A Test for School Reform in Newark

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_russakoff

by savorypiano • 12 years ago

141 226 12 years ago

api2• 12 years ago

I worked for a while as a government contractor. I'd become disillusioned with libertarianism (no connection to the decision to take the job), and still am, but that experience cured me of any leanings toward the sort of liberalism that sees government as a solution to much of anything.

The system was actively anti-meritocratic and the waste was simply incredible. They ran an entire data center at around 1% utilization. The electricity wasted alone must have been tens of thousands worth a month at least.

Contractors were the worst. People often complain about too many and overpaid government employees, and there certainly was that, but the contracting waste was where the real hemorrhaging was going on. I routinely saw outside firms hired to do things at many multiples of what it would have cost to have federal employees do it, or even to recruit new federal employees. These contractors would proceed to waste the money much more flagrantly than anyone inside the government did, would deliver barely-working solutions, and would then get contracted again to fix them. It was a routine thing. I started to really suspect that someone was getting kick-backs, but gross incompetence in the handling of outside contracting could explain it too.

spiritplumber• 12 years ago

The key part of your comment is "would get contracted again to fix them".

Contractors optimized for money-over-work.

I had a similar situation where I politely mocked a competitor's product for breaking down in 3 months when mine would die after 2 years, and the other guy answered that they make a lot of money on service contracts (it's nautical equipment, so warranties work a little differently).

acdha12• 12 years ago

I've seen that a lot and very similar stories at large companies and private organizations. The main lesson I've drawn is that we spend far too much time talking about isolated small examples and ignore the questions about the incentive structures which lead to it. (The classic example being the pressure to exhaust your budget by the end of the year, which has been joked about for ages but few organizations seem interested in fixing.)

Most of the explanation is probably the obvious answer: fixing the broken system requires calling higher-status people on the carpet. Attacking a few teachers, clerks, etc. is much safer politically than asking exactly why the superintendent or CEO doesn't seem to care about efficiency absent a crisis.

zzzeek• 12 years ago

if you observed that the private contracting waste was where the real hemorrhaging was going on, then your problem was with all the privatized resources being paid with public money - essentially the vast influence of the "free market" on a public resource that is not well suited to traditional free market forces. This article is specifically about the failure of privatized resources, such as charter schools, private donations delivered directly to contractors with no public oversight or review for the purposes of improving the public good. It is about billionaires with no experience or justification for being at the center of a complex public system attempting to inject gigantic, ad-hoc donations into systems they don't understand, and failing.

api2• 12 years ago

Not a bad point. If I, say, donated $100million to Microsoft to improve the Windows UI and did not know precisely where to put that money in the company and what that money should be doing, it probably would not fare much better.

Still: the waste I saw was incredible. There is definitely a systemic incentive problem in government, not to mention a problem with private contracting and oversight.

normloman• 12 years ago

A few bad teachers can't explain Newark's low graduation rates. Bad teachers exist outside Newark, but kids outside still graduate in greater rates than Newark students. The difference between Newark and everywhere else is poverty. That's why I never had any hopes for Zuckerberg's donation. You've got to fix poverty to fix education.

Unfortunately, the best way to raise someone out of poverty is through education. So you've got a chicken-egg problem.

Have we tried doing both? Create new jobs for poor parents while simultaneously improving schools for their children?

Jun85• 12 years ago

But using the same reasoning you give, we can point out that there are other poor regions in the US with better graduation rates. Surely, cultural and historical reasons also play a big role.

The solution is to realize that the causes are many and big. Rather than trying to take these on in a gargantuan effort, which is pretty much doomed, my suggestion would be to ... just ignore the causes! Forget about what causes the problem, just fix the problem for now. When somebody heavily bleeding you don't stop to find out what caused the wound.

This would be a transitory approach, of course. But, as you stated, once you make headway into education, you'll be much better equipped to tackle the root causes.

crusso• 12 years ago

Public schools and the NEA are a monopoly. Monopolies will never fix themselves or act in the best interests of their customers. The only way to fix a bad monopoly is to divest it of power, break it up, and let others take a crack at using the same resources.

standeven2• 12 years ago

Applying corporate logic to education is a mistake. In Finland there are no private schools, and the education system is ranked among the highest in the world.

Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-ame...

pmorici5• 12 years ago

"A few bad teachers can't explain Newark's low graduation rates."

The problem is it's not just a few it's probably a lot of really crappy teachers, principals, and administrators. Teacher unions like to use the phrase "just a few bad apples" but when you have a system that bad your're right a few doesn't explain it it's probably the whole bunch or close to it that is rotten.

gonehome• 12 years ago

Somewhat related there was an earlier comment from HN that I really liked (though don't remember who said it) - about the bad apples phrase.

"In situations where accusations of widespread corruption, misconduct, unethical action, etc are made, a phrase that is often trotted out in defense of the accused is "just a few bad apples". It's not WhereEver Police Department that has an issue with racial bias and violent escalation, it's just a few bad apples. Our school district does not have a bullying problem, it's just a few bad apples. Etc.

What is interesting about this cliched defense is that it is actually a malformed statement of the original cliche, "A few bad apples spoil the barrel."

The original cliche refers to a phenomenon where overripe or rotten apples release ethylene gas, which is a ripening agent. This ethylene gas will accelerate the ripening/rot of nearby apples. If you are not vigilant in weeding out the bad apples, the rot will rapidly spread and soon there will be no good apples left to rescue.

Human "bad apples" don't release ethylene gas, but they corrupt their peers nevertheless. When a good cop backs the cover story of his corrupt cop partner, he becomes a bad cop as well. When prosecutors take up arms in defense of their corrupt prosecutor peers, they become no better than the initially targeted. If school administrators allow a bully to have his way for too long, then everybody else sees that they can get away with it too and before long you have daily fistfights behind the school at the end of the day.

Institutions that have had widespread unchallenged corruption for decades rarely need keyhole surgery, they need amputations."

bachmeier• 12 years ago

Newark is not the only place with teacher unions. Why do teacher unions have so much more of a negative impact in Newark than elsewhere?

TallGuyShort• 12 years ago

"Just a few bad apples" is a very auspicious phrase for the unions to use, given how common the phrase "one bad apple can spoil the bunch" also is.

redthrowaway• 12 years ago

The main problem is still poverty, and you can't fix that with charter schools.

cwbrandsma• 12 years ago

Bad parents are the ultimate equalizer, and are inherently unfixable. Good parents will have children that perform under bad teachers, and excel under good teachers. Bad parents will have student no matter how good the teacher is (or, it takes an exceptional student to break out of that.)

bedhead2• 12 years ago

So very true, and that's what makes it so depressing. I believe many of the problems with schools are structurally unfixable because there's a powerful network effect with - for lack of a better phrase - "good people". The good ones want to be with other good ones, naturally. So they all move to certain suburbs and neighborhoods, and the result is a segregation of good and bad folks. And of course, breaking the cycle of bad parenting often times seems nearly impossible...

tveita• 12 years ago

Bad parents are the ultimate equalizer, and are inherently unfixable.

That's a large assumption. I am sure many things can be done to improve peoples' ability, means and motivation to be good parents.

Kluny• 12 years ago

I see no reason why it's inherently unfixable. I feel like there's a bias in our culture that parents will "just know" how to raise children properly. How often do you see classes for teaching parents of toddlers/young kids/preteens/teens how to deal with kids in that age group? There's plenty of resources for newborns, but little past that. Just recrimination and blame for parents who can't get it right. Parenting classes might actually go a long way, but there's no way of knowing for sure right now.

jarrett2• 12 years ago

Unfortunately, the best way to raise someone out of poverty is through education. So you've got a chicken-egg problem.

Education is clearly one factor, but there are many others. The most effective way to ameliorate poverty is to improve all factors simultaneously. E.g. employment/income, housing, healthcare, incarceration, transportation, education--just to name a few of many factors.

jpadkins3• 12 years ago

Create new jobs for poor parents while simultaneously improving schools for their children?

Tulsa OK is trying that. Preschool combined with a jobs program.

http://www.npr.org/2014/04/22/304563233/what-exactly-is-high...

InclinedPlane• 12 years ago

The impact of bad schools systems hits poor students disproportionately.

Imagine two school systems that otherwise have the same general qualities.

In one you have children who have wealthy, educated parents. Parents who read. Parents who take an active interest in their children's education. Parents who encourage their children to learn independent of school. Those children are going to acquire an education more or less independent of the quality of their teachers. They will be able to get as much out of the text books as they would from the teachers, because they are more likely to read on their own, more likely to spend the effort doing the work, and more likely to care (or have their parents care) about learning. If those children have bad teachers it's a momentary setback, and something they can often overcome with the help of their parents, fellow students, and self-study.

