Newark, Chan-Zuckerberg, $45 Billion And The School of Hard Knocks

The phrase “school of hard knocks” isn’t the first one that jumps to mind when the topic of Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan come up, yet author Dale Russakoff argued Friday that the couple’s $100 million donation in 2010 to the Newark school system put them through such an institution, and that furthermore, the experience directly shaped their approach to giving away their $45 billion fortune.

Russakoff made her remarks at The Big Ideas Fest, a conference about innovations in education that took place Dec. 2–5 in San Jose.

Chan and Zuckerberg unveiled their initiative Tuesday through a letter to their newborn daughter Maxima. The couple want to focus on personalized education, promoting entrepreneurship, eradicating disease, Internet connectivity, and clean energy.

Core to their efforts are the pronouncement of six principles, which you can read for yourself here. [For a great analysis of their approach, read Fusion writer Felix Salmon’s piece.]

But here are the first two:

We must make long term investments over 25, 50 or even 100 years. The greatest challenges require very long time horizons and cannot be solved by short term thinking.

We must engage directly with the people we serve. We can’t empower people if we don’t understand the needs and desires of their communities.

On the face of it, these principles probably sound self-evident. However, Russakoff’s five-year odyssey of reporting on the Newark educational reform project showed that Chan and Zuckerberg failed to apply them.

As she reports in her book “The Prize,” leaders of the reform initiative failed to win over any influential advocates within the local community. Part of the problem with that is that by not listening to the community, you can’t discover what they’ll respond to.

Instead, the effort, which was championed by then Mayor Cory Booker and Governor Chris Christie, led to a financial crisis, mass layoffs, worse student performance on average. It also left behind an angry electorate.

Russakoff told us:

“Without question, some good did come from the $100 million spent, and the other $100 million from the matching donors: A very significant expansion of the city’s high-performing charter schools, improved management systems inside what had been a really dysfunctional school district bureaucracy, and new teachers contracts with much tougher accountability for teachers’ instruction of students (although nothing like the revolutionary changes that Mark Zuckerberg wanted in the beginning.)

But the district schools in Newark that are attended by 60 percent of children had been plunged into a financial crisis in part because of one of the good things, because of the exodus of the children to the charter schools. The dollars went with them.”

It turns out that Chan and Zuckerberg had placed too much trust in the politicians and educational-consultant-complex as proxies. Instead, they should have communicated directly with the local community leaders, and become more involved in community building.

“Based on what Cory Booker had told him, Mark Zuckerberg said that he thought he was doing something that was what people in Newark wanted for themselves.

Meanwhile, Cory Booker vowed that he would be the 24/7 education Mayor, but he got hijacked by a number of other distractions, including the murder rate in the city, a crushing fiscal crisis, a political revolt by the city council, and his race for senator.

Instead of Newark becoming the role model for the nation, multiple philanthropists are using it as a case study for how NOT to treat a community that they had hoped to help.

But here’s the fascinating part: Mark Zuckerberg, at the ripe older age of 31, has emerged as one of Newark’s most serious and self-reflective students.”

Russakoff points to another announcement made Tuesday in Newark just hours before Chan and Zuckerberg made theirs.

“The Foundation dispensing their gift in Newark announced that it was committing $10 million to create a network of community schools. This is a big initiative of Mayor Baraka’s, schools with wrap-around services for children … in the aftermath … the foundation has made other visible investments in community, including the Mayor’s summer youth employment program, and a citywide campaign to increase the number of college graduates in Newark, which is only now 12%. The goal is to get to 25% by 2025.

“At Tuesday’s community school announcement, Mayor Baraka stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Foundation’s president and the state appointed school superintendent, appointed by Governor Christie. It was a real tableau of rapprochement, even though it was belated.

Cory Booker and Chris Christie, as you may well have heard, have left the fray of the education reform struggle that they had set in motion with so much fanfare in 2010. Booker left for the Senate, and Governor Christie left for the presidential campaign circuit.

Mark Zuckerberg alone, among the three men who sat on Oprah Winfrey’s stage that day, appears to have been changed by the experience.

As he and Chan wrote to their baby daughter, it will be decades, maybe even a century, before their new, far grander initiative reaches fruition.

But if it bears even some of the fruits they hope for the world in which Maxima is going to grow up, it will be in part because of the lessons her parents learned the hard way, in the tough educational precincts of Newark, New Jersey.”

I have yet to read the book, and I’m sure it’s a difficult balancing act to both listen to the community while blowing up the teachers’ compensation system in the way that Zuckerberg wanted. And reforming school systems is notoriously hard. What’s important is that Chan and Zuckerberg are focused on quickly learning from their mistakes, and implementing what they learned.

Russakoff said that during an interview, the couple were “disarmingly honest” about their lack of knowledge of philanthropy, but “in committing this $100 million, they hoped not only to help children in Newark, but also to learn from the experience, and to become better philanthropists as a result of it.”

For Chan and Zuckerberg’s peers, this is an attitude and lesson that are worth taking to heart. They’re not the first, and they’re not the last generation of “philanthrocapitalists.” As another generation of philanthropists think of curing the world’s ills but remain distrustful of governments as the best implementers of these fixes, it’s important to pay attention to what did and didn’t work in their world, and why.

As I travelled in Southeast Asia in the early Nineties on a bike after college and talked to people working on development projects, one of the things that I was told was that outsider NGOs would parachute into local communities, implement their idea for a fix, and then leave the local community to work with the fix — even though they hadn’t been consulted.

This would happen over and over again, resulting in a lot of boondoggles.

Let’s hope the next generation of design-thinking trained do-gooders can avoid repeating history.