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Mark Zuckerberg and his wife to donate $120M to needy Bay Area schools

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Re: Mark Zuckerberg and his wife to donate $120M to needy Bay Area schools

#41

Post by InclinedPlane »

monochr wrote: post #32
nostromo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing that the money is all gone (or committed) with a large chunk being spent on consultants billing "a thousand dollars a day." It gives me more appreciation for Bill Gate's approach, which seems much more cautious, albeit slow.

>Amazing that the money is all gone Not really. This is what American Capitalism is known as around the world. In oil and gas you know to sell your shares and not work for a firm that gets an American CEO because everything the article talks about happens without fail within the first three years. The short and simple of it is that Americans businesses just plain have no morals and everyone expects to be screwed over…

Applying the label "capitalism" to a government run school system is outright laughable.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg and his wife to donate $120M to needy Bay Area schools

#42

Post by aianus »

sytelus wrote: post #31
L_Rahman wrote: post #14

In light of this announcement, it's worth reading the New Yorker's fantastic piece exploring how Zuckerberg's previous $100 million investment into the Newark public school fared. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_...

I'd some 2nd hand experience of how inefficient US school system is. Lots of districts and school actually have huge budgets. Some in fact have more budgets than entire state of a 3rd world country. The way this goes is, people in charge would cry about not having money. Then they would get chunk of money. And then those people would come up with ideas such as free distribution of iPads to everyone, go to conferences…

When I was a senior in High School in Toronto in 2009, our school had recently purchased a pallet of brand new $100+ calculus textbooks. The up-to-date textbooks were chock-full of politically correct pictures of minority students doing math in wheelchairs by typing equations into their latest-gen $200 Texas Instruments graphing calculators. On the other hand, they were missing topics such as integration entirely since they had been removed in recent versions of the Ontario math curriculum.

My math teacher, however, handed out the same tattered calculus books students had been using since the 1980's and forbid the use of calculators on all tests or exams. We learned math by proving theorems and solving word problems involving few, if any, numbers. I went on to study math in university and freshman honors calculus was a cakewalk compared to Mr. Sidhu's twelfth grade calculus and vectors class and his 30 year old textbooks.

I fail to see how any amount of money could improve education unless it's spent on hiring better teachers (which the unions would never allow). You really don't need much besides a chalkboard, a copier, and a high-quality, engaged teacher.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg and his wife to donate $120M to needy Bay Area schools

#43

Post by Dewie »

fantomass wrote: post #40
fdsary wrote: post #13

From a Scandinavian point of view this seems like such a detour. Why wait for billionaires to be so kind of fund schools when you could tax wealth and fund public and universal education? Why do the American people chose this way time after time?

Honestly, I don't like this kind of condescending comments. I'm european too and I hear this kind of statements all the time. We Europeans in general and particular Scandinavians have it very easy to judge in our warm and cuddly nests. A lot of what is wrong in the U.S. today goes back to our own absolutely unparalleled failure in the roughly 40 years between 1940 until 1980. I think the American people could be far…

> A lot of what is wrong in the U.S. today goes back to our own absolutely unparalleled failure in the roughly 40 years between 1940 until 1980.

Please explain.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg and his wife to donate $120M to needy Bay Area schools

#44

Post by GabrielF00 »

sytelus wrote: post #31
L_Rahman wrote: post #14

In light of this announcement, it's worth reading the New Yorker's fantastic piece exploring how Zuckerberg's previous $100 million investment into the Newark public school fared. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_...

I'd some 2nd hand experience of how inefficient US school system is. Lots of districts and school actually have huge budgets. Some in fact have more budgets than entire state of a 3rd world country. The way this goes is, people in charge would cry about not having money. Then they would get chunk of money. And then those people would come up with ideas such as free distribution of iPads to everyone, go to conferences…

The Boston Public Schools has 4,500 teachers, not including any other staff. Any organization in the US that employs 4,500 professionals is going to have a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars at a minimum. The fact that this budget is enormous compared to the state budgets of third-world countries is simply because salaries are higher in the US by orders of magnitude.

The reason that schools can spend a lot of money on flashy projects when regular, annual needs are not being met is because it's often much easier to fund flashy new projects. School districts can fund technology purchases through bond measures or through grants, but funders are unlikely to be interested in paying money for everyday non-flashy things like cafeterias. It's entirely possible to get grant money that's specifically earmarked for one particular project and also have longstanding needs that aren't being met.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg and his wife to donate $120M to needy Bay Area schools

#45

Post by pessimizer »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #15
easytiger wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The federal government spent $683.7 billion in a year on defense alone. maybe they could spare a few million for the children. Relying on private finance to help schools simply will make matters worse from a big picture in a similar way to how Africa became addicted to overseas aid

Sigh. Did you spend one nanosecond of time doing any research before firing off your oh so pious comment about sparing a few pennies to save the children? A very quick google found me ed.gov, which is the US Department of Education. Here is an exact quote [1]: ED currently administers a budget of $67.3 billion in discretionary appropriations (including discretionary Pell Grant funding) and operates programs that touc…

Nobody actually thought that less than a penny was being spent on schools. What they were saying was that money that was currently being used for defense should be shifted to other things.