In the other you have children who have poor, uneducated parents. Those children are almost completely and utterly dependent on their teachers. They're not going to read at home, they're parents may not have a strong interest in their education (assuming that the school is handling it), and so on. If those students encounter a bad teacher it translates to a huge setback. They have no support network to deal with bad teacher, it could easily cause them to fall behind or, worse, to lose interest in school and education.

Jun85• 12 years ago

What a waste! Government agencies should provide data, supporting services, etc. when needed, they should not be developers of solutions, because, due to their very nature, they cannot do it. Curiously enough, money is not a motivator in this realm for better work, it's like watering the Sahara in the hopes that suddenly vegetation will sprout.

What Zuckerberg should have done is to put out $10M-$20M of that money as prizes for small non/for-profit startups to come up with ingenious solutions. Then, after this survival of the fittest mode ends, push money into the promising ones.

kjjw• 12 years ago

And then we'd be reading about the folly of the scheme's over-reliance on the private sector.

They were not aiming at the root of the problem: massive poverty and massive inequality.

In fact I'd go further, $100 million is nothing. What is probably needed is billions of dollars worth of investment in public services.

Jun85• 12 years ago

Call me pragmatic but I see those problems to be not (easily) solvable. Rather than endlessly debate about what the cause is, my proposal would be to involve young, energetic outsiders to come up with solutions and move quickly to implement them. Not all of these will be workable but some will (remember the Go entry from yesterday and how Monte Carlo methods are much better in developing strong AI compared to truing to come up with good computer strategies? Similar approach).

at-fates-hands• 12 years ago

>> They were not aiming at the root of the problem: massive poverty and massive inequality.

While this is completely true, you also have to factor in politics. Take a look what's happening in NYC right now. You have charter schools that are doing incredible work in low income areas and De Blasio wants to shut them down:

"Bill de Blasio, who repeatedly singled her out on the campaign trail as the embodiment of what he saw was wrong in schooling, and who last week followed his word with deed, canceling plans for three of her schools in New York City while leaving virtually all other charter proposals untouched."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/05/nyregion/de-blasio-and-bui...

acdha12• 12 years ago

What Zuckerberg should have done is to put out $10M-$20M of that money as prizes for small non/for-profit startups to come up with ingenious solutions.

What kind of solution would a startup come up with for a kid who doesn't sleep under the same roof three nights running or who doesn't have a single role model who succeeded at school and is doing well professionally because they live in an area which has been systematically screwed over (race, class, etc.) for so long that everyone they know has given up?

There are a few areas where the tech-world style approach could help — building better software for class management, lesson planning, etc. if for no reason other than reducing the amount going to huge, under-delivering enterprise software vendors – but most of the problems are areas where we've chosen not to invest as a society: jobs, housing, medical care — critically long-term disability care — etc. Ask a teacher how it feels when a bright student starts missing school because their family was evicted or is being pressured not to go to college because their family wants them to watch a younger/disabled sibling while the parents are at work.

The best use for that $100M probably would have been opening some sort of high-headcount employer in the area to help break the cycle — even a call center job is a big step up if it provides a consistent, livable income.

IanDrake3• 12 years ago

The best use for that $100M probably would have been opening some sort of high-headcount employer

That assumes these people are employable or want to work.

We agree the biggest problem for these kids is family life, I just don't think that will stop with employment or even just handing their parents money.

mynewwork• 12 years ago

Tragically opening a call center likely wouldn't help at all. Many people in poverty in the US are actually better off staying unemployed because their entitlements (food stamps, housing assistance, free child care, etc) go down or disappear if they get a job.

Our current setup is severely broken and full of perverse incentives that trap people in poverty. In an effort to prevent abuse we've stripped eligibility for assistance programs to only the near-destitute but then set the payouts at a higher level than many of those people are likely to earn on re-entering the workforce.

Dozens of programs, at both a state and federal level, would need to be overhauled so that the incentives led people out of poverty instead of creating a chasm between government dependence and entry-level labor.

8ig8• 12 years ago

Here's the primary article:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_...

nickkthequick• 12 years ago

I upvoted you but personally I prefer this link (they worked hard on the article, I believe they deserve the ad revenue):

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_...

TheMagicHorsey12• 12 years ago

I don't know why people are so opposed to newspapers showing advertisements.

