
A Test for School Reform in Newark - nicholas73
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_russakoff
======
jstalin
I have personal experience with urban education, having been a member of a
fairly large city's school board. One thing I realized is that centralization
has killed the ability for anyone to think outside the box. There used to be
thousands of school districts in my state, but that number has dropped by
around 90%.

Sure, I get the argument that it's more efficient to pool some resources, such
as buses, food service, etc., but I really believe that education is really
just about having a good principal who can choose his/her teachers and hold
them accountable. Most people aren't aware that many union contracts prohibit
the principal from choosing the teachers in the school because of seniority
rules, and getting rid of bad teachers is essentially hopeless. And of course
all teachers are paid the same, based on years of tenure, rather than actual
outcomes or instructional needs.

I've seen schools which most would consider being in the worst part of the
ghetto doing very well because of a highly motivated principal. The more we
centralize, the harder it becomes to do anything of value to help schools
perform better. And the trend continues to be more and more in the direction
of centralization.

~~~
gmu3
The union contracts are really out of control. For those that aren't aware,
research "rubber rooms". Hundreds of teachers in NYC are literally paid to
come and sit in empty rooms and do nothing while they wait years to be
reviewed because the districts don't have the ability to fire teachers.

~~~
lmm
As a European I wouldn't blame the unions there; the right to an arbitration
hearing when you're accused of misconduct does not seem unreasonable. What
else would you do, allow anyone to just be fired on the principal's say-so?

The real problem seems to be that the arbitration proceedings in NYC take
years - partly because NYC isn't paying the arbitrators (in contrast to the
union, which is paying its half of the arbitrator wages). How is that the
union's fault?

~~~
danielweber
_What else would you do, allow anyone to just be fired on the principal 's
say-so?_

This is the way just about every other profession in the US works.

My manager doesn't need to prove anything to anyone to dismiss me.

~~~
Iftheshoefits
I'm not sure holding up any other profession, much less "just about every
other profession" as a model of how we should organize our employer/employee
relationships is a good idea.

The kind of relationship you describe has created a general environment in
which wages are depressed and working conditions continue to deteriorate.
Every time unions lose power, workers' working conditions--including
compensation and intangibles--deteriorate.

~~~
danielweber
Most professionals -- which teachers desire to be treated like -- have done
quite well over the past 34 years despite fewer and fewer organizational
defenses of their conditions. Unskilled labor is another story.

Unless teachers should be treated and protected like factory workers. Usually
teachers object to that characterization, but if you want to argue for it,
okay.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_professions](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_professions)

[2] I'm assuming you are using Reagan's election as the start date of the
professional malaise. Call it a lucky guess.

------
api
I worked for a while as a government contractor. I'd become disillusioned with
libertarianism (no connection to the decision to take the job), and still am,
but that experience cured me of any leanings toward the sort of liberalism
that sees government as a solution to much of anything.

The system was actively anti-meritocratic and the waste was simply incredible.
They ran an entire data center at around 1% utilization. The electricity
wasted alone must have been tens of thousands worth a month at least.

Contractors were the worst. People often complain about too many and overpaid
government employees, and there certainly was that, but the contracting waste
was where the real hemorrhaging was going on. I routinely saw outside firms
hired to do things at _many multiples_ of what it would have cost to have
federal employees do it, or even to recruit new federal employees. These
contractors would proceed to waste the money much more flagrantly than anyone
inside the government did, would deliver barely-working solutions, and would
then get contracted again to fix them. It was a routine thing. I started to
really suspect that someone was getting kick-backs, but gross incompetence in
the handling of outside contracting could explain it too.

~~~
zzzeek
if you observed that the private contracting waste was where the real
hemorrhaging was going on, then your problem was with all the privatized
resources being paid with public money - essentially the vast influence of the
"free market" on a public resource that is not well suited to traditional free
market forces. This article is specifically about the failure of privatized
resources, such as charter schools, private donations delivered directly to
contractors with no public oversight or review for the purposes of improving
the public good. It is about billionaires with no experience or justification
for being at the center of a complex public system attempting to inject
gigantic, ad-hoc donations into systems they don't understand, and failing.

~~~
api
Not a bad point. If I, say, donated $100million to Microsoft to improve the
Windows UI and did not know _precisely_ where to put that money in the company
and what that money should be doing, it probably would not fare much better.

Still: the waste I saw was incredible. There is definitely a systemic
incentive problem in government, not to mention a problem with private
contracting and oversight.

------
TheMagicHorsey
The problem with schools in a place like Newark is that they serve as a rare
source of economic opportunity in an otherwise shithole neighborhood. Schools
are a font of money in a place where almost every other economic activity is
illegal.

That's why reforming a school is a shit show. Its the place where everyone is
feeding at the teat.

Here is one possible solution for a billionaire to try. It won't work for
anything but a tiny minority of students at the moment, but it will shine a
light on how our education problems are a problem of the education
bureaucracy, and not of the students.

Set up a magnate boarding school, outside of the city (perhaps even outside
the state). Run it EXACTLY the way you want to run it. Let anyone apply. Give
admission based on a lottery ... not on the basis of an examination ... so no
one can accuse you of taking only the best kids.

Offer free room/board/education.

Start only with first graders. Then add a grade, every year, as your first
class ages. In 12 years you will graduate your first class of students.

Hire the best teachers. Spend a lot on infrastructure. Teach
programming/science/technology. Make partnerships with the best universities.
Get internships for your students in start ups and companies, using your
connections. Maybe your own company can hire some of them.

Show the world what kids from an inner city failed neighborhood can do,
without the interference of these teachers and their unions.

When your kids succeed, however spectacularly, or modestly, that will be a
beacon.

Encourage your graduates to give back to the school. You will still hemorrhage
cash every year, it may never be sustainable without your continued
involvement ... but it would be the kind of experiment that would leave an
impact for decades ... and if you succeeded in making it sustainable, maybe
for centuries.

~~~
javajosh
This comment is ignorant beyond belief! Have you ever been to Newark? It's a
huge, bustling city - actually, New Jersey's largest city. When you make
absurd claims like "[schools] serve as a rare source of economic opportunity
in an otherwise shithole town" how can anyone take anything you say seriously?

~~~
TheMagicHorsey
I go by what I see. I should probably have said "neighborhood" not city.

Do you see how people cling to those fucking administrative jobs, while
screwing over kids, like those jobs are the last life preserver on a sinking
ship.

Every school district has teacher's unions that are a pain in the ass ... but
only in Newark do you see an utterly corrupt organization defended tooth and
nail by entire neighborhoods, without regard for how the children are
effected.

Its ridiculous. People treat the firing of clerks like its a genocide of a
colonized people.

~~~
throwaway0010
The objectionable part is that it's not a regional issue. Vampires chasing
money are everywhere and will relocate to follow the cash teat. This would've
happened anywhere in the USA.

~~~
TheMagicHorsey
Okay, I own up to my post being unfair in that way. This could be the case in
Oakland too.

I have to admit I am channeling some childhood angst about a different school
system altogether ... not Newark.

------
8ig8
Here's the primary article:

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

~~~
nickkthequick
I upvoted you but personally I prefer this link (they worked hard on the
article, I believe they deserve the ad revenue):

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

~~~
TheMagicHorsey
I don't know why people are so opposed to newspapers showing advertisements.

How are they supposed to operate their organizations without funds?

Or do people seriously think government funding of papers is the way to go?

I happen to think that state funded news papers would be worse than papers
funded by advertisers. At least with advertisers you have many different
sources of funding. With the state you have just one boss, and you can't print
stories that would piss him off.

~~~
acdha
I wish more places would adopt Ars Technica's model where you can pay to not
see ads. I think ad antipathy is a long-term trend the industry should adjust
to but it would break the revenue model at some places – e.g. it costs more to
for an online-only New York Times subscription than for online+paper because
the business has been dominated by print advertisements for so long.

~~~
eli
I wish this model would work, but I don't think it does in practice.

For one thing, it drives the value of the ads you do show _way_ down to
commodity prices. Think about it: no advertiser is going to spend big bucks on
ads that are literally only shown to the cheapest and least engaged members of
your audience.

It also misaligns the incentives. Now the ads function like the "nag screen"
on old shareware apps. The site's revenue is tied to the ads being annoying
enough that you'll want to get rid of them.

~~~
acdha
Good point: I think there could be a stable equilibrium on the other side but
the transition might be impossible.

------
normloman
A few bad teachers can't explain Newark's low graduation rates. Bad teachers
exist outside Newark, but kids outside still graduate in greater rates than
Newark students. The difference between Newark and everywhere else is poverty.
That's why I never had any hopes for Zuckerberg's donation. You've got to fix
poverty to fix education.

Unfortunately, the best way to raise someone out of poverty is through
education. So you've got a chicken-egg problem.

Have we tried doing both? Create new jobs for poor parents while
simultaneously improving schools for their children?

~~~
pmorici
"A few bad teachers can't explain Newark's low graduation rates."

The problem is it's not just a few it's probably a lot of really crappy
teachers, principals, and administrators. Teacher unions like to use the
phrase "just a few bad apples" but when you have a system that bad your're
right a few doesn't explain it it's probably the whole bunch or close to it
that is rotten.

~~~
fossuser
Somewhat related there was an earlier comment from HN that I really liked
(though don't remember who said it) - about the bad apples phrase.

"In situations where accusations of widespread corruption, misconduct,
unethical action, etc are made, a phrase that is often trotted out in defense
of the accused is "just a few bad apples". It's not WhereEver Police
Department that has an issue with racial bias and violent escalation, it's
just a few bad apples. Our school district does not have a bullying problem,
it's just a few bad apples. Etc.

What is interesting about this cliched defense is that it is actually a
malformed statement of the original cliche, "A few bad apples spoil the
barrel."

The original cliche refers to a phenomenon where overripe or rotten apples
release ethylene gas, which is a ripening agent. This ethylene gas will
accelerate the ripening/rot of nearby apples. If you are not vigilant in
weeding out the bad apples, the rot will rapidly spread and soon there will be
no good apples left to rescue.

Human "bad apples" don't release ethylene gas, but they corrupt their peers
nevertheless. When a good cop backs the cover story of his corrupt cop
partner, he becomes a bad cop as well. When prosecutors take up arms in
defense of their corrupt prosecutor peers, they become no better than the
initially targeted. If school administrators allow a bully to have his way for
too long, then everybody else sees that they can get away with it too and
before long you have daily fistfights behind the school at the end of the day.

Institutions that have had widespread unchallenged corruption for decades
rarely need keyhole surgery, they need amputations."

------
rayiner
Experiments like this expose a really fundamental problem with how Americans
approach the issue of poverty. We're convinced that the solution to poverty is
education and funding education, because it has to be to validate our
political assumptions. For a liberal, it would be tough to swallow the idea
that cultural dysfunction (fatherless kids and the gangs that fill that power
vacuum) is a root cause. For conservatives, it would be tough to swallow the
idea that free market globalization has simply left places like Newark to die.
So we pump ever more money into education, and blame teachers for not solving
problems that are totally outside the scope of their ability to solve.

~~~
jpadkins
I was with you until "free market globalization has simply left places like
Newark to die."

Can you explain that in more detail? Detroit is the counterexample where the
firms did not offshore the jobs, but the city still got decimated. I'm not
sure how "free market globalization" is the root cause. Maybe you could say as
"other countries industrializing has simply left places like Newark to die"
but I don't think our economic policies could slow or reverse that trend.

~~~
rayiner
Detroit was decimated because Americans started buying Japanese and Korean
cars. That was possible because of free-market globalization.

Now, I'm not saying that on the whole the world isn't better off as a result
of free-market globalization. On the net, the gain to consumers in Phoenix
from cheaper foreign goods might well outweigh the loss to workers in Newark.
But I don't think it's controversial to say that alternative policies could
have left Newark better off than it is now, even if they are globally less
efficient, or that economic conservatives tend not to highlight the downsides
of pro-globalization policies. Nobody comes out and says: "more competition
means more efficiency, but it also means there will be winners and losers, and
lower-skilled workers in America are likely to be the losers."

~~~
jpadkins
Agreed on your quote, but of course no one will win elections with that kind
of truth.

But I still don't think there was any policy the US could have taken to
prevent the rise of industrial Korea and Japan, and the downfall of Newark and
Detroit.

------
cjensen
Statistical studies have long shown that (1) education outcomes strongly
correlate with parenting; especially having two parents. (2) education
outcomes have near-zero correlation with funding.

Given this, one would expect this exact outcome. Santayana and all that.

If you want to use money to improve education, I suspect the best use would be
to provide parental education as soon as the child is born. It would be nice
if someone provided a _small_ amount of money to try that out.

~~~
jseliger
I don't mean to be that jerk, but I'm going to anyway: citations are needed on
this: "Statistical studies have long shown that..."

