Mark Zuckerberg dropped $100 million into Newark, which is being used to open more charter schools and facilitate the privatization of public education in that impoverished district. If there is one lesson we have learned from charter schools in New Jersey, it is that privatization works best when the charters are free to exclude students who might get low test scores and to kick out those who can’t get those high test scores. In other words, the Zuckerberg money will be used to establish a form dual school system–one for the achievers, and the other as a dumping ground.
But wait! There is a real need for Zuckerberg’s millions in New Jersey.
A photo exhibit just opened outside the New Jersey State House, showing schools in urban districts that are in terrible physical condition.
“Students at New Jersey’s most resource-starved public schools walk down hallways covered in mold, take tests in asbestos-filled classrooms and trod across floors peppered with rodent droppings. And when these students visit different districts for sports matches or debate club meets, the inequalities are thrown into sharp relief as the students come face-to-face with the basic cleanliness and safety offered by a majority of the state’s educational institutions.
Last Wednesday, a powerful photo exhibit stationed in front of the New Jersey State House displayed the ugly truth hiding inside some of the state’s most dilapidated schools, many of them located in urban areas. Titled “A Blind Eye: The Immorality Of Inaction” and organized by public school advocates at the New Jersey Healthy Schools Now coalition, the exhibit took place in protest of Republican Gov. Chris Christie’s administration, which state education advocates say has displayed a lack of commitment to the area’s most vulnerable students.”
Governor Christie halted all spending on repairs in these schools. He says the money has run out, so children should continue to go to schools in unhealthy conditions. His critics say the money has not run out, but that Governor Christie doesn’t want to change the conditions for the students or teachers in these schools.
Mark Zuckerberg! You could fix these buildings! You could repair the buildings that Governor Christie refuses to repair.
Here is a wonderful use of your millions! Think of the thousands of needy children who will thank you for changing their lives for the better.
Or you could continue to build a dual school system in Newark.
Please do the right thing. Spend your money where it is truly needed and will make a huge difference.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
OR how about razing those schools and building state of the art new schools in their place…or maybe just safe and healthy ones in their place?
Two things: First…$100,000,000 SOUNDS like a lot of money… but eight years ago we spent just $12,000,000 renovating one 700 pupil HS in NH… $100,000,000 MIGHT fix five dilapidated schools in NJ… Second: the public doesn’t understand how drastically we’re underfunding infrastructure: This blog post has a link to a Financial Times article with a chart that illustrates this: http://waynegersen.com/2013/11/05/party-like-its-1947/
Is there a state or district run by an ed reformer where kids in existing public schools have benefitted at all from “reforms”?
It’s amazing to me that they continue to get away with presenting themselves as local, state and federal “leaders” on education when they completely ignore 90% of the students.
How has Chris Christie benefitted PUBLIC schools in that state? That’s the job, and that’s how he should be judged.
How did we get to such a crazy place where 90% of kids LOSE under reform?
While you’re at it Mark, could you please kick in a few extra bucks for central air conditioning. The exhibit should include some photos of thermometers reading in the 80s, 90s and even 100+ while students are taking high stakes exams. Another dirty little infrastructure secret that NO ONE wants to talk about. Teachers and students are working in the equivalent of brick ovens in many cities throughout New Jersey and New York.
Begging billionaires to provide what the state should be providing is both ludicrous and demeaning. Vote the bastards out who refuse their constitutionally mandated jobs.
+1
But the point here is if he really does want to help, then we need to look at where help is needed. He is masking or self-deceiving or rationalizing or something the support of charters over badly needy public institutions. I think the point is the juxtaposition within the context of “benevolence.” It is some kind of evangelism (albeit I cannot figure out for what message, exactly; only that its believers are stalwart).
I get flyers for Heiffer Intl (a great effort, from what I can tell–and I do give to them but sometimes I think, well hell I’ve got students who coukd ise a couple chickens and some new shoes. I even have a friend who brags on his website about building a school (funding it) from the ground up in Africa, but seems to not notice the needs of children and schools in his own city. It’s like it’s hip to help the poor in countries where we imagine extreme poverty, but the desire to help the equivalent in our own country is seen as not hip (or something). Someone is flailing in an open sea and a boat with floatation devices comes by and tosses out rafts for children playing on the other side of the boat. Nevermind the flailing children. If they can swim over to the other side of our boat they can play too! And so it goes.
Here’s our bond issue today, for new schools.
http://www.yesforbryanschools.com/bondissue/
So, two things. I’ve talked to hundreds of voters in the last three months trying to persuade them to pass this infrastructure spending, and it is a tough case to make thanks to media and national reformers’ trashing public schools as “failure factories”.
It doesn’t matter that our schools are not “failure factories” (as national reformer Chris Christie depicts public schools) because reformers have been chanting this mantra for ten years now.
Second thing is public school parents are going to have to get better at advocating for their public schools now that public schools have been abandoned by state and federal “reform” leaders. The ratio of teachers to parents working on this thing is embarrassing- many more teachers. Leaving the defense of public schools up to public school teachers is not a plan.
The windows in my classroom are so filthy once can barely see out them. The auditorium seating is a danger – broken chairs, wooden pieces that are shredded and pulled up from the base, and a ceiling that is brown with stains and falling down. When I lead my students down the hallway, I often tell them to just “step over the roach.” This is Newark. It is tragic, utterly tragic what is going on there.
What are we allowing to be done to our children? Move the politicians’ offices in one of these palatial settings-their residences too. Every picture tells a story. Perhaps more people should take pics of our public schools and post them, send them, social network them. This is a disgrace in the richest country in the world.
“In the United States today, 23 percent of children live in poor homes. In Finland, the same way to calculate child poverty would show that figure to be almost five times smaller. The United States ranked in the bottom four in the recent United Nations review on child well-being. Among 29 wealthy countries, the United States landed second from the last in child poverty and held a similarly poor position in “child life satisfaction.” Teachers alone, regardless of how effective they are, will not be able to overcome the challenges that poor children bring with them to schools everyday.”
Retrieved from:
http://www.blogforarizona.com/blog/2013/05/finnish-education-expert-gives-the-like-to-the-great-teachers-myth.html
Thank you DR for your courage to stand behind our children who are left behind. We should all learn from your wisdom.
EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY should be the title of our national photo essay dipicting the dilapidtaed condition of our children’s work places. NOW THATS A GREAT IDEA> LETS GET IT GOING> I’m not trech savvy enough but boy will this open some eyes. (And a nod to Rod)
I don’t like the school reformers but one wonders what has been done with all the tax money that is said to be spent in schools. I spent most of my life in Clifton, NJ. In recent decades I saw lots of tax money going to urban districts and much less coming to older declining cities like Clifton. I don’t care for the reformers but I do wonder what is happening to our tax dollars. It is a fair question. We need to find a way to educate children without taxing home owners to death.
Large chunks go to consulting and testing.
Yes Dienne! More and more $ every year.
To Jerry,
Enormous amounts of money go to testing, databases (to hold student and teacher information), technology to administer the tests, entire new departments within the state DOE to keep up with the “data” from all the testing and the new teacher evaluations, new materials that are “Common Core aligned”.
There is an seemingly endless parade of expensive “necessities” that do not help children at all.
If anyone is worried about tax dollars, help us kill the current “reform”!
And frankly, much goes to heavy administrative costs outside of things related to corporate reform. The problem in districts isn’t bloated teacher salaries (which the public seems to believe but isn’t true), it’s crazily bloated administrative salaries and programs.
Jerry, I don’t have a clue where all the money is going, but I assure you it is not reaching the schools. I am a k teacher in Newark, and this year, the kindergarten “classroom supplies” provided to me were a large box of crayons (with a few hundred) and I was told to split them with another teacher. I also received glue sticks, a nice surprise. That’s it. I have yet to receive paper for my kids to write and draw. When the ink runs out of our teacher printers, it is not replaced. My first year in Newark (5 years ago) I taught 4th grade, I worked at a school where in DECEMBER, we were told we’d need to provide our own paper for copies. The budget had run out, we were told, and that was it for paper. I felt like I was teaching in Russia!
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the building I am in is just atrocious. We are in desperate need of repairs throughout the building.
But here’s something interesting: When a collegue had her room painted two years ago (every-so-often, some superficial upgrades are made – certainly better than nothing.), she was moved out of her classroom for over 3 months. It took over 3 MONTHS to paint a classroom! (My husband, who is not a professional painter, just painted 2 large rooms in 4 days.) Multipy this scenario by however many schools in Newark get painted each year, that adds up to a lot of paychecks for painters. Just one little example of waste.
I also know that our schools pay hundreds of thousands for assessments and test PREP programs each year. And new curriculum for math and language arts was just purchased throughout the district which had to cost a ton. Not to mention the training that goes along with the new materials.
Some of the expenditures make sense, but far more do not. Who is getting hurt by these outrageously bad decisions and the lack of funding and support? Students, especially inner-city children, where parents don’t tend to advocate and fight against the madness. And then, yes, Jerry – taxpayers. Because who knows where your and my money is going. It’s certainly not in my classroom or in my school!
You cannot shame the shameless into doing the right thing, you can only force them to do so – or, if not do the right thing, at least stop the destruction – by making it clear that their impunity will cost them dearly.
As long as frauds like Cory Booker can fail upwards into positions of power, rather than be used as object lessons in the political consequences of smashing and grabbing a vital public resource, then this plague will continue.
Spending per pupil per year for the districts highlighted in the photos (source: http://www.state.nj.us/education/guide/2013/ind.shtml):
Trenton: $20,407.
Paterson: $19,618.
Gloucester: $22,707.
Phillipsburg: $19,409.
So it would seem that the problem isn’t lack of money.
Thats money for students education – not infrastructure repairs and renovations. Districts with high free and reduced lunch, high special education, and high ESL populations require a lot of money – in many cases to cover unfunded mandates.
There are plenty of high FRL districts in the country that make do with a lot less than $20,000 a year per kid, and whose buildings aren’t that horrible. Again, there must be problems here that go way beyond money . . . .
WT,
FRL data does not take into account costly special ed and ESOL services.
Also, “across the country” is difficult to compare. Which districts did you want to compare to the NJ districts you listed? Rural Georgia?
I agree there are all sorts of problems, but comparing per pupil money expenditures and the state of the buildings across the country is not going to get us there, IMHO.
Dr. Ravitch, you are of course absolutely right
but
will Bill Gates and the rest of these people listen to you, or are they even interested in what you say? I truly do not know. At one time I admired Bill Gates and thought that he truly believed in what he was doing, that he too was propagandized into believing the “news” reports, the “Nation at Risk” ignorance.
Anymore, I wonder.
Education should be the search for “glimmers of truth” looking to those who are experts in their field of study and who do in depth research
but
anymore it looks more and more as if propaganda rules the day. Shout lies long and loud enough and you “win”. “You” win but everyone else loses.
Such is the fate of all nations who follow that fallacy and sooner or later the nations who follow that “philosophy” fail and the results are disastrous for everyone, including the “Caesars” who are in power and seek to sustain their power.
When “truth” is subservient to monetary power what can one expect?
This exhibit would be an excellent feature on 60 Minutes.
Thanks for posting this, Diane. It’s vital for people to know about this.
Tomorrow, when I have some free, post-election time, I’ll be starting a Facebook group that highlights this disgrace in New Jersey and that asks Mark Zuckerberg to please fund THIS instead of further privatizing our public schools.
That is, unless someone else beats me to the punch here and does it before me… 😉
What the heck is with NJ? First they elected the conservative Bradley Foundation supported Democratic infiltrator Corey Booker and now they’ve re-elected the racist Chris Christie. I suspect information is not getting out to the public there, and now Christie has positioned himself to run for POTUS in 2016.
Christie, you may have gotten away with treating children and adults of color like second class citizens in your state, but you are not what caring, respectful Americans in other states want as their leader, “boy”.
Well, at least VA was turned off by the “too conservative” GOP gubernatorial candidate and elected a Democrat.
And thank goodness NY now has De Blasio! Woo Hoo!!
Of course, one can only hope the VA Democrat is better than the Republican. One never knows anymore, since neoliberals in both parties are much more alike than they are different.
I wonder what the fine print of his donation stipulates? Surely Zuckerberg wants 100M worth of product placement…
Social Darwinism from the right… Who knew???