How are they supposed to operate their organizations without funds?

Or do people seriously think government funding of papers is the way to go?

I happen to think that state funded news papers would be worse than papers funded by advertisers. At least with advertisers you have many different sources of funding. With the state you have just one boss, and you can't print stories that would piss him off.

bcsmith• 12 years ago

I too don't mind them collecting ad revenue, but I really hate clicking next on multi-page stories. There is no "page limit" on a web page and clicking through and reloading the entire page to get the next part is annoying...

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_...

nugget• 12 years ago

I heard Bill Gates speak once at school and I remember him saying that giving away his fortune was harder than earning it in the first place.

dethstar• 12 years ago

Did he explain why/how? I really don't understand what you're trying to say. Was it because he was too fond of it? Was it because there were many causes he'd like to give to and couldn't make his mind?

borski• 12 years ago

I imagine it was because making good choices and judgments about who deserves it is difficult. Making sure the money is spent in a manner that matters, as opposed to given away as salaries to a bunch of consulting groups, is very hard.

res0nat0r• 12 years ago

I'm sure he means that doing it responsibly (having the money actually be spent correctly and not wasted or lining other peoples pockets) actually takes a lot of time and effort.

MrFoof• 12 years ago

I can guarantee Bill's reason is because he wants the money he provides to be used as efficiently as possible. You want the most benefit to be provided for your dollar. You want to donate to the organization who can use your funds at 70% efficiency, and not one that will use it at 7% efficiency, otherwise you are providing less good for your dollar.

icpmacdo• 12 years ago

I bet you he was speaking in the context of it being difficult to donate money effectively to see the most positive outcome.

eCa• 12 years ago

Giving money is easy, but I guess he (and Zuckerberg) wants to give money where it makes a difference.

In this case it looks like it didn't make a difference -> failed gift.

jarrett2• 12 years ago

Based on his other comments, I assume he was referring to the challenges of finding the right places to spend money--places where the money will have the most positive effect. It's easy to give money away. Goodness knows there are endless people and organizations who would gladly take it. What's much harder is knowing ahead of time what impact a given donation will have. Or, to put it differently, knowing how effective a charity is at advancing its stated mission.

pestaa• 12 years ago

I may be wrong, but it's quite obvious to me. You wouldn't want to donate to an organization where the money doesn't make a traceable and measurable impact. Luckily I see more and more charities prioritize transparency.

darkstar999• 12 years ago

This is basically blogspam of this New Yorker article.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_...

dang• 12 years ago

Yes it is. We changed the url (from http://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-gave-jersey-10...).

Submitters: please do your due diligence. HN wants original sources, not ripoffs. If the article you're posting is ripped off of something else, post the something else.

jstalin• 12 years ago

I have personal experience with urban education, having been a member of a fairly large city's school board. One thing I realized is that centralization has killed the ability for anyone to think outside the box. There used to be thousands of school districts in my state, but that number has dropped by around 90%.

Sure, I get the argument that it's more efficient to pool some resources, such as buses, food service, etc., but I really believe that education is really just about having a good principal who can choose his/her teachers and hold them accountable. Most people aren't aware that many union contracts prohibit the principal from choosing the teachers in the school because of seniority rules, and getting rid of bad teachers is essentially hopeless. And of course all teachers are paid the same, based on years of tenure, rather than actual outcomes or instructional needs.

I've seen schools which most would consider being in the worst part of the ghetto doing very well because of a highly motivated principal. The more we centralize, the harder it becomes to do anything of value to help schools perform better. And the trend continues to be more and more in the direction of centralization.

bradleyjg2• 12 years ago

On the other hand, tiny little school districts were created for the purposes of racial segregation and continue to act as mechanisms of racial and economic segregation. Also depending on state law and various other contingent factors, you can end up with regional or even state wide union contracts even with balkanized school districts. Finally, specialized (including aggressively tracked) schools are difficult to impossible with small catchment areas that only support a few schools per level.

Although it's far far from perfect, the NYC education department has managed to increase principal autonomy somewhat without throwing out all the advantages to scale.

carsongross• 12 years ago

And there, my friends, is the totalitarian impulse: "We must coercively centralize in the name of platonic ideals, damn the costs."

drzaiusapelord• 12 years ago

and getting rid of bad teachers is essentially hopeless.

This is the big problem with education. I don't like how unions have co-opted the narrative to "Just pay us more and we'll finally do our jobs right" which somehow has become crowd friendly. Instead better performance testing and easier firing is what we need, especially in my hometown of Chicago. Public sector unions have interests that go against those of taxpayers by default. Until we fix unions we won't fix education.

acdha12• 12 years ago

I don't like how unions have co-opted the narrative to "Just pay us more and we'll finally do our jobs right"

They're probably even less happy about the right-wing has co-opted the narrative that the problems in education are caused by the teachers.

Teaching is a challenging job which requires an advanced degree, very long hours with no flexibility, low pay even before you adjust for true hours worked, and you are given very little professional discretion. Do you really think you're going to get better results by putting even more pressure on things which teachers have only marginal control over[1] rather than simply encouraging more teachers to leave?

To put some facts into the discussion: this assessment by the American Statistical Association found that teachers are responsible for 1 to 14% of student's test score variance:

http://www.amstat.org/policy/pdfs/ASA_VAM_Statement.pdf

Follow Amdahl's law: even if you could load the school up with the best teachers on the planet, lavish pay, fully merit-based, etc. you're not going to see the kind of improvements you're claiming.

The problems start outside of the classroom and need to be fixed there.

CarolineSF• 12 years ago

Except that it's very consistent that the states with strong unions have the highest academic achievement and the states with weak or no unions have the lowest. So the facts easily refute this common but erroneous opinion. (This is most likely because nonunion states correlate with high poverty, and so does low academic achievement, but it conclusively disproves the notion that unions are to blame for low academic achievement.) (Also, whoever told you that lied, so disbelieve anything else that source told you -- fool me twice shame on me.)

gmu3• 12 years ago

The union contracts are really out of control. For those that aren't aware, research "rubber rooms". Hundreds of teachers in NYC are literally paid to come and sit in empty rooms and do nothing while they wait years to be reviewed because the districts don't have the ability to fire teachers.

lmm3• 12 years ago

As a European I wouldn't blame the unions there; the right to an arbitration hearing when you're accused of misconduct does not seem unreasonable. What else would you do, allow anyone to just be fired on the principal's say-so?

The real problem seems to be that the arbitration proceedings in NYC take years - partly because NYC isn't paying the arbitrators (in contrast to the union, which is paying its half of the arbitrator wages). How is that the union's fault?

revdinosaur3• 12 years ago

This is an oft-cited phenomenon, but it should be noted that this policy started to be dismantled 4 years ago [1].

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/nyregion/16rubber.html

Spooky23• 12 years ago

That's just a symptom.

The alternative widely prescribed is to move towards quasi-private charter schools. These schools attract enrollment mostly because of their 7-5 school day, which eliminates daycare expense and hassle for many parents.

Educational outcomes vary.

The thing that doesn't vary is that the bondholders who fund the school buildings, etc tend to be protected. So if the charter school flops, you're stuck with it.

bluedino• 12 years ago

You can get rid of the 'bad' teachers but there's a finite supply of 'good' teachers. You can pay them more or give them smaller class sizes or educate them more, but you're still not going to just magically end up with everyone being a great teacher.

It's just like you can't make any ten programmers all 10x programmers, no matter what.

thedufer• 12 years ago

In many places you can't get rid of the bad teachers - largely because of overly powerful unions. People who would make good teachers are driven away from teaching by the perverse incentives. Yes, the number of good teachers is finite, but so few of them are actually in front of students that the upper limit hardly matters for the foreseeable future.

Loughla3• 12 years ago

Thank you for a rational, experience based answer.

cafard• 12 years ago

I would argue that high school education is generally better in Maryland and Virginia, where school districts are by county (or equivalent city) than in Pennsylvania, where there are many more school districts.

brudgers2• 12 years ago

It's interesting to note that well supported public school districts aren't fighting to switch to charter schools and vouchers and the end to tenure. Nobody is saying "Sure our high school is among the best academically, but think of how much better it would be if the teachers were worried about not having a job next year." Then again, $100 million won't buy them off. Perhaps because it's not enough to cover the construction of a new high school.

In a place like Newark, a child's teachers may be the only people in their lives with stable employment. That doesn't matter when implementing free market Wahhabism. Teachers must fear for their jobs.

Tenure is an imperfect proxy for employee ownership. As the article shows, it may be a better model than venture capital rocket fuelled disruption. The tragedy, in human terms, is not the failure. The tragedy in human terms is that unjust means were rationalized for ideological ends and the result was still a failure...in human terms.

