Sunday, September 27, 2015

Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million donation to Newark public schools failed miserably — here's where it went wrong

Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million donation to Newark public schools failed miserably — here's where it went wrong - Yahoo Finance:
In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million to Newark, New Jersey's failing public-school system with the intention of turning around the schools in five years.
The goals Zuckerberg set out to achieve — to enact a number of reforms that would make Newark a model city for education reform — are widely seen as a failure, journalist Dale Russakoff told Business Insider.
So where exactly did that $100 million go if the turnaround was a failure?
Russakoff mapped the money trail in her new book "The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools," which tracked the five years since Zuckerberg's donation.
The $100 million from Zuckerberg actually became $200 million under the agreement other sources would match his contribution. Here's where that money went:
  1. Labor and contract costs: $89.2 million
  2. Charter schools: $57.6 million
  3. Consultants: $21 million
  4. Various local initiatives: $24.6 million
The total committed funds comes to less than $200 million as of January 2015, as some funding decisions are still pending.
One of the biggest failures in Zuckerberg's plan to reform Newark schools was the renegotiated teachers' contracts.
Zuckerberg envisioned the teacher contract reform to be a centerpiece of the reform and contributed $50 million — half of his total donation — to go to working on that cause.

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