So Oprah, Bill and Mark are going to save education for us. Phew. Crisis averted.
Yesterday’s announcement that Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, is donating $100 million to New Jersey’s largest school district on the surface seems like another laudable philanthropic gesture by the droves of millionaires and billionaires following the latest fad in philanthropy — education reform. But one thing educators and philanthropists have not learned is that throwing money into the bottomless pit of the public education system as it is currently constructed is futile.
Too much money is not the problem in education. Oversight is a problem. Leadership is a problem. Talent is a problem. Management is a problem. But there is plenty of money to go around. The United States is set to spend $540 billion to educate 49.4 million students in public schools this year. We are some of the top spenders in the world with some of the lowest achievement results.
Let’s consider some specific examples of these private philanthropists and their efforts to reform education. Oprah opened a girl’s school in South Africa to the tune of $40 million and down comforters for each student. So far we know that it has resulted in a sex scandal involving the headmistress and a defamation suit against Oprah. Reform? Data? Haven’t seen that.
Mr. Gates and his foundation have poured millions into the Atlanta Public School system which now spends more per pupil than any other metro Atlanta school system. I only wonder how much of that money was spent on the erasers used by cheating teachers and administrators on the state standardized tests to change the results for low-performing schools. A local newspaper investigation has exposed the lie of reform that Beverly Hall, superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, has touted across the nation holding up her school system as a model for urban school reform. Too bad the paper has also worked on the graduation numbers for her district and can’t seem to locate as many as 16,000 students who disappeared from the rolls. In the corporate world we call this cooking the books.
So now Mark Zuckerberg believes his munificence will save Newark schools — a system plagued by mismanagement and failing despite being taken over by the state government and boosted with major infusions of cash from the state coffers. Perhaps the most disturbing comment about the gift was offered by Derrell Bradford, executive director of the education reform group Excellent Education for Everyone, “What your seeing is for the under-40 set, education reform is what feeding kids in Africa was in 1980. Newark public schools are like the new Live Aid.”
Mark, Oprah, and Bill will be well-advised to read the last findings on the outcome of all the food aid flowing to the starving children in Africa in the eighties. Just yesterday John-Clark Levin’s Wall Street Journal article “The Failure of the Live Aid Model” explained how financial aid to starving children in Africa so glamorized by celebrities in the 1980’s was actually arming rebel factions, tyrannical dictators, and corrupt governments resulting in years of civil war and ethnic cleansing. Remember Live Aid? Bob Geldof? All those photos of skeletal children that flashed across the screen? Turns out all our cash was buying guns and feeding government officials. Incredibly, my own African friends recount for me horrendous stories about watching cargo planes filled with food aid landing on air strips in their countries and seeing the supplies disappear in government vehicles to be sold or exchanged for cash or weapons.
I think Oprah, Bill, and Mark have a responsibility to see that the money actually helps the kids in schools, not just to boost failing organizations with failing policies. The core of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s education policy is more charter schools, vouchers for private schools, and merit pay for teachers based on student performance. Unfortunately, they don’t have enough substantial research to prove that these policies can produce the kind of change needed to turn around the Newark school system. But it is Mark’s money. He is free to do whatever he pleases with it. Even flushing it down the toilet — which might be as effective as funding a fundamentally flawed school system.
