Zuckerberg learns cost of school reform

Joe Nocera says the Facebook founder’s $200 million attempt to reform schools in Newark failed, exposing impediments to change.

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 plot 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 fundraising 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 is that Zuckerberg, knowing little about education reform, naively 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.

She goes on to describe blunders by the reformers, including huge sums for consultants, the hiring of an abrasive superintendent, an unwillingness to fund programs that weren’t “transformative” enough, and a top-down approach that infuriated the people of Newark, who felt they were being dictated to by wealthy white outsiders.

Almost half of Zuckerberg’s grant was spent (or committed) to help gain new labor contracts; out of the $200 million in his money and the matching grant, $21 million went to buying out unwanted teachers and other staff members. Yet Zuckerberg didn’t realize until too late that New Jersey state law — not teacher contracts — imposed the seniority system he was trying to get rid of.

Education reformers are furious at the way the movement is portrayed in the book; one critic, Laura Waters, described “The Prize” as “a fairy tale about reform.” Others believe that Russakoff overlooked some of the good things that have taken place in Newark, especially in the area of teacher training. And that the public schools are at least marginally better than they were.

But Russakoff doesn’t let those propagating the status quo off the hook. She describes the school system as an “employer of last resort.” She shows the impediments to real change imposed by the union.

Most telling is her comparison between the resources that a very good charter school, Spark Academy, has at its disposal and those available to the public schools. The KIPP charter network gets $16,400 per pupil, of which $12,664 is devoted to Spark, its elementary school in Newark. The district schools get $19,650 per pupil, but only $9,604 trickles down to the school. Money that the charter school is spending on extra support is being soaked up by the bloated bureaucracy in the public school system. It is a devastating fact.

Here is another one: The primary change in Newark has been the increasing number of students — over 30 percent now — who are being educated in charter schools. I realize that many in the education reform community will applaud this, especially since those students have shown enormous progress in test scores (though Russakoff is quick to note that as in all cities, some Newark charters failed “dramatically”). It’s great for the 30 percent who are learning from charter school teachers. But as Russakoff puts it in the most poignant line in her book, “What would become of the children left behind in district schools?”

The original idea behind the charter school movement was that this competition would spur traditional public schools to improve, to better compete for students. Instead, just as white flight drained urban school districts of white middle-class students when their families fled to the suburbs, now there is a new brain drain, with the black and Latino children of ambitious parents fleeing urban public schools now that they see an alternative.

There is another way to approach reform, a way that includes collaboration with the teachers, instead of bullying them or insulting them. A way that involves the community rather than imposing topdown decisions. A way that allows for cross-pollination between charters and traditional public schools so that the best teaching practices become commonplace.

As for Mark Zuckerberg, his experience in Newark does not appear to have deterred him. Last year he pledged to give $120 million in grants to high-poverty schools in the San Francisco Bay area. This time, however, he says he will collaborate with parents, teachers, school leaders and officials of charter organizations and school districts, according to an op-ed he wrote with his wife, Priscilla Chan, in The San Jose Mercury News. Apparently, Zuckerberg has learned his lesson. What will it take for the rest of us to learn?

Nocera is a New York Times columnist.