"We"—schools, society, etc.—can't really control parenting. But we can control
schools, and per the articles I list here:
[http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/susan-engel-
doesnt-...](http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/susan-engel-doesnt-
get-2/) , it is probably possible to get substantially better outcomes than
the ones we're getting now, chiefly through better teachers. At the moment,
most public school teachers are paid in lockstep based on seniority—CS
teachers and PE teachers get the same pay—and can't be fired after their
second or third year of teaching, and that creates a lot of perverse
incentives.

~~~
gfodor
""We"—schools, society, etc.—can't really control parenting."

Sounds like you need a citation of your own. I'm sure you could come up with
hundreds of ways to apply money towards the solution of improving parenting.

~~~
jseliger
See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7739746](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7739746)
.

------
nymph
Precious.

Another instance of the principle that money is, in many ways, like violence:
you'd like to think that if it hasn't solved your problem already, if you just
keep throwing more and more at it it, you'll solve it eventually -- but all to
often, it just makes the problem worse.

And inasmuch as Zuck would like to believe that being young means you're
smarter... whatever your baseline, oftentimes, having too much money -- in
Zuck's case, literally more money than he knows what to do with -- just makes
us stupider.

 _Between 2010 and 2012, The New Yorker reports that "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, [and] teacher evaluation." Many of the consultants were being
paid upwards of $1,000 a day._

 _“Everybody’s getting paid but Raheem still can’t read, " Vivian Cox Fraser,
president of the Urban League of Essex County, was quoted saying._

~~~
gwern
At the time, people were wondering if it was a PR move to help defuse _The
Social Network_. Zuckerberg isn't mentioned as being incensed at the waste of
money, so...

------
darkstar999
This is basically blogspam of this New Yorker article.

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

~~~
dang
Yes it is. We changed the url (from [http://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-
zuckerberg-gave-jersey-10...](http://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-
gave-jersey-100-130400933.html)).

Submitters: please do your due diligence. HN wants original sources, not
ripoffs. If the article you're posting is ripped off of something else, post
the something else.

------
nugget
I heard Bill Gates speak once at school and I remember him saying that giving
away his fortune was harder than earning it in the first place.

~~~
dethstar
Did he explain why/how? I really don't understand what you're trying to say.
Was it because he was too fond of it? Was it because there were many causes
he'd like to give to and couldn't make his mind?

~~~
jarrett
Based on his other comments, I assume he was referring to the challenges of
finding the right places to spend money--places where the money will have the
most positive effect. It's easy to give money away. Goodness knows there are
endless people and organizations who would gladly take it. What's much harder
is knowing ahead of time what impact a given donation will have. Or, to put it
differently, knowing how effective a charity is at advancing its stated
mission.

~~~
danielweber
Bill also looks at the effects his dollars have. He admitted that his attempt
to fund smaller schools plain didn't work out.

------
camworld
A large percentage of the Zuckerberg money went towards the NTU teacher
contract that rewards teachers with bonuses based on performance.

[http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/13/10/22/explainer-
mark-z...](http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/13/10/22/explainer-mark-
zuckerberg-s-100-million-gift-to-newark-schools-and-the-foundation-for-newark-
s-future/)

------
Donzo
From the article in The New Yorker, Ras Baraka is paraphrased as saying:

"The Booker-Christie-Zuckerberg strategy was doomed, he said, since it
included no systemic assault on poverty."

Poverty truly is this issue.

Giving meal tickets to a bunch of proclaimed "reformers" is not the solution,
as this case proves.

Until every child has a warm place to sleep, food to eat, and at least one
devoted adult to discipline and encourage them, children will be "left
behind," to use the phrase of yesterday.

I say this as someone who statistically excelled at teaching reading in the
West and South sides of Chicago for nine years.

I also say this as a member of the human race.

------
pmorici
Well that is depressing.

They should have watched the documentary "Waiting For Superman" which talks
about schools that defy the odds and produce good outcomes for the their
students in places where the schools in general are a total failure. It used
to be on Netflix streaming but looks like it is only available via DVD now.

[http://www.hulu.com/watch/185389](http://www.hulu.com/watch/185389)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_%22Superman%22](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_%22Superman%22)

