Philanthropic ideals rooted in teaching kids
Dr. Priscilla Chan described when she first recognized the needs of children in disadvantaged communities and the frustration she felt, not knowing how to help.
She was tutoring in an afterschool program in Dorchester, Conn., she told the few hundred people attending a fundraising gala for Teach for America on Wednesday.
“I was supposed to help with homework in a windowless basement that flooded every time it rained,” said Chan, wife of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
One of the students she tutored stopped coming and was missing school. Chan found her on the playground alone, missing teeth.
“I was suddenly struck by how vulnerable children are,” she said. “I felt powerless.”
Chan would go on to be a teacher and later a physician, but felt that in each world, she was unable to address all the needs of children.
“Both in the classroom and the hospital, I felt I was coming up short,” she said.
As the child of refugees, Chan told the Teach for America crowd at the Design Center in San Francisco, she was prodded by her teachers to attend Harvard University, the first in her family to attend college.
“I was lucky,” she said. “Luck is not scalable. Luck is not a national strategy.”
Chan said she and Zuckerberg want to learn from organizations like Teach for America, which has been funneling teachers into thousands of lower-income communities across the country for 25 years.
“This is hard work, but important work,” she said. “There’s simply no other choice.”
Chan and her husband have focused their own philanthropic efforts on education and science, vowing to spend most of their vast Facebook fortune on those efforts during their lifetimes. They created Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in 2015, committing $3 billion to cure, treat or prevent all human disease within the next century.
The power couple also opened a private school in East Palo Alto, the Primary School, to provide a free education that incorporates health care into the services provided to students.
Some of the staff and administrators at the school have a background in Teach for America, or TFA, which currently has nearly 300 teachers in Bay Area schools.
The TFA teachers don’t have full credentials, but are billed as top college graduates who want to spend at least two years teaching in some of the country’s poorest communities. Yet in recent years, critics — including teachers unions — have condemned the organization, saying it’s filling the country’s neediest classrooms with inexperienced and cheap labor.
The San Francisco school board voted to not renew its contract with the organization this school year, saying it wanted to focus on hiring qualified teachers with long-term commitments.
Chan, however, lauded the program as an example of an organization to model after.
“Teach for America has helped us understand what works and what doesn’t,” she said. “TFA is more than just a few steps ahead of us here.”