Chan-Zuckerberg Abandon Model School They Founded and Funded

This is a very sad story.

Mark Zuckerberg is a billionaire. His wife Priscilla Chan is a pediatrician. Ten years ago, they founded and funded a school that was designed to be different. They sought out children who were impoverished. Their school offered wrap-around services. They did all the right things.

But they are withdrawing their funding because they are disappointed by the school’s test scores. Test scores! Had they no better way of measuring success? Apparently not. Their scores were substantially higher than those of the local school district. But that wasn’t good enough. Were the children healthier? Were parents more engaged in their children’s education? In the end, the school was closed because its scores were not “good enough.”

It was supposed to be a long-term commitment, but it wasn’t. CZI surely could have made a 25-year commitment to their school but they pulled away their funding after only a decade. Do they have enough evidence to determine the value of investing in children’s well-being? No.

As I said, this is a very sad story.

Laura J. Nelson of The Wall Street Journal reported:

The school that Dr. Priscilla Chan co-founded for low-income students was designed to be different. 

The vast fortunes being minted in other corners of Silicon Valley had mostly missed East Palo Alto, Calif., where the Primary School opened in 2016. Funded through Chan’s philanthropy with her husband Mark Zuckerberg, the private, tuition-free school aimed to support the “whole child” through wraparound services, including free dental checkups, early-intervention screenings and wellness coaching for parents.

The school joined a long list of efforts by the country’s wealthiest, dating back to Andrew Carnegie, to put their stamp on the American classroom. Then, after a decade of operation and more than $125 million from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Primary School shut down in June.

Dr. Priscilla Chan SUZANNE CORDEIRO/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

The board voted unanimously in April 2025 to close the school after learning that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative wouldn’t fund it after the 2025-26 academic year, people familiar with the situation said.

The school’s demise marks the end of one of the highest-profile education efforts funded by the couple’s philanthropic arm, which has shifted its focus from social issues toward scientific research. 

By some measures, the school’s academic performance fell well short of state norms and its leaders’ expectations, complicating efforts to spread its model to public and charter schools. By others, it succeeded in helping students outside the classroom in ways that are usually not available in public schools.

Board president Jean-Claude Brizard said that before the vote to close, he shared several options with CZI about the school’s future, including “winding down.” The board wouldn’t have voted to close without alignment from their biggest funder, he said. 

A CZI spokesperson said the decision to close was up to the school’s board and that the organization was focused on the school’s academic results, not the cost.

The Primary School’s closure has illustrated what philanthropic investment means for a community when it arrives, and when it leaves. 

“It was a godsend school,” said Mele Fakapelea, whose daughter Telesia won a lottery spot in the founding class. Fakapelea later enrolled her four younger children. Losing the school’s support system, she said, was “crushing.”

Mele Fakapelea, in red lei, and her family at the eighth-grade graduation for her eldest daughter, Telesia, center. SAO LUTUI

Nearly 540 children were enrolled at the Primary School’s two campuses. The Ravenswood City Elementary School District is now preparing for an enrollment surge, renovating a campus to avoid packing students into portable trailers.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative pledged $50 million when the closure was announced. That includes paying the balance of the school’s lease to the district and supporting local groups to carry on some services. CZI also gave $3.6 million to education savings accounts: $10,000 for elementary students, $2,500 for preschoolers and $1,000 for children in early-childhood education.

Business leaders and founders “look at K-12 education and go, ‘Man, how hard can it be to improve this thing?’” said Rick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “Well, it’s incredibly hard.”

Zuckerberg announced one of the couple’s first major charitable gifts, a $100 million grant to Newark, N.J., public schools, on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 2010. The Primary School was far more hands-on.

Chan said then that her work as a pediatrician, and at a Boston housing-project after-school program, had taught her that systems to help children are often siloed. The school set out to help children overcome the effects of poverty and childhood trauma.

Staff worked with community clinics to find high-needs families, including students with behavioral issues and learning disabilities. Three in four students spoke a language other than English at home. 

