Mark Zuckerberg’s Newark schools cash drop: “Everybody got paid but Raheem still can’t read”
Four lessons we learned about educational reform and Facebook philanthropy from an epic New Yorker article
TOPICS: MARK ZUCKERBERG, FACEBOOK, PHILANTHROPY, NEWARK, CHRIS CHRISTIE, CORY BOOKER,EDUCATIONAL REFORM, CHARTER SCHOOLS, TECHNOLOGY NEWS, BUSINESS NEWS
So what happened to the $100 million that Mark Zuckerberg pledged four years ago to support New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s ambitious effort to “fix” the Newark public school system?
The short answer: The money has been spent, mostly on labor contracts and consultant fees, and the Newark school district is still a disaster zone.
The long answer is contained in Dale Russakoff’s epic investigative report in the New Yorker“Schooled. Published the day before a Newark mayoral election that will choose between representatives of the teachers unions and the educational reform movement, Russakoff’s piece is a fascinating deep dive into the complexities of achieving reform in one of the worst-performing school districts in the country. It’s a story about charter schools, political ambition, race and poverty. It’s a story about a problem without an easy solution.
Both Booker and Christie come out looking less than spectacular, as they abandon Newark to focus on their own political careers. (Booker is now a senator and Christie wants to be president.) But what about Zuckerberg? What can we learn from his first major foray into philanthropy?
No. 1: An awful lot of money went to people who weren’t directly involved with teaching kids in Newark:
During the next two years, more than twenty million dollars of Zuckerberg’s gift and matching donations went to consulting firms with various specialties: public relations, human resources, communications, data analysis, teacher evaluation. Many of the consultants had worked for Joel Klein, Teach for America, and other programs in the tight-knit reform movement, and a number of them had contracts with several school systems financed by Race to the Top grants and venture philanthropy. The going rate for individual consultants in Newark was a thousand dollars a day. Vivian Cox Fraser, the president of the Urban League of Essex County, observed, “Everybody’s getting paid, but Raheem still can’t read.”
No. 2: It’s seems safe to say that the interest in educational reform expressed by Mark Mark Zuckerberg’s Newark schools cash drop: “Everybody got paid but Raheem still can’t read” - Salon.com: