Posted on 10/21/2015 7:50:55 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
When Dale Russakoff began writing about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million gift to help fix the failing schools in Newark, N.J., she assumed she would end up telling an uplifting story of transformational change.
"It sounded to me at the time like, well, that's enough money to do anything," Russakoff recalled of watching Zuckerberg announce the gift before a whooping "Oprah" audience in 2010, joined by a political odd couple in the form of Newark's charismatic, reform-minded Democratic mayor at the time, Cory Booker, and New Jersey's Republican governor, Chris Christie.
"I didn't think it was going to be the miracle that they talked about," Russakoff said, "but I thought that it was going to be noticeable, positive change in education in a city that had been so neglected by history."
Plagued by corruption and mismanagement, the schools had been taken over by the state in 1995 — hence the importance of Christie's involvement. But the system remained a disaster, with fewer than 40 percent of third- through eighth-graders reading or doing math at grade level.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
RE: Maybe Z’s goal was to demonstrate that lack of money isn’t the problem, and more money isn’t the solution.
WOW, and he was willing to squander $100 Million to prove it?
That money could have been put to good use funding a potentially lucrative start-up.
Some people just have way too much money.
Just replace the word wanderer with squanderer... the democrat socialist and Rino's live to squander.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDAhOuiFZyY
Can't say how many decades since I heard or thought of this tune and boom there it is, amazing how the mind works.
But the article does say 5 years was not enough time..................
So, it was $200 million smackers!!
#6 He was smart enough to steal the idea of Facebook then hire people who knew how to run a company and who got stock in the company and very rich when it used phony numbers of users to impress Wall Street when they did their IPO.
The CEO is really just a figurehead. What has he done other then rake in the money from the stock going up? What does he do at Facebook?
He keeps busy going around to meetings with other rich people trying to out do each other.
In the last ten years, in a city of less than 200,000 people, during a time when enrollment declined to 28,000 students, our school district spent more than 2 billion dollars rebuilding and upgrading every school in the district. That is over 71 thousand dollars per student and that is only what was spent on upgrading the facilities not teacher salaries, books, buses, and everything else.
When my wife and I went to school here just a tiny fraction of that amount was spent on schools even in inflation adjusted dollars. Since that time student achievement has tanked. The school district blames the students for their poor performance in a mealy mouthed way that points out that most of the kids are now “minorities”.
So 200 million bucks... Newark has only 7 thousand more students than our school district. 200 million bucks isn’t even a fraction of what our district spends... why would anyone think that amount would make even the tiniest ripple. Public schools are out of control money pits.
Giving $100 million to Newark Public Schools ? He’d have been better off burning it in a big bonfire.
Or using it as TP.
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