Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, aka the richest guy alive, recently announced plans to donate $2 billion to create a network of preschools. “The child will be the customer,” says Bezos. Maybe we’re old-fashioned, but the idea of pupils as “customers” doesn’t lead us to believe that Bezos has a firm understanding of the moral complexities of pedagogy or child care. The phrase sounds every bit like the tone-deaf hubris of our Silicon Valley overlords.
Maybe the effort will succeed, but we’re not optimistic. Bezos is hardly the first zillionaire to decide he can fix education once and for all by dumping truckloads of cash on it. In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg went on the Oprah Winfrey Show with Chris Christie and Cory Booker—then governor of New Jersey and mayor of Newark, respectively—and promised to donate $100 million to help Newark’s abysmal schools become “a symbol of educational excellence for the whole nation.” In 2015, New Yorker writer Dale Russakoff published The Prize, a painstaking investigation into how that money was spent. His conclusion? Zuckerberg’s millions “enriched seemingly everyone, except for Newark’s children.”
The Gates Foundation has spent billions on all manner of education grants over the years, but in late 2014 Bill Gates flatly stated that his numerous failures here were proof he was “naïve.” A 526-page report from the RAND Corporation released this summer noted that a $575 million project to improve teacher performance in just three school districts—nearly half the money came from the Gates Foundation—was a failure: “Overall, the initiative did not achieve its stated goals for students, particularly LIM [low-income minority] students. . . . [S]tudent outcomes were not dramatically better than outcomes in similar sites that did not participate.”
Our favorite instance of education lottery flops, though, comes from M. Night Shyamalan. The filmmaker’s personal foundation once tried to improve the schools in his hometown of Philadelphia. Philly schools are still a mess, but in 2013 Shyamalan wrote a book about his experience: I Got Schooled: The Unlikely Story of How a Moonlighting Movie Maker Learned the Five Keys to Closing America’s Education Gap. Lest you think Shyamalan is just another filthy rich dilettante, well, his book did get a glowing blurb from Newark’s school superintendent.
