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I remember the hype around this announcement, and yes, everyone expected it to turn out differently.

• x0ra 11y ago
  really ? This is a large amount of money in the hands of public "servants". This was doomed to failure from day 1.
• merpnderp 11y ago
  Why? Money and education results don't correlate. Every single factor in education is overwhelmed by parental involvement. So maybe that $100 million should of been used to pay parents to participate in their children's education.
  • VLM 11y ago
    > Money and education results don't correlate Even if they did, see my math analysis above that roughly 1/5 of employees are front line instructional and 4/5 are deadwood administrative. Therefore even in the most superficial analysis 80% of the money will be wasted on metrics and TPS reports and consultants. The reality of course is deadwood can cause much more damage than a front line instructor, lets say 2x as much, so of the $100M at least $90M would be wasted on deadwood and only $10M would get to the instructors. $10M to the instructors sounds helpful, but its a big district so it divides out to only $10K or so per instructor. Figure a substantial portion of that will be lost in paperwork and corruption (4 out of 5 employees exist to get in the way...) so you only get $5K per teacher effective. Assuming money equaled results, $5K isn't much. A math teacher could buy 50 brand new TI calculators, assuming buying brand new calculators increased student results, which they probably don't. Or about ten ipads, so the ten worst troublemakers could play angry birds and get out of the way of the rest of the class. Or $5K is about two sets of new overpriced textbooks for newark's very large class sizes. Again assuming any of those expenses give results anywhere but the product sellers bottom lines... But even if they did give results, they couldn't give much.
  • chrischen 11y ago
    Money thrown at things in general doesn't work. It's not specific to education. See VICE's piece on the Afghanistan reconstruction and how much of American money is wasted. Ex: Afghanis are tearing down equipment, planes, etc, so that they can request to purchase new ones using American money.
  • threatofrain 11y ago
    I think money and education do correlate in a way that is difficult to disentangle, because more money in education probably correlates to higher property values, and higher property values probably means more money in education. And these things probably correlate to parents who are more likely to be professionals and more likely to value educational involvement. But revenue from taxes might be spent more carefully, with a budget already planned out, whereas a sudden cash infusion was not planned. So the money's potential was unexpressed. $20M went to consultants!
• mikeash 11y ago
  I seem to recall seeing a lot of people predicting it would be a massive waste.
• fatjokes 11y ago
  Really? I feel the consensus around the time was that it coincided with the release of The Social Network movie and that Zuckerberg was basically trying to buy some good press to offset how he was portrayed in the movie.