~~~
voyou
The proposals mentioned in the article (replacing regular public schools with
charter schools, performance-related pay for teachers, a new
"transformational" superintendent) are similar to the policies proposed in
_Waiting For Superman_. The success of those policies, however, is pretty
questionable, and this case may be another reason to be sceptical (see Diane
Ravitch's criticism of _Waiting For Superman_ here:
[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-
ch...](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-charter-
schools/) )

~~~
pmorici
Well I'd say their first problem is that they didn't actually _implement_ any
of the ideas they just spent 100 million on over paid consultants (one of the
cited problems in the documentary) and didn't change a single thing. Waiting
for superman talks specifically about the epidemic corruption in Newark's
school system.

------
pessimizer
Mark Zuckerberg donated money for school privatization in Newark, not to "fix
Newark's schools." There's a difference.

[http://www.publicschoolreview.com/articles/123](http://www.publicschoolreview.com/articles/123)

------
wil421
Imagine that, a government organization spending all their money on high paid
consultants with nothing to show for it.

I wonder how many of these consultant firms had ties to Booker and his
cronies.

------
icambron
I would love to see someone try this experiment: let's say we pay teachers
$200K/year, gave them huge discretionary budgets, and put a lot of performance
pressure on them. What would happen in place like Newark? I'm not saying
that's a sustainable, scalable solution, but it certainly sounds like a good
use of $100M.

~~~
danielweber
It's possible to overpay for a position. If you pay significantly over market
rates, it is going to be hard to filter through all the applications, and you
need a separate auditing mechanism to check for people, say, slipping $20,000
to the HR person to get themselves on the top of the pile.

BTW, this is an excellent way of fairly determining if a job is overpaid or
underpaid: how hard is it to find applicants? Do people camp out for 3 days
beforehand for a chance to apply? In case of performance issues, do people
cling to their jobs like a drowning man to a life-preserver?

 _LATE EDIT_

I agree with the discretionary budgets. Each teacher should have an expense
account on a credit card for when things come up and s/he needs to buy
something.

~~~
icambron
> It's possible to overpay for a position.

No doubt. And I pulled the number 200K out of my ass; it could be a lot of
numbers. But on the question of how hard it is to find applicants, it depends
what you hold constant: the qualifications or the compensation. Here we're
holding the compensation constant and raising the qualification bar however
high we can. I'm sure hoards of people would apply to become CEO of Microsoft
if that was a thing you could do, but that doesn't mean the position is
overpaid. The experiment here is to see if you could get much better teachers
by widening the pool of potential applicants to people who who wouldn't
normally want to do that, by a) making the pay competitive with other high-
skill industries and b) cutting out a lot of the bullshit involved in applying
that skill to teaching children. That pool would surely include plenty of
people who are already rockstar teachers, but additionally lots of people who
think of themselves as bound for, say, business consulting or finance or
software engineering. How would you choose among your applicants? I don't
know, but I'm sure there are plenty of answers to "if I could turn anyone into
a teacher, who would it be? And I how could I maximize their abilities?" Maybe
this is actually lots of different experiments with different selection
criteria and different degrees of freedom in applying themselves to the task
(e.g., in defining curriculum).

~~~
danielweber
I think it would be a great thing to try.

Some people in this thread have mentioned some primary boarding schools for
high-risk students. I'd want to internalize the results of those
interventions, too.

------
wglb
Whenever I hear talk about school reform, or teacher's pay or how long they
work, I am reminded of Dean Kamen's
[http://www.usfirst.org/](http://www.usfirst.org/). I heard him speak last
fall, and he points out that a significant part of the problem is the glory
and fame attached to entertainment figures and sports figures, rather than to
scientists, engineers, and doctors.

His program sponsors local competitions, such as building robots, and other
technology-oriented activities.

While the issues raised in the article are valid ones, we need to look at the
whole picture.

------
fleitz
Startup school receives $100 million in funding based on an idea..... and
fails? I wonder if it was a mobile social local school like Color?

It seems that perhaps what is needed is a YC of education that provides small
grants and helps with follow-on investment once those small bets pay
dividends.

Education is fundamentally pretty simple, you need a room, a teacher, and a
few dollars worth of paper. Seems like the ideal thing for a startup.
Fundamentally once you teach a person basic literacy and basic numeracy they
can spend the rest of their life teaching themselves.

------
brudgers
That's the efficiency of the free market. People sought to capture as much of
the $100 million as possible while investing a minimum of effort and
resources. It's entrepreneurial.

------
nopinsight
From my direct experience working in this field for over ten years, parent's
attitude and social environment probably account for most of the variation in
education achievement at the elementary level. Kids are curious by nature, but
acquiring the three Rs (reading, writing, arithmetic) is not built into human
nature. It requires sufficient cultural support from the kid's environment and
caretakers. Dedicated teachers and good learning process help, but children
spend much more time at home and in their neighborhood than at school.

