When Facebook FB -0.72% founder Mark Zuckerberg hosted a fundraising event at his home in Palo Alto, Calif., last month for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the event set tongues wagging. The billionaire’s interest in the New Jersey politician was thoroughly dissected by the chattering class. Too bad there hasn’t been as much interest in analyzing Mr. Zuckerberg’s $100 million commitment to support the struggling public schools in Newark, N.J., or in studying the effectiveness of the many other education grants made by foundations to help in Newark.
To be fair, it is difficult to judge how well the philanthropy in Newark is working because precious few data have been collected. Truly useful metrics, therefore, haven’t been developed. The gap between good intentions and measurable results will be familiar anywhere in the country where philanthropies join efforts to improve education.
To address the shortfall in Newark, our organization, the Newark Trust for Education, has undertaken an effort to collect information about the foundations’ work that will help clarify for school administrators, principals, teachers, parents and students how best to improve K-12 public education.
Our primary objective: follow the money. Which philanthropies are spending how much, to do what, in which schools? No one really knew. In collaboration with the funding community, we created a tool called the NET Navigator. It allows anyone with an interest in tracking the tens of millions of philanthropy dollars now flowing into Newark schools to conduct online searches by funder, by school or by specific program. Soon the database will include individual school achievement data.