On September 24, 2010, Mark Zuckerberg was known, to the extent he was known at all, as a scrappy 26-year-old Harvard dropout and tech company founder. The theatrical release of The Social Network was still a week away, and controversies over Zuckerberg’s handling of fake news, racist harassment, abuse of contractors, Cambridge Analytica, the Rohingya genocide, and much more were still years in the future.
So when he went on The Oprah Winfrey Show and announced that he was donating $100 million of his fortune to the public schools in Newark, New Jersey, the reaction was rapturous applause, not tired cynicism.
If you’ve followed the story of Zuckerberg’s donation since that date, you know that spending that $100 million turned out to be a great deal more complicated. On the latest episode of the Future Perfect podcast, we went to Newark to examine the results of Zuckerberg’s gift, and of then-Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s efforts to implement it:
I highly recommend you download the podcast, which goes deep into what the Newark experience says about wealth inequality and philanthropy. This piece will focus more on what happened on the ground, and what evaluations of the gift have told us.
Basically, the net effect of Zuckerberg’s intervention in Newark’s schools is disputed. Defenders argue that the donation fueled reforms that helped students, and point to rising test scores and graduation rates in Newark as evidence that the disruption worked. Opponents are more skeptical.
But the process that led to the gift and the reforms it spurred are easier to evaluate. And here, critics seem to have a point — billionaires from out of town did seem to have greater say than the people of Newark. The Zuckerberg gift and the fight over it tell us a lot about philanthropy, democracy, and the tension that can often arise between the two.
How the gift came together
By the time Booker became Newark mayor in 2006 (after losing an incredibly tense and racially charged election in 2002), the city’s schools had been struggling for decades.
Dale Russakoff, a former Washington Post education reporter who wrote the definitive book on Zuckerberg’s gift, says the schools’ leadership was rife with corruption. “The school board was treating itself to junkets, traveling to remote vacation islands on school district money,” she says. Meanwhile, state investigators found deplorable conditions at schools, including wastewater pumping into the street and painters stripping walls while class was in session.
In 1995, a judge had ordered the state to take over the city’s schools — but that did little to improve the dismal quality of instruction. When Booker took office, barely more than half of the district’s students graduated high school.
Booker, who held broadly pro-school choice views, including support for private vouchers, wanted to intervene but was limited by state control. For a time, he was serving as mayor while Democrat Jon Corzine was governor. But Corzine had a close alliance with the state teachers unions. When Republican Chris Christie unseated Corzine in 2009, though, Booker had a fellow school choice fan with whom to collaborate to remake Newark schools.
He just needed a source of funding. A friend tipped him off that Zuckerberg — a new billionaire with no philanthropic history (he was only 26, after all) — wanted to make a big move on education. Booker arranged to attend the investment bank Allen & Company’s conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, and be seated near Zuckerberg. “Booker sat next to Zuckerberg and he gave him his pitch, which he’s brilliant at — giving pitches for Newark and getting people to invest money in Newark and also making himself seem like a great investment,” Russakoff recounts.
The basic pitch was that Newark was small enough that something like $100 million could actually make a difference across the district, in a way it couldn’t in a massive district like New York City’s or Los Angeles’s. But Newark was still big enough that if a reform package worked, it could be picked up and emulated in bigger cities.
How Newark residents were (and weren’t) consulted
The pitch worked.
Booker eventually got a $100 million promise from Zuckerberg. But he didn’t stop there. The gift was a matching donation: Booker needed to raise another $100 million from a variety of other wealthy donors to unlock it.
In her book The Prize, Russakoff recounts a pitch Booker made to Bill Ackman, the billionaire New York hedge fund manager, who had been a fan of Booker’s for years. The mayor first requested $50 million. Ackman countered with $25 million, which Booker took.
By giving $25 million, Ackman also bought himself a board seat to something called the Foundation for Newark’s Future (FNF). The FNF was the outfit that would be responsible for handing out the $200 million in total funding the Zuckerberg matching gift brought in. The FNF’s board consisted of Booker and any donor giving $10 million or more (a threshold later cut to $5 million).
Conspicuously missing from that board? Newark’s residents.
Ray Chambers, a private equity veteran and longtime donor to Newark schools, tried to change this by coordinating a $1 million donation from Newark residents, to show local buy-in. In an email later obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, Booker’s chief fundraiser called the sum “insignificant.”
Newarkers weren’t completely absent. While there would be no community involvement on the foundation board, Booker did try to consult ordinary citizens by hiring New York City political consultant and education reform booster Bradley Tusk to conduct community engagement.
But Russakoff says that when the people Tusk hired to run listening sessions wanted to report back on what they heard, and what uses they thought Newark residents wanted the money to go toward, they were told that the city had already decided on the changes it wanted. “The listening sessions really weren’t listened to,” Russakoff says. (Booker has disputed this, telling reporters the community forums were important to the process.)
One of the multimillionaire members of the board of the FNF told Russakoff, “It wasn’t real community engagement, it was public relations.”
