About six years ago, the founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg took a critical decision to invest in Newark’s downtrodden education system; in particular, the entrepreneur donated $100 million in order to drastically transform the failing public-school system. Significantly, Facebook CEO along with Newark mayor Cory Booker and New Jersey governor Chris Christie seemed to have elaborated on a high-level implementation plan to equalize access to quality education. A peculiar thing is that a group of consultants who were involved in coming up with the ideas of how to fix Newark’s failing schools emerged to be full of enthusiasm, and, thus, they were expected to succeed in designing an efficient education policy, respectively. Notwithstanding this fact, Zuckerberg soon came to understanding a profoundly complex framework of Newark school district itself; consequently, hesitation occurred.
Despite the fact that Zuckerberg’s $100 million gift definitely increased the chances to reform Newark public schools system, a well-organized and ambitious plan to transform one of the country’s poorest school districts was doomed to failure from the start. To be precise, since the plan to remake Newark schools initially lacked emphasis on democracy, it could obviously not match the public’s sentiments. Additionally, neither students, nor teachers were engaged in education policy making; and it occurred as most likely another reason why a highly motivated team embedded in education reform failed to transform a failing Newark school system. The last but not the least, Zuckerberg’s donation was irrationally used to pay off salary debts, rather than create equal educational opportunities in schools. I can easily imagine Zuckerberg’s dialogue with his wife, which would look as follows:
“How could it happen? I donated to make Newark students have equal educational opportunities,” said Mark.
“Darling, take it ease, next time you will just be more careful about the way your gifts are sent.” replied Chan.
It is inevitable that Zuckerberg learned a bitter lesson, which consisted in that funding alone does not play a crucial role in the process of education policy adoption. Surely, the lesson that Zuckerberg learnt influenced him in a way that he became aware of how to do charitable work properly. To put it another way, the sixth richest person in the world currently understands that being an effective donor implies an inclusive approach to fixing certain problems; the latter, he is conscious that a large donation alone does not serve as an opportunity to carry out reforms.