Some things felt more startup than school. Teachers signed nondisclosure agreements as part of their employment contracts. Some toddlers wore recording devices at home to count back-and-forth conversations with their caregivers, part of a program to boost language development.

Chan was on campus often, including to read a Mo Willems book (“The Pigeon Needs a Bath!”) to kindergartners. During the launch of a curriculum with Sesame Workshop, Chan bantered with Elmo in a promotional video. Teachers attended the workshop’s 50th-anniversary gala and met Michelle Obama.

Parents were on campus regularly for coaching sessions and classes about child development. 

But the school had some challenges, including high principal turnover. It also initially lacked clear plans and approaches for special education and student discipline, former employees said. 

Katherine Carter, a former middle-school principal hired as a consultant in 2019, said there “really was not an understanding of the amount of time and support” and planning to launch a school. Carter, who left in 2024, said it can take five years for a new school’s approach to gel.

It took time for the new school to find the right curriculum and policies, said Lindsey Luebchow, a founding member of the Primary School. Principal turnover, she said, was one result of the structural challenge of “managing many programs in a single school.”

Chan was the Primary School’s co-founder and board chair for about eight years, until 2023; CZI was the main funder. Having one major backer in perpetuity hadn’t been the original plan, CZI said, but rather a model that “could be sustained through primarily public investment.” To that end, the Primary School said it tried to keep per-pupil spending at a reasonable level for a public school.

Jean-Claude Brizard, chairman of the board of directors for the Primary School SITTHIXAY DITTHAVONG/AP

Chan lobbied her network “to bring in other funding sources,” CZI said. But finding donors to supplement CZI was a tough sell, said Brizard, who is the former head of Chicago’s public schools. “Why would you give money to an entity being funded by one of the wealthiest people in the world?” he said.

Chan was “not shy” about her frustration with academic performance, Brizard said. Chan told The Wall Street Journal last year that outcomes weren’t where “frankly, anyone would have wanted them to be.”

Early last year, soon after Zuckerberg and Chan attended President Trump’s inauguration, CZI told staff its mission was changing. Funding for social advocacy had been “wound down” over the past several years to “align with our focus as a science philanthropy as well as the current legal and policy landscape,” staff were told. There was no evidence that the couple’s attendance influenced the board’s vote, CZI said.

That April, the Primary School’s board voted unanimously to close after the next academic year. The timing of the CZI changes and the inauguration, Brizard said, was “an unfortunate coincidence.” 

Angelica Cardenas, 29, whose 3-year-old daughter was enrolled along with her siblings’ five children, said she heard about the closure from the news. “If they knew they were going to stop investing in our community, it should have been spoken about earlier on,” Cardenas said.

Some staff and parents said they thought the Primary School would last for decades, in part because it was focused on long-term outcomes. 

“This was never something that was supposed to be just a philanthropic play in perpetuity,” Brizard said. “Maybe that wasn’t articulated well enough.”

A Stanford University report found that in spring 2025, 14% of local students in third grade and above exceeded literacy standards; at the Primary School, it was 26%; statewide, it was 47%. 

Eighth-grade students, many of whom had attended the school for a decade, demonstrated above 50% grade-level proficiency in their final year, the school said.

Luebchow said students saw “steady and encouraging” academic progress after the pandemic, and pointed to improvements in children’s well-being and socio-emotional skills. About 85% of students had their annual well-child visit, compared with 55% of children on Medicaid in the county.

Every teacher returned for the final year. School leaders told parents: We understand if you don’t want to stay. If you do, we’ll close the year out strong.

School leaders arranged tours of other schools, set up a station for parents to complete admission applications, and called in a representative from a 529 savings plan to help parents open the accounts seeded by CZI. 

Parents and teachers tried to savor the “lasts”: the last back-to-school night, with Pacific Island dancers on a tapa cloth mat. The last pep rally, where children blew red vuvuzelas.

Fakapelea’s oldest daughter, now 13, was one of two speakers when the school’s lone class of eighth-graders graduated in June. She cried afterward, as her family draped her in leis.