What the money was ultimately spent on
Booker presented the broad outlines of his reform package to Gov. Christie in the summer of 2010, before the gift was announced. “Real change has casualties and those who prospered under the pre-existing order will fight loudly and viciously,” he wrote in the plan. He declared that he wanted to “make Newark the charter school capital of the nation” and incorporate greater teacher accountability metrics, weakening tenure protections in the process.
As my colleague Dylan Scott explains, that’s roughly the approach Booker took once the money from Zuckerberg and his matching donors came in. Half of the school district’s principals were replaced; 14 schools (11 traditional, three charters) were shut down by fall 2015. New schools of both types were opened, and the city adopted an open enrollment system so parents put their kids into traditional schools and charters through the same process.
Russakoff’s book has a detailed breakdown of where the $200 million from Zuckerberg and his matching donors ultimately went. The highlights:
- $48.3 million went to a new union agreement, which incorporated test-based accountability metrics and weaker tenure protections; of that total, $31 million went to back pay that helped sweeten the deal for teachers who had to approve the new deal.
- $57.6 million went to expanding and providing operating support for charter schools
- $21 million went to consultants working on everything from comms to “data systems, strategic planning, financial analysis … reorganization of district offices, teacher and principal evaluation frameworks, advice on teachers’ contract negotiations, design of universal enrollment system, analysis of student performance data.”
- $12 million went to local philanthropies for a variety of projects.
The rest went to smaller-scale projects. But the big-ticket items were certainly the new teacher contract and the new charter school launches.
Did billionaire gifts fix Newark schools?
There have been two major attempts to evaluate the effects of the Newark reforms. The first, by Harvard professor Tom Kane and his colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, was funded by Zuckerberg’s foundation. They looked at changes in student achievement, rather than absolute levels, to adjust for differences in the composition of students going into different schools. They found that student progress in both English and math fell in the first few years of the reform, reflecting the disruption they caused. But then student progress sped up again; math achievement growth is back where it was before the reforms, and English achievement growth is higher.
Jesse Margolis, an economist originally contracted by Christopher Cerf, who oversaw the Newark schools for Christie from 2015 to 2018, estimates that compared to other low-income municipalities in the state, Newark’s test scores have gone from the 39th to the 78th percentile — from below average to considerably above (among all New Jersey towns, it went from the 4th to 14th percentile — progress, but still way below average). The high school graduation rate rose from 63 percent in 2011 to 77 percent in 2018.
No one is under the impression that Newark’s schools are “fixed,” or that the work of improving them is done. But the two studies tell a story of noticeable, modest improvement after major disruption.
The quarter of the philanthropic investment that went to charter schools in some ways exemplifies the best cases for and against what Booker did. The Future Perfect podcast team — Dylan Matthews and Byrd Pinkerton — visited the KIPP Spark Academy, a charter elementary school that predates the gift but benefited with the rest of the sector from Zuckerberg’s contribution and the new emphasis on the charter sector. KIPP has a reputation as an unusually high-performing charter chain, and randomized trials by Mathematica have found that it causes significantly more learning than district schools in nine states (plus Washington, DC) where it operates, including New Jersey.
Sure enough, our visit led me to believe that Spark is a wonderful place to go to school. It lacked the strict “no excuses” discipline and heavily regimented curricula that charters are often known for; there were school uniforms, but kids were free to yell and goof off. In one class, a kid sat on a rug because he was more comfortable there than at a desk.
But the growth of charters like KIPP has, critics argue, resulted in fewer public funds going to traditional public schools — about $1,000 less for instruction per student than they received a decade or so earlier. KIPP teachers are not unionized, though there have been efforts in the South Bronx to recognize a union at a school there.
The most important lesson: you have to listen to residents
Regardless of the net impact on the district or on test scores, the biggest lesson of the Newark experience is likely about process. There are many ways to boost student learning and increase test scores — but not all of them involve the kind of public consultation process that occurred in Newark. You don’t have to disagree with the actual policies Booker enacted to think that barely consulting Newarkers and implementing a plan that was there from the get-go is problematic. Booker appears to have spent more time in 2010 pitching Zuckerberg on the idea than on pitching his constituents.
Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have since founded a dedicated philanthropic entity, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which promises to “work hand-in-hand with those on the front lines of change-making” and “believe[s] that lasting change is possible only with the support of community movements,” provisos that feel directly inspired by the Newark experience.
At the same time, CZI’s major education initiative — an investment in the computerized learning platform Summit Learning — has provoked a massive backlash in communities where it’s been adopted. Tom Kane, the Harvard economist, was initially contracted to evaluate that plan, but Summit canceled it. Asked about the cancellation, Kane told the New York Times that, in the reporter’s words, he was “wary of speaking out against Summit because many education projects receive funding from Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan’s philanthropic organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.”
That kind of dynamic, where the views of wealthy individuals as channeled through their philanthropy count for more than those of the communities affected by the policies those philanthropists support, was at work in Newark too. And it’s a problem regardless of where you land on education reform.
Read more
- Dylan Scott explains the Newark gift
- Patrick Wall at Chartbeat has done some fantastic reporting on the outcomes of the gift
- Dale Russakoff’s history of the gift, and the New Yorker excerpt of her book
- The Harvard evaluation, and a critique of it
- Another evaluation finding the intervention worked
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