Another factor, not very politically correct to say but real nonetheless, is
genetics, although genes likely play a larger role when the subject matter is
more complicated, at the high school level and beyond, and when the learning
environment is worse. If the teaching system is suitable and children have the
motivation to learn, most students can master elementary school materials
quite well.

At the high school level though, not everyone can master abstract concepts,
like equations involving complex numbers and trigonometric functions, with
reasonable effort, especially if their basics from elementary education are
lacking. (They may be able to get fairly good at them with Herculean efforts,
but few would want to dedicate their whole teenage life to academics.)

Given the hypothesis from real-world experience above, I suspect that reform
successes at the high school level is significantly harder to come by than at
the elementary one. If anyone has empirical data to support or refute this
hypothesis, it would be helpful.

In any case, involving parents and caretakers to support children education is
essential for any school reform efforts in poorer neighborhood. This is likely
to be more effective at the elementary level when parents have stronger
influence over their kids, and other confounding factors (like drugs and love
life) are less important than when they become teens.

Parental push is definitely behind the academic success of Confucius regions
in Asia: Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and Shanghai-China.
All of them perform excellently in international academic assessments in
reading, math, and science.

[http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/dec/03/pisa-
re...](http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/dec/03/pisa-results-
country-best-reading-maths-science)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_International_Mathema...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_International_Mathematics_and_Science_Study#Top_10_countries_by_subject_and_year)

~~~
hershel
But there has been cases for schools for inner-city children that showed great
results ,for example sabis. Not sure how they did it , but maybe not all is
lost ?

------
NorthGuy1
$100M is roughly 10% of Newark's annual budget and was offered as one time
funding. Education is a service industry so that 10% is effectively spread
thinly across all the schools in the district. This is in stark contrast to
Zuck's product development background where 100M can be concentrated into
developing a single product that can produce amazing ROI. Perhaps this is why
our IT billionaires flounder in education?

------
wavesounds
"It came in the form of philanthropic donations, which, unlike government
funding, required no public review of priorities or spending."

This is why we should raise taxes on Billionaires. A lot of them are willing
to give away a lot of their money but, no matter how well intentioned they
are, they are not as good at spending money for the public good as the
government is.

------
gargarplex
Sorry but you're all wrong. It was a political and pr move timed with the
release of The Social Network

------
kelvin0
Sometimes more money without the appropriate structural changes does not yield
the intended 'miracle'. This is almost like someone winning the lottery which
amplifies their troublesome behaviors ...

------
DanielBMarkham
Wow. $100 million.

Put into a trust, you could pull out interest every year, say $2 million, and
have your project funded forever.

What would the project be? Well, if you set the funding up that way, that's
the beauty: you could try different things with that $2 million every year and
see what worked the best. That way, instead of trying to "fix" a problem, you
could create a system that would continue to help find optimizations.

Hell, one year you could give away cash prizes. Another year hire in-home
tutors for at-risk kids. Another year you could try some kind of vouchers. You
could on and on like this, continuing to experiment and evolve. Or you could
just write a check to somebody.

Maybe Zuck has learned that you don't write checks to fix systemic problems.

Maybe.

------
616c
As a proud NJ-raised kid, I can confirm hat others say about Newark, but with
my own personal spin: Newark is a shithole, and no amount of money will fix
that problem.

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EGreg
I know what I would do:

[http://magarshak.com/blog](http://magarshak.com/blog)

------
robg
Exactly why we can't trust government with resources. Every dollar must be
held accountable.

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edtechdev
Wow, a lot of experts on education here.

There are a lot of myths out there about (U.S. K12) education, such as all
these "bad teachers" that we can't ever fire because of tenure, and how awful
U.S. education is compared to other countries or compared to the U.S. in the
50s and 60s, and how charter schools or vouchers will solve all education's
problems.

There is actual data and research out there on all this, buried under all this
opinion. Did you know for example that tenured teachers are twice as likely to
lose their job as non-tenured teachers?
[http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-
sheet/teachers/the-m...](http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-
sheet/teachers/the-myth-of-teacher-tenure.html)

There is also a history behind all this. Before teacher tenure, teachers were
regularly fired on the whim of principals or because of getting pregnant. See
for example "Why Teacher Unions Are Good for Teachers—and the Public"
[http://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/winter0607/ravitc...](http://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/winter0607/ravitch.cfm)

And see the book "50 Myths & Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools"
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-
sheet/wp/2014/03/...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-
sheet/wp/2014/03/18/50-terrible-ideas-for-improving-schools/)

As the authors state: "The mythical failure of public education has been
created and perpetuated in large part by political and economic interests that
stand to gain from the destruction of the traditional system."

Once you get past the myths, I'd recommend doing a little reading on how
people actually learn (it's not just dumping information on empty brains). See
for example the book How People Learn (free, pdf):
[http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309070368](http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309070368)

Or for the more impatient, watch this beginning of this video Minds of Our
Own:
[http://www.learner.org/resources/series26.html](http://www.learner.org/resources/series26.html)

Or this even shorter video on the counter-intuitive nature of how people learn
from videos (criticizing the Khan Academy videos):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVtCO84MDj8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVtCO84MDj8)

Teaching is an incredibly difficult job, because learning is incredibly
complex. A single phrase or gesture can have an enormous positive or negative
influence on learning. If you tried spending even one hour in a typical K12
classroom, most likely you'd be eaten alive. It may not seem like many K12
teachers are getting fired, partly because most teachers quit within 5 years.

------
mantrax5
This is why Steve Jobs used to say "everyone can throw money at a problem and
fail to change anything", but people chose to see it as the excuse of a greedy
businessman (who actually did donate to a number of projects _privately_ ).

Throwing money at a problem and forgetting about it almost never works. It
just breeds corruption. Case in point.

Well, in a way the money wasn't wasted. Mark really needed the positive PR
back then what with The Social Network movie and all the privacy
vulnerabilities and abuses of Facebook. He got his PR. Facebook surviving was
worth $100 million to him, so good job. Facebook survived. So he stopped
donating.

