How to Waste $100 Million: Mark Zuckerberg Edition

Zuckerberg’s Money Won’t Solve Government Schooling Problems

by Josh Guckert

In an article for The Wall Street Journal published on Monday, James Piereson and Naomi Schaefer Riley wrote about the results of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg‘s gift of $100 million to Newark public schools. The short answer: “not much” has changed.

Zuckerberg, working in conjunction with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and then-Newark Mayor (and now US Senator) Cory Booker, donated the massive sum to the Newark school system in hopes that it would make a difference for children who have not been given adequate opportunities to learn.

However, “[t]he bulk of the funds supported consultants and the salaries and pensions of teachers and administrators, so the donation only reinforced the bureaucratic and political ills that have long plagued public education in the Garden State.”

The WSJ article points out that Zuckerberg is not the first to think that he could cure the woes of government education through benevolent intentions: in 1993, Walter Annenberg pledged $500 million to public schooling, and even with matching grants growing the donation to $1.1 billion, no noticeable changes took hold, and much of the money became engulfed in the bureaucracy of the schooling rather than being used toward assisting in learning.

Conversely, there are more successful stories profiled, involving John Walton, Ted Forstmann and John Paulson, all of whom used their considerable wealth to help allow children access to private education. Walton and Forstmann each gave $50 million to give low-income children the opportunity to attend private schools, while Paulson donated $8.5 million to the Success Academy charter-school network.

All of this points to the reality that while the US spends more on education than any other developed nation, it still lags far behind in results. At this point, it will take more than just pouring capital into the public school system to achieve results: an overhaul of the entire bureaucracy is greatly needed.

As it is now, the status quo is nearly unable to be changed, due to the hold that teachers’ unions and politicians have on the system. As each of those two entities works to benefit the other, complacency is encouraged, while innovation and change are left behind.

This is of course not exclusive to education; it is all too commonplace with many state endeavors. There is continually a lack of accountability which does nothing to guarantee the best outcomes for students and parents. With the continual centralization of education (with expansions like No Child Left Behind and Common Core), schools have become even more focused upon training to test, rather than endowing with useful information.

While this is no doubt detrimental to society as a whole (and in particular, younger generations), little blame can be put on the teachers who choose to teach in such a manner; they are merely responding to the perverse incentives that government has placed in front of them. Until teachers are pushed to be held responsible for their performances, they cannot be singled out as the only reasons for lagging results in comparison with the rest of the world.

As has been seen plenty both domestically and abroad, charter schools and other private entities perform best for pupils because they are held to a standard. If they do not live up to their expectations, they are punished by the market. Because of this, they take it upon themselves to employ any means necessary to be the most innovative in teaching children and producing results.

Mark Zuckerberg has learned what advocates for liberty in the classroom have known for years: merely putting money into a broken system will do nothing to change the sub-par results that said system has produced. In order for anything to change, there must be choice and competition in education.