
Mark Zuckerberg and his wife to donate $120M to needy Bay Area schools - fredkelly
http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_25862641/mark-zuckerberg-and-his-wife-donate-120-million
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L_Rahman
In light of this announcement, it's worth reading the New Yorker's fantastic
piece exploring how Zuckerberg's previous $100 million investment into the
Newark public school fared.

[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_russakoff?currentPage=all)

~~~
sytelus
I'd some 2nd hand experience of how inefficient US school system is. Lots of
districts and school actually have _huge_ budgets. Some in fact have more
budgets than entire state of a 3rd world country. The way this goes is, people
in charge would cry about not having money. Then they would get chunk of
money. And then those people would come up with ideas such as free
distribution of iPads to everyone, go to conferences all over, hire speakers
that charge $20K for speaking fees, build stupid websites that no one cares to
use, fly over consultants to brainstorm education models, hire programmers to
build useless school specific apps, and so on. Soon enough money would be all
gone and then cycle repeats. Actual students hardly ever gets benefit from
this drama and they may continue suffering bad cafeteria food or inadequate
science lab.

I guess inner city schools probably are in need of money and improving
facilities but for many others more money is not a solution.

~~~
aianus
When I was a senior in High School in Toronto in 2009, our school had recently
purchased a pallet of brand new $100+ calculus textbooks. The up-to-date
textbooks were chock-full of politically correct pictures of minority students
doing math in wheelchairs by typing equations into their latest-gen $200 Texas
Instruments graphing calculators. On the other hand, they were missing topics
such as integration entirely since they had been removed in recent versions of
the Ontario math curriculum.

My math teacher, however, handed out the same tattered calculus books students
had been using since the 1980's and forbid the use of calculators on all tests
or exams. We learned math by proving theorems and solving word problems
involving few, if any, numbers. I went on to study math in university and
freshman honors calculus was a cakewalk compared to Mr. Sidhu's twelfth grade
calculus and vectors class and his 30 year old textbooks.

I fail to see how any amount of money could improve education unless it's
spent on hiring better teachers (which the unions would never allow). You
really don't need much besides a chalkboard, a copier, and a high-quality,
engaged teacher.

~~~
L_Rahman
Absolutely. I went to high school in Bangladesh. Our school was barely
equipped for internet and many students didn't have them at home. Textbook,
teacher and homework. That was it. No calculators.

Started college in America with a better calculus background than most of my
engineering peers.

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fdsary
From a Scandinavian point of view this seems like such a detour. Why wait for
billionaires to be so kind of fund schools when you could tax wealth and fund
public and universal education? Why do the American people chose this way time
after time?

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alandarev
Why such a huge accent put on taxing wealthy people?

Large portion of tax already goes into public education. Money is never
enough, thus someone donating more money to education never hurts. But I fail
to see connection between 'if we need more money, tax all those wealthy
citizens'.

~~~
fdsary
If you have a tax %, the wealthiest will automatically give more money but it
will still be proportionally.

Also, not having too rich and too poor people is a goal in itself - to move
wealth from rich to poor creates a society where everyone is equal. Equal
people are more happy and peaceful, and that is what it's all about.

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hkmurakami
I personally know teachers in the SJ school district who are truly passionate
about helping their students succeed, but alas, the way in which these funds
will be used I imagine will largely be determined by forces outside of the
control the teachers of the frontlines.

While I, like many others here, do not expect these funds to make a noticeable
difference in the under-served schools in the Bay Area, I do sincerely hope
that our expectations are proven wrong.

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InclinedPlane
The problem with public schooling in the US isn't funding, inflation adjusted
per-student funding has more than doubled since the 1970s but educational
outcomes haven't budged. Pouring more money into the top of the funnel is the
same thing we've been doing for decades, and it hasn't worked. If you want to
make a big impact in education you either have to spend money closer to the
students or you have to build something disruptive.

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ejfox
I always felt a donation to Newark with Oakland in your backyard was bizarre.

