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Where’s Cory: Zuckerberg’s bad investment in Newark schools

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Where’s Cory: Zuckerberg’s bad investment in Newark schools

JUNE 5, 2014    LAST UPDATED: THURSDAY, JUNE 5, 2014, 1:21 AM
BY GLENN GARVIN
THE MIAMI HERALD
THE RECORD

SAMUEL JOHNSON called second marriages the triumph of hope over experience. When an Internet billionaire announces a plan to give away an additional $100 million to a second public school district after the first fritters it away without any results, I’d say it’s more like the triumph of delusion over the dead certainty that teachers’ unions and educational bureaucrats are a bottomless pit of greed.

Last week’s announcement that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are donating $120 million to poor school districts in the San Francisco Bay Area coincidentally came a day or two after the publication of a long and horrifying piece in The New Yorker about what happened to their first attempt to wash away public education’s problems with a flood of cash.

Four years ago, Zuckerberg and his wife, convinced that the trouble with public education was that society doesn’t value it enough, put their money where their liberal ideals were, donated $100 million (a sum quickly matched by other philanthropists) to the Newark school district.

The result might be titled No Consultant, Bureaucrat or Union Goon Left Behind. Consultants took $20 million right off the top, routinely charging $1,000 a day for services like public relations, human resources and other stuff that’s been around since the beginning of corporate time but that apparently had to be reinvented for Newark.

Fifty new principals were hired in a district that already had a ratio of one administrator for every six students, double the state average. (Nearly a third of Newark’s educational bureaucrats were clerks, four times the rate of other New Jersey districts. “Even some clerks had clerks,” The New Yorker noted in awe.)

Meanwhile, the principals already onboard fought like demons to keep the district from closing their failing schools, even as students streamed out to enroll in new charter schools set up with Zuckerberg’s money.

– See more at: https://www.northjersey.com/opinion/opinion-guest-writers/zuckerberg-s-bad-investment-in-newark-schools-1.1029705#sthash.7fFLceph.dpuf