic presidential contender was assassinated in 1968. With an eye-popping price tag of $578 million, it will mark the inauguration of the nation’s most expensive public school ever.
The K-12 complex to house 4,200 students has raised eyebrows across the country as the creme de la creme of “Taj Mahal” schools, $100 million-plus campuses boasting both architectural panache and deluxe amenities.
“There’s no more of the old, windowless cinderblock schools of the ’70s where kids felt, ‘Oh, back to jail,'” said Joe Agron, editor-in-chief of American School & University, a school construction journal. “Districts want a showpiece for the community, a really impressive environment for learning.”
Not everyone is similarly enthusiastic.

Deborah Simmons:

D.C. schools open their doors Monday morning for the start of a new year, and charter parents and advocates say a new problem is compounding an old one.
This school year, the D.C. Healthy Schools Act mandating new feeding and physical-education policies takes effect. But charter schools are scrambling to meet some requirements of the new law, which says schools must feed students locally produced fruits and vegetables and offer students overall healthier meals. The act also raises the bar on physical fitness.
“The majority of charter schools are going in commercial buildings,” said Robert Cane, executive director of the advocacy group Friends of Choice in Urban Schools. (FOCUS). “We support good food and exercise, but charter schools have scrambled to meet requirements.”
Charter and traditional schools often lack cafeterias, and most charters lack green space for children to play or hold gym classes. Many don’t have a swimming pool, gymnasium, football field, tennis court or a track course.

Erik Gerding:

As usual, New Jersey leads the nation. Today, rather than Snooki showing the country a new level of reality t.v. debauchery, we have the Garden State itself becoming the first state of the union ever charged with violating federal securities laws.
According to the SEC release, New Jersey failed to disclose in 79 state bond offerings between 2001 and 2007 (totaling $26 billlion) that two public employee pension funds were underfunded. According to the SEC, the failure to disclose masked
the fact that New Jersey was unable to make contributions to [the pension funds] without raising taxes, cutting other services or otherwise affecting its budget. As a result, investors were not provided adequate information to evaluate the state’s ability to fund the pensions or assess their impact on the state’s financial condition.
Given that this post is about securities law from a securities law professor, I should note that Ma Gerding is a New Jersey state employee.
New Jersey is a special state in many ways, but my gut instincts tell me this SEC action is just the vanguard of a coming wave of state and municipal securities litigation. We have all the ingredients for an epidemic:
Start out with the dire budget situation of states and municipalities squeezed by the financial crisis.

Jay P. Greene

Enrollment at America’s leading universities has been increasing dramatically, rising nearly 15 percent between 1993 and 2007. But unlike almost every other growing industry, higher education has not become more efficient. Instead, universities now have more administrative employees and spend more on administration to educate each student. In short, universities are suffering from “administrative bloat,” expanding the resources devoted to administration significantly faster than spending on instruction, research and service.
Between 1993 and 2007, the number of full-time administrators per 100 students at America’s leading universities grew by 39 percent, while the number of employees engaged in teaching, research or service only grew by 18 percent. Inflation-adjusted spending on administration per student increased by 61 percent during the same period, while instructional spending per student rose 39 percent. Arizona State University, for example, increased the number of administrators per 100 students by 94 percent during this period while actually reducing the number of employees engaged in instruction, research and service by 2 percent. Nearly half of all full-time employees at Arizona State University are administrators.
A significant reason for the administrative bloat is that students pay only a small portion of administrative costs. The lion’s share of university resources comes from the federal and state governments, as well as private gifts and fees for non-educational services. The large and increasing rate of government subsidy for higher education facilitates administrative bloat by insulating students from the costs. Reducing government subsidies would do much to make universities more efficient.