CMD-F for Oakland in this article... nothing.

~~~
gkoberger
He grew up closer to Newark.

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brudgers
This is a lot of money when it's yours. Karma points to the Zuckerbergs.

In terms of running a school district, it would be nice. Sprinkled across a
region...well it's rounding error. If the total cost (compensation, benefits,
administration, facilities and transportation) per year of a teacher in the
classroom is assumed to be $100,000/year [probably very very low for the Bay
Area], then the total package represents 1200 teacher years - or 120 teachers
for 10 years. And that's like one teacher per school district.

If it were used to bring new facilities online - it's about new high school
with furnishings and equipment and no new staff. However, the money isn't
going to fund new schools or keep teachers in classrooms (or get children to
and from school, or provide Head Start, or after school programs for needy
children whose parents and guardians work, or any of the really pressing needs
of individual children and families in poverty). Nevermind, thinking about how
the housing situation effects their lives - to get a sense of scale, maybe
that's how to think about the numbers...moving a few hundred of the region's
homeless families off the street and into owner occupied housing?

No. the money isn't going for anything that long term.

It's going to 'technology' \- a category where five years of use is a really
long time = where staff salaries are a multiple of what teachers earn...and
somebody has to select, install and maintain all those gadgets. It's a
consultant gravy train.

The person who offers money in exchange for people doing what whatever they
say is the served, not the serving. And with private individuals, unlike a
government, the serving have no say whatsoever. This isn't a partnership.
Zuckerberg isn't asking the districts what they need and seeing which of their
needs he can meet. He's come up with a solution without the hard work of
prioritizing the possibilities. That's unfortunate.

While I honestly admire the generosity, winning access to Exeter Academy and
Harvard in the fast swimming semen sweepstakes doesn't make a person an expert
in education at the scale of a school district, let alone a region. Even if
one worked really really hard building a technology company.

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chasef
Throwing money at an already failing system isn't going to do anything. Look
at how his donation to New Jersey played out. He's just putting money into a
dying system. The entire educational system needs to be reworked completely.
And the changes we need won't be made by politicians, we need hackers to do
it.

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marincounty
This is about as wateful as spending 3 billion on SnapChat! I haven't read the
stipulations, if any, but feel most of it will be fretted away on
administration. I never thought Mark was a brilliant person, and still believe
he stole every original thought since he stole Facebook from the spoiled boys.
Only in America? Yes--at a certain point--the rich do not know how to spend
money. I'm for a government that taxes their money. If they don't like it move
to Ireland. Yes--I know they moved, but when I'm president--when Ireland is
attacked they would not be able to look to their home country for help. Sorry
--but you wanted the divorce Deare.

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spacemanmatt
And now they have enough money? Until they run out and the next angel drops a
wad of cash on them? That sounds like an absolutely stellar way to fund public
education.

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aidenn0
That's one solution to Prop 13; I can't help but think that the $120M would be
better spent trying to repeal that example of what's wrong with direct
democracy.

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jinushaun
Hopefully with better success than NJ, but I doubt it. #california

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Jugurtha
I wasn't aware his wife was wealthy.

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contingencies
Needy ... Bay Area ... _hahaha!_

~~~
NickSharp
The Bay Area is bigger than the HN bubble. There are some desperately poor
school districts.

~~~
easytiger
The federal government spent $683.7 billion in a year on defense alone. maybe
they could spare a few million for the children. Relying on private finance to
help schools simply will make matters worse from a big picture in a similar
way to how Africa became addicted to overseas aid

~~~
PhantomGremlin
Sigh.

Did you spend one nanosecond of time doing any research before firing off your
oh so pious comment about sparing a few pennies to save the children?

A very quick google found me ed.gov, which is the US Department of Education.
Here is an exact quote [1]:

    
    
       ED currently administers a budget of $67.3 billion
       in discretionary appropriations (including
       discretionary Pell Grant funding) and operates
       programs that touch on every area and level of
       education. The Department's elementary and
       secondary programs annually serve nearly 16,900
       school districts and approximately 50 million
       students attending more than 98,000 public
       schools and 28,000 private schools. Department
       programs also provide grant, loan, and work-study
       assistance to more than 13 million postsecondary
       students.
    

So it turns out that the federal government is _already_ spending more than "a
few million for the children".

And in case you slept thru civics 101 class, the very next paragraph from the
ed.gov website points out:

    
    
       That said, it is important to point out that
       education in America is primarily a State and
       local responsibility, and ED's budget is only
       a small part of both total national education
       spending ...
    

[1]
[http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/index.html](http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/index.html)

~~~
pessimizer
Nobody actually thought that less than a penny was being spent on schools.
What they were saying was that money that was currently being used for defense
should be shifted to other things.

If you really wanted to attack the commenter, you could have compared rates of
growth since 1980 in both defense and education, or compared defense/education
spending ratios of other countries to our own, or anything other than what you
did: posted the DoE's budget, a count of the number of students, schools, and
school districts in the US, and a mention that most school financing is funded
by local taxes as if it were something you didn't know was common knowledge.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
So, someone is allowed to say "maybe they could spare a few million for the
children".

But when I point out that the federal government is _already_ spending $67.3
billion, that's not enough of a counter-argument. That's "common knowledge",
so I needed to provide extensive additional information to refute his
statement?

I think we'll have to "agree to disagree" about this one.

