You think Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million gift to Newark public schools will make a difference?

May I remind you that NJ pays the highest property taxes in the World. Most of it goes to the Education system already.

School Money Math Never Adds Up Quite Right

Katherine Mangu-Ward | October 1, 2010

Today at National Review, Rich Lowry does some education money math on the occasion of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million gift to Newark public schools. He is pessimistic about the possibility that more money—even private money geared toward reform—can make much of a dent in one of the worst performing school systems in the country. Lowry writes:

Newark spends more per pupil than any other city in the country, and gets dismayingly little for it. For $22,000 per pupil — more than twice the national average — it graduates half its students.

Which makes Zuckerberg's millions feel a bit like carrying coals to Newcastle. And Lowry is quite right when he says that "it's easy to imagine Newark spending $44,000 per pupil and arriving at the same dismaying outcome."

Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee. Not Cory Booker and Michelle Rhee.Bringing outside money into a dysfunctional, already over-funded urban public school system is far from unprecedented. Schools chief Michelle Rhee did the same thing in D.C. She did it semi-quietly, with a patchwork of donations from foundations to cover the major bonuses and salary increases for every teacher that were required to push through a merit pay proposal. It took $64.5 million in outside money to win important (though not earth-shaking) concessions in the union contract negotiations that shaped most of her difficult tenure. (Money, by the by, which may leave with Rhee if she is booted by presumptive mayor-elect Vincent Gray when he takes over the mayoralty from Rhee champion and outgoing mayor Adrian Fenty.)

http://reason.com/blog/2010/10/01/school-money-mat...