Business Boy Wonder faces steep learning curve in public education arena

To many, Mark Zuckerberg is the “Steve Jobs” to the millennial generation. Born in 1984, he launched Facebook in his Harvard dorm room before dropping out. He became a billionaire at age 23 and cemented the term “social network” in the global consciousness. Unlike Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg has embraced philanthropy early in his career. In 2013, alone, Zuckerberg and his wife donated almost one billion to charity. The following year, he donated $25 million to fight Ebola. He signed the Giving Pledge at age 26 and, like fellow billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, committed to donating at least half of his wealth.

Zuckerberg’s progress as philanthropist has not been without a steep learning curve. His 2010 donation to Newark public schools is illustrative of the challenges of large scale giving.

In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg appeared on Oprah to announce $100 million dollar donation to Newark Public Schools. He was flanked by Republican Governor Chris Christie and Democratic Mayor Cory Booker. to announce the donation. The funds would later be match by donations to exceed $200 million. Now, 5 years later, we have a sense of where those funds went and what effect they had on Newark Schools.

A clip of that announcement can be seen here:

http://tinyurl.com/zucknewark

Dale Russakoff new book “The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools?” looks at the Zuckerberg deal and the fallout. Of the committed amount of the $200 million, the money flow looked like this:

Labor and contract costs: $89.2 million

Charter Schools: $57.6 million

Consultants: $21 million

Various local initiatives: $24.6 million (Jackson, 2015)

Zuckerberg and Christie spent much of the money on renegotiating teacher contracts but that put them at odds with the union leaders. One article noted:

The union boss, Joe Del Grosso, demanded a ransom of $31 million to compensate for what he felt members should have received in previous years — before agreeing to discuss any labor reforms. The superintendent, Cami Anderson, demanded accountability from schools but set her own performance goals only after the academic year was largely over and relied on expensive consultants — whose total bill ultimately exceeded $20 million — without clear objectives long after she had promised to recruit a permanent leadership team. (Knee, 2015)

School choice led to schools closing or moving students further away from their home neighborhoods. Russakoff said:

“When a school is closed, children had to walk through very dangerous territory, sometimes through gang territory, through drug-dealing neighborhoods, and none of that was kind of vetted in advance to see what can we do for these kids to make sure they’re safe.”(Jackson, 2015)

Under final examination we also find that:

$20 million of Zuckerberg’s donation went to consultants who took care of management of the projects. While not technically a failure, this contributed to the poor optics of the plan.

Consultants were making $1,000 a day while the local teachers and administrators did not see any of the additional funds in merit pay that they were promised. (Jackson, 2015)

While the Zuckerberg donation led to many unintended consequences and demonstrated the dangers of trying to apply only business practices to public service, Zuckerberg has not been daunted and he continues to fund various initiatives through his foundation. With his engineering track record and his business brilliance, he might just get it right the next time around.