Zuckerberg’s Expensive Lesson

It’s just hitting bookstores, but Dale Russakoff’s new book, “The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools?,”
has already become a source of enormous contention, both in Newark,
where the story takes place, and among education advocates of various
stripes.

The
plotline revolves around what happened to the Newark school system
after Mark Zuckerberg, the young founder and chief executive of
Facebook, donated $100 million in 2010 to transform the city’s schools, a
sum that was matched by the prodigious fund-raising of Cory Booker,
Newark’s former mayor (now the state’s junior senator). The stated goal
of the grant, according to Zuckerberg at the time, was to turn Newark’s
schools into a “symbol of educational excellence for the whole nation.”
Five years later, with the money basically gone, I think it is fair to
say that hasn’t happened.

Russakoff’s
story, in brief, is that Zuckerberg, knowing little about education
reform, naïvely put his faith in the charismatic Booker, a champion of
the reform movement. Booker advocated the usual things: more teacher
accountability, more charter schools and new agreements with the
teachers’ union that would allow for the best teachers to be rewarded —
and the worst to be fired.

Zuckerberg’s Expensive Lesson