~~~
x43b
"He got his PR. Facebook surviving was worth $100 million to him, so good job.
Facebook survived. So he stopped donating."

Is that really true? I thought Zuckerberg gave more in 2013 to charity then
any other person in the United States.

Link:
[http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/10/zuckerb...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/10/zuckerberg-
biggest-giver/5355871/)

------
Jun8
What a waste! Government agencies should provide data, supporting services,
etc. when needed, they should not be developers of solutions, because, due to
their very nature, they cannot do it. Curiously enough, money is not a
motivator in this realm for better work, it's like watering the Sahara in the
hopes that suddenly vegetation will sprout.

What Zuckerberg should have done is to put out $10M-$20M of that money as
prizes for small non/for-profit startups to come up with ingenious solutions.
Then, after this survival of the fittest mode ends, push money into the
promising ones.

~~~
acdha
> What Zuckerberg should have done is to put out $10M-$20M of that money as
> prizes for small non/for-profit startups to come up with ingenious
> solutions.

What kind of solution would a startup come up with for a kid who doesn't sleep
under the same roof three nights running or who doesn't have a single role
model who succeeded at school and is doing well professionally because they
live in an area which has been systematically screwed over (race, class, etc.)
for so long that everyone they know has given up?

There are a few areas where the tech-world style approach could help —
building better software for class management, lesson planning, etc. if for no
reason other than reducing the amount going to huge, under-delivering
enterprise software vendors – but most of the problems are areas where we've
chosen not to invest as a society: jobs, housing, medical care — critically
long-term disability care — etc. Ask a teacher how it feels when a bright
student starts missing school because their family was evicted or is being
pressured not to go to college because their family wants them to watch a
younger/disabled sibling while the parents are at work.

The best use for that $100M probably would have been opening some sort of
high-headcount employer in the area to help break the cycle — even a call
center job is a big step up if it provides a consistent, livable income.

~~~
IanDrake
>The best use for that $100M probably would have been opening some sort of
high-headcount employer

That assumes these people are employable or want to work.

We agree the biggest problem for these kids is family life, I just don't think
that will stop with employment or even just handing their parents money.

~~~
incision
_> "That assumes these people are employable or want to work."_

I'd say that seems more reasonable than assuming the opposite, but not at all
surprising that _you_ would feel otherwise [1][2].

1:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7700903](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7700903)

2:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7566117](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7566117)

~~~
IanDrake
Pointing out that I don't think people who happen to be minorities should be
treated differently doesn't help your argument.

I love people who think they're not racist then make assumptions like yours.

