December 22, 2008 10:12AM # I’m So Poor I Can Barely Fire My Raku Pottery! By [Neal McCluskey](https://www.cato.org/people/neal-mccluskey) --- SHARE ![]()With L.A. school officials constantly complaining about [funding shortfalls](http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/LAUSD-Budget-Woes.html), the State of California seemingly in [perpetual financial crisis](http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/politics/2008/12/19/with-shortfall-mounting-california-budget-deal-is-stymied-again.html), and [federal lawmakers ](http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/05/07/36facilities.h27.html?qs=Alyson_Klein+school+construction)assuming that school districts have poor facilities due to lack of funds, [this little number ](http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-me-arts22-2008dec22,0,5883272.story?track=rss)really makes you think: Does any district really need a $232 million art-school building equipped with, among other things, “floor-to-ceiling windows with motorized blackout shades.…an outdoor atrium for firing Japanese raku pottery” and “a conical library whose dazzling interior swirls upward to an off-center skylight”? Probably not, and it really makes it hard to keep tolerating the incessant public-schooling complaints about woeful underfunding. Neither the broad data (see [Indicator B1](http://www.oecd.org/document/9/0,3343,en_2649_39263238_41266761_1_1_1_1,00.html)), nor such anecdotal evidence as the far-too-mundanely named Central High School No. 9, support the claim. ##### Related Tags [Education](https://www.cato.org/education), [Center for Educational Freedom](https://www.cato.org/center-educational-freedom) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).