Whenever there’s a discussion about failing school systems, sooner it later it turns to what will fix the problem. The answer is always the same: Money! Money will fix the problem. If we only had enough money to repair buildings and buy supplies. If we could pay teachers, principals and administrators more they would work harder. The standard big government solution, throw money at the problem always works, right?
My first thought was, 200 years ago children were educated in one room schoolhouses with a blackboard and a couple copies of McGuffy’s Reader. But I guess this is a different time requiring a different solution.
So if money will solve the problem, how much would it take? What if I invented the next big thing, that thing that everybody has to have, like the iPhone. And I became a billionaire overnight. So I go to the local school board and ask, “How much would it take to fix the problem so every child gets an education? A million dollars? Ten million? A hundred million? They tell me how much, I write a check and within a few years, the problem is solved.
It’s as simple as that, right? Well I just learned that Mark Zuckerberg (the Facebook guy) stole my idea! In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg gave a $100 million to the ailing Newark, NJ school system to fix it. His only stipulation was that a matching $100 million be raised from other donors. So in addition to the normal tax revenue available to run the schools, they received $200 million that could be spent on anything needed to fix the problem.
Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark at that time, said they could turn the system around in five years and have a model to fix any failing school system in the country. If you’re not aware, the Newark, NJ school system was so corrupt and mismanaged, the State took control away from the city in 1995 to try and fix it. Twenty years later, the State is still running the system.
I found out about this experiment when I stumbled across an interview with Dale Russakoff about her new book The Prize : Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools?. She documents the trials and tribulations of the attempt to reform the worst school district in the country from day one.
The Prize: Who’s in charge of America’s schools?
Book reviews and author interviews are supposed to tell you just enough about the book to get you to buy it so you can see how it ends. It worked. I bought the book. And I can tell you (spoiler alert!) it ended well for the teacher’s union, companies with school board contracts and consultants. For the students of the Newark School System, not so much.
I expected the book to be an expose’ of a corrupt system, but it really wasn’t. The book isn’t political at all. The author recounted the facts of the project in a chronological order. Interspersed within the story of the government’s futile attempt to fix a failed education system from the top down, were the success stories of teachers and principals who were able to make a difference at their level.
The author laid out the facts so you could draw your own conclusions. These are mine:
The Newark school system is the perfect example of big government gone bad. For decades, school board members repaid their supporters with jobs in the school system or contracts to provide services. The author notes that in most systems, an administrative assistant would work for three or four managers. In the Newark system, a manger might have three or four assistants and those assistants might have assistants! This equates to 12-14 people doing a job that one person could do. Money wasted?
The primary mission of large city school systems is no longer education, it is jobs. Before a change is made that might improve children’s education, it is weighed against how it affects school system employment. If the affect is negative, the change is not made. The loss of one job is unacceptable in order to improve education. The acceptable answer to most problems is to hire more people.
During a school board election, a city councilwoman urged people to elect the slate that was about labor. Her statement: “We have a clear choice between those who will do nothing for labor and those that will do everything for labor”, “Jobs, jobs, jobs! Jobs that are safe and secure.” The slate called itself Children First.
Teachers unions exist to protect teachers’ jobs, not insure a quality education for each child. As non-union charter schools became established, the number of teachers needed in the public system was reduced. In unions, seniority rules, requiring high-performing, talented teachers to be laid off in order to keep incompetent teachers with more seniority. In an attempt to try to keep the good, low seniority teachers, they kept the high seniority, incompetent teachers, but assigned them to non-teaching duties at a cost of $21 million over three years!
In order to get the Zuckerberg $100 million, a matching $100 million had to be collected from other wealthy donors. Mayor Booker had a hard time rounding up the other $100 million. It seems that a lot of wealthy education reform philanthropist believed that district school systems cannot be fixed. They chose to donate their money to charter schools. Maybe they were right.
Where the $200 million went. $185.9 million was spent. $13.7 million was earmarked for the Principal’s contract, but not spent because the Principal’s Union refused to negotiate. $400,000 remains unspent.
An additional $24.3 million was raised for charter schools by the Newark Charter School Fund and the New Schools Venture Fund is not included above.
$224.3 million was raised from the private sector to help improve the Newark School System. Less than five years later, the money is practically gone with virtually no noticeable improvement.