In September 2010, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg went on The Oprah Winfrey Show, along with then-Newark Mayor Cory Booker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, to announce an eye-popping gift: $100 million to reform Newark Public Schools.
Local philanthropists and others would match that, doubling the gift to $200 million.
In exchange, the struggling urban system was expected not only to welcome more independently run charter schools but to close low-performing schools, give families an easier way to choose a new school and enact a performance-based pay system for teachers.
In the seven years since Zuckerberg’s announcement, critics have not been shy in pointing out how much turmoil the effort has caused. But they haven’t had a good way to figure out whether Zuckerberg’s millions have been well-spent.
A new study, out Monday, represents the first attempt to answer that question. It finds that the cash made a difference — in a limited way.
The findings, from a team led by Harvard University’s Thomas Kane, look at school achievement data from 2009 through 2016, comparing the growth in Newark students’ achievement relative to that of similar students and schools elsewhere in New Jersey.
The upshot? Newark students improved sharply in English.
In math? Not so much.
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Thirty-one percent of a gift meant for children went to the union as the price of being allowed to measure whether teachers were effective. That’s not a bug in the system. That’s the system working exactly as it’s designed to work. Protecting itself from accountability is the primary function.
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and, Thiel Fellowships.