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A Fool and His Money

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What happens when a billionaire gives $100 Million to a corrupt, self-serving bureaucracy? Answer: Bureaucrats and their buddies in the consulting business got to buy vacation homes.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made a splash by announcing his plan to give $100million to help turn around Newark, New Jersey’s public schools in an appearance on Oprah in 2010. 

But nearly four years later, Zuckerberg’s money has run out, having been spent mostly on labor contracts and consulting fees with no noticeable improvement in student performance, a report in the New Yorker reveals.

Zuckerberg’s money has mostly gone into the early stages of overhaul, paying consultants upwards of $1,000 a day to find solutions to Newark public schools’ problems.

According to the report, between 2010 and 2012 ‘more than twenty million dollars of Zuckerberg’s gift and matching donations went to consulting firms and various specialities: public relations, human resources, communications, data analysis, [and] teacher evaluations.’

The bureaucrats and consultants got richer; and the kids got nada.

My utter lack of faith in Government, vindicated once again.

Comments

  2. It’s not that the Newark NJ schools are starved for money. By Court-fiat, the taxpayers of the State of NJ totally-supports the Newark school system while the local corrupt officials and teachers’ union decide how the money is split-up spent. The taxpayers of NJ spend three-times as much per-student compared to the suburban NJ schools…approx. $45-thousand/year including the capital budget…on Newark’s’ failing schools and are rewarded-with the State’s highest drop-out rate, and some of the State’s worst test-scores.

    And the mayor of Newark NJ who presided over this debacle is now NJ’s junior Senator.

  3. Wait a minute!

    There was a terrible mess which needed to be studied so that mission statements could be set forth and committees formed and solution oriented goals set in place.

    It was, in short, a community desperately in need of organizing. So, now, with $100 million spent, you want to stop now? You want all of that preliminary organization effort to go to waste?

    Obviously, we need several generations more of this activity and a much bigger sum of money to carry this project forward to the point where trials can be tried and model schools can tested and new members of the bureaucracy can test old theories and advance new theories and …..

    Damn! Its for the chilrun. What don’t you understand?

  5. This is pretty typical of how education works.

    Get a bunch of money to fix problems, give all the administrators a pay raise, create consulting positions for favored people to work on the problem and then Fix nothing.

    A lack of money isnt what’s wrong with our education system-the problem is the model itself.

  7. At some point, we’ll have to entertain the possibility that the problem lies not in the public school system but in the population of students it’s charged wih educating. What else should we expect from a bureaucracy lavished with funds for which there are no useful expenditures?

    Some years back, a federal judge ordered the KCMO public school system to go nuts spending money to improve educational results. They build olympic pools, a planetarium, studios – you name it. I think the bill came to about $2 billion. Results: zilch.

    The desparate effort to close the “achievement gap” has been a huge and very expensive utter failure.

    At some point (probably when we’re out of money – real and borrowed), perhaps the poobahs will acknowledge that race is more than an abstraction and implement policy designed to actually make a difference. Pretending that human beings, unlike other mammals, are all exactly equal in every respect is a belief in magic. As soon as we stop believing in magic, maybe we’ll start making progress towards tailoring education that can help everyone achieve their potential and make real progress towards closing the gaps. Until then, Zuckerberg’s money-down–rathole failure won’t be the first nor will it be the last.

    http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html

  9. We’re assuming that Zuckerberg didn’t know that the money would just line people’s pockets. Remember, we’re talking about a guy who is not a moral paragon to begin with, is a rather ruthless and empathy-challegned guy, and has had some very questionable interactions with the NSA. Not to mention that he has been outright lying to Facebook users. I don’t know if he’s quite that slimy to give Newark money for “education” *wink wink*, but in this day and age, you can’t rule out any possibility.

  10. KCRob- I didn’t realize there was another realist on here. The funniest part about the Kansas City free for all with taxpayer money is that the kids ended up doing worse, but that was probably because they thought they could stop cooking the books. 137 teachers in Atlanta got busted changing answers on standardized tests, and the last I heard the scandal in Philly is bigger than Atlanta. The worse the kids do the better it is for the unions.