“If they knew they were going to stop investing in our community,” Angelica Cardenas told The Wall Street Journal, “it should have been spoken about earlier on.”
Cardenas, whose 3-year-old daughter was enrolled at The Primary School, a private institution funded by Mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Priscilla Chan, was distraught to learn that the school is closing. Like many parents — including Cardenas’ siblings who collectively have five children enrolled — she was caught off guard.
A representative from the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative said the foundation’s priorities had shifted; they have offered parents money for educational savings accounts to ease the blow. And their plan was never to be the sole funder of the school in the long term anyway. After dumping more than $125 million into it, they had trouble getting other donors to buy in. Which is not surprising, given that the school was failing, even by its founder’s account.
Last year, Chan, a pediatrician by training, told The Wall Street Journal that student outcomes weren’t where “frankly, anyone would have wanted them to be.” It’s hard to know how bad they were, but frankly, the results are not surprising.
From the start, the school was not designed around academic outcomes. Instead, according to the Journal, it “aimed to support the ‘whole child’ through wraparound services, including free dental checkups, early-intervention screenings and wellness coaching for parents.”
Such an approach is hardly revolutionary. For instance, the Harlem Children’s Zone and its Promise Academy charter schools have been offering these kinds of wrap-around services for more than a quarter of a century. But the Primary School was lacking the focus that all schools — but especially schools for underprivileged kids —need. Plans for curriculum and school discipline seemed at best unclear.
When the Journal asked my American Enterprise Institute colleague Rick Hess about this fiasco, he said that business leaders “look at K-12 education and go, ‘Man, how hard can it be to improve this thing?’” And then they find out “Well, it’s incredibly hard.”
But Hess is giving Zuckerberg and Chan too much credit. If the couple had given even a fraction of their attention to this question, they would have applied some very basic business principles to the problem and given The Primary School a chance at success. Namely, they would have asked what has worked and funded that. Because unlike trying to build early social media apps, there are clear models out there for schools that teach kids from poor homes, broken homes, homes where English is not the first language and so forth. And Chan and Zuckerberg apparently chose to use none of them.
But before we get to that, it’s worth going back a little further. In 2010, Zuckerberg made a deal to give $100 million to help improve Newark’s public schools. It was a total wash. Most of the money supported consultants and the salaries and pensions of teachers and administrators and the gift accomplished almost nothing as a result. Again, the tech entrepreneur’s refusal to learn from others was astonishing. Bill Gates dumped tens of millions into New York public schools to little effect. Before that, Walter Annenberg gave half a billion to public schools across the country to little effect.
These are the kind of results that would cause any intelligent businessman to rethink his investment. But not Zuckerberg. It appears that he and Chan have learned little. At least they’re not dumping money into public school systems. The fact that the former head of Chicago’s public school system is the chairman of the CZI Board is a sure sign, though, that Zuckerberg and Chan still don’t have a clue. Why would you be taking advice from someone who led one of the worst performing public-school districts in the country? And modeling the school on the idea that what the kids need most is “wrap-around services” — that is, resources to address their non-academic problems — is really part of the same narrative. This is what leaders of public school unions like to say: They can’t teach kids well until we solve societal problems like poverty and racism.
In fact, that’s just an excuse — the truth is that this country has managed to successfully educate millions of poor and minority kids without ending poverty and racism.
If you have hundreds of millions of dollars burning a hole in your pocket, there are some things you could do to improve the lives of underserved students. And providing them with on-site dental care is not the most important. There are scholarships to schools that work, for one thing. Organizations like the Children’s Scholarship Fund support students at private schools — including many Catholic schools — with long records of helping students succeed academically. There are charter school networks like Success Academies where students regularly outperform their wealthy suburban counterparts. Why not give their founder $100 million to further their work?
The explanation for the fiasco of The Primary School is willful blindness with a dash of hubris. To educate poor kids you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. But you do need to watch what makes one turn.