If you really wanted to attack the commenter, you could have compared rates of growth since 1980 in both defense and education, or compared defense/education spending ratios of other countries to our own, or anything other than what you did: posted the DoE's budget, a count of the number of students, schools, and school districts in the US, and a mention that most school financing is funded by local taxes as if it were something you didn't know was common knowledge.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg and his wife to donate $120M to needy Bay Area schools

#46

Post by monochr »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #41
monochr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Amazing that the money is all gone Not really. This is what American Capitalism is known as around the world. In oil and gas you know to sell your shares and not work for a firm that gets an American CEO because everything the article talks about happens without fail within the first three years. The short and simple of it is that Americans businesses just plain have no morals and everyone expects to be screwed over…

Applying the label "capitalism" to a government run school system is outright laughable.

This is capitalism in government, that was the whole point behind the "venture philanthropists".

Watching plan after plan crash and burn with them blaming the poor is like a getting a time machine ride to 1860's Britain trying to deal with the massive dislocations of the industrial economy without doing the one sane thing they could have done: massive government intervention in the economy to slow down the worst effects of industrialization.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg and his wife to donate $120M to needy Bay Area schools

#47

Post by fantomass »

Dewie wrote: post #43
fantomass wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I don't like this kind of condescending comments. I'm european too and I hear this kind of statements all the time. We Europeans in general and particular Scandinavians have it very easy to judge in our warm and cuddly nests. A lot of what is wrong in the U.S. today goes back to our own absolutely unparalleled failure in the roughly 40 years between 1940 until 1980. I think the American people could be far…

> A lot of what is wrong in the U.S. today goes back to our own absolutely unparalleled failure in the roughly 40 years between 1940 until 1980. Please explain.

Ok, I see, I dind't phrase it carefully enough - sorry. I meant what happend in Europe, not in the U.S.

Here's my very very very unhealty simplifictation of how the lack of public funding of public services and the events in europe are related.

underfunded schools > public spending in general > fiscal quote > "washington" > elections > cultural reflexes > "socialism" > libertarianism/Reagan > Europe > cold war > socialism > WW II

Re: Mark Zuckerberg and his wife to donate $120M to needy Bay Area schools

#48

Post by InclinedPlane »

guelo wrote: post #35
spindritf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans spend over $14k/kid on education already, more than Sweden which is below $12k, and almost twice the OECD average.[1] I'm guessing that all developed countries have already reached a point of diminishing returns in their spending on education. The reason money from billionaires is interesting is because it's less limited by the regulations. It can be spent in ways public money cannot be used. It didn't work…

That $14k average includes public and private schools, as well as college tuition. It also ignores the fact that US public school funding is provided via local property taxes, so wealthy neighborhoods have better funded public schools than the lower income neighborhoods, whose kids actually need more resources.

Per student spending at K-12 public schools is $13k.

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66

Also, per student spending is substantially evened out in some areas. For example, every public school in NYC has the same per student spending. More importantly, there is almost no correlation between per student spending and educational outcomes. Some of the states with the worst performing public schools also have higher spending. Moreover, many of the states that have higher revenue and higher public school spending also have higher costs of living. If you take the 5 highest and 5 lowest ranked US state public school systems and adjust their spending by the relative cost of living then order them from highest to lowest you end up with this list: 5th, 47th, 49th, 48th, 4th, 50th, 46th, 2nd, 1st. Spending is an easy issue to focus on, but it's not the right issue, and fixing it won't fix outcomes.

Fixing education is a complicated problem, imagining that we can fix it by just throwing money at it is, frankly, lazy. It's like a disengaged father sending his child to the most expensive private school without understanding anything about their child's educational desires or needs.

The problem with the system is that it's bureaucracy bound and married to perverse incentives. We need to fix the incentives, to do so within the existing system is a monumental task.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg and his wife to donate $120M to needy Bay Area schools

#49

Post by InclinedPlane »

monochr wrote: post #46
InclinedPlane wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Applying the label "capitalism" to a government run school system is outright laughable.

This is capitalism in government, that was the whole point behind the "venture philanthropists". Watching plan after plan crash and burn with them blaming the poor is like a getting a time machine ride to 1860's Britain trying to deal with the massive dislocations of the industrial economy without doing the one sane thing they could have done: massive government intervention in the economy to slow down the worst effe…

At least have the intellectual honesty to call it "crony capitalism". Implying that there is any relation to the free market or the "invisible hand" is ridiculous.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg and his wife to donate $120M to needy Bay Area schools

#50

Post by makomk »

nostromo wrote: post #23
L_Rahman wrote: post #14

In light of this announcement, it's worth reading the New Yorker's fantastic piece exploring how Zuckerberg's previous $100 million investment into the Newark public school fared. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_...

Amazing that the money is all gone (or committed) with a large chunk being spent on consultants billing "a thousand dollars a day." It gives me more appreciation for Bill Gate's approach, which seems much more cautious, albeit slow.

Both Bill Gates' approach and Zuckerberg's have the same fundamental issue, though - they're using their money to push their own half-baked political ideas about what would make schools better, despite a spectacular lack of evidence they works. (Gates is slightly more efficient in how he does it, making his donations conditional on the government paying most of the cost of his planned reforms, but that's it.)
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