Free market Wahhabism just writes up all those charter schools and consultants and studies and threatened livelihoods to a failed "ability to think outside the box." The solution to the solution failing is always the solution.

[Disclaimer: my sister is a public school teacher. Tattooed and pierced, she does the Dirty Harry. She had the kid the who was afraid that the pictures wouldn't be there later if they closed the book - think video tape. She had the kid who was kept in a closet at home for four years before third grade. The kid whose mom called the school to say he wouldn't be in because the boy friend had just killed the baby brother - and that's how the police found out when the principal called them - that's one of kids whose improvement on the FCAT determined her bonus. These are the kids who stand out from the usual parents in jail or dead of AIDS or homeless or just coming to school hungry or sick because they don't have affordable health care. Why is she in the union? Well so that some born again Southern Baptist principal can't fire her tattooed Wiccan ass.]

camworld• 12 years ago

A large percentage of the Zuckerberg money went towards the NTU teacher contract that rewards teachers with bonuses based on performance.

http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/13/10/22/explainer-mark-z...

nymph• 12 years ago

Precious.

Another instance of the principle that money is, in many ways, like violence: you'd like to think that if it hasn't solved your problem already, if you just keep throwing more and more at it it, you'll solve it eventually -- but all to often, it just makes the problem worse.

And inasmuch as Zuck would like to believe that being young means you're smarter... whatever your baseline, oftentimes, having too much money -- in Zuck's case, literally more money than he knows what to do with -- just makes us stupider.

Between 2010 and 2012, The New Yorker reports that "more than twenty million dollars of Zuckerberg’s gift and matching donations went to consulting firms with various specialties: public relations, human resources, communications, data analysis, [and] teacher evaluation." Many of the consultants were being paid upwards of $1,000 a day.

“Everybody’s getting paid but Raheem still can’t read," Vivian Cox Fraser, president of the Urban League of Essex County, was quoted saying.

gwern• 12 years ago

At the time, people were wondering if it was a PR move to help defuse _The Social Network_. Zuckerberg isn't mentioned as being incensed at the waste of money, so...

mikeash• 12 years ago

I often compare XML to violence: "if it doesn't solve your problem, you need to use more."

Perhaps in Zuckerberg's case, it was PHP rather than XML.

In any case, the headline gets a gigantic "well, DUH" from me. Two reasons:

1. It strikes me as unlikely that a lack of funding is Newark's fundamental problem here.

2. Even if lack of money is the fundamental problem, the annual budget for the system is a billion dollars. Why would anyone expect 10% of their annual budget, spent over a period of years, to do anything interesting?

pmorici5• 12 years ago

Well that is depressing.

They should have watched the documentary "Waiting For Superman" which talks about schools that defy the odds and produce good outcomes for the their students in places where the schools in general are a total failure. It used to be on Netflix streaming but looks like it is only available via DVD now.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/185389

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_%22Superman%22

voyou• 12 years ago

The proposals mentioned in the article (replacing regular public schools with charter schools, performance-related pay for teachers, a new "transformational" superintendent) are similar to the policies proposed in Waiting For Superman. The success of those policies, however, is pretty questionable, and this case may be another reason to be sceptical (see Diane Ravitch's criticism of Waiting For Superman here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-ch... )

pmorici5• 12 years ago

Well I'd say their first problem is that they didn't actually _implement_ any of the ideas they just spent 100 million on over paid consultants (one of the cited problems in the documentary) and didn't change a single thing. Waiting for superman talks specifically about the epidemic corruption in Newark's school system.

pessimizer• 12 years ago

Mark Zuckerberg donated money for school privatization in Newark, not to "fix Newark's schools." There's a difference.

http://www.publicschoolreview.com/articles/123

wil421• 12 years ago

Imagine that, a government organization spending all their money on high paid consultants with nothing to show for it.

I wonder how many of these consultant firms had ties to Booker and his cronies.

EGreg• 12 years ago

I know what I would do:

http://magarshak.com/blog

cjensen3• 12 years ago

Statistical studies have long shown that (1) education outcomes strongly correlate with parenting; especially having two parents. (2) education outcomes have near-zero correlation with funding.

Given this, one would expect this exact outcome. Santayana and all that.

If you want to use money to improve education, I suspect the best use would be to provide parental education as soon as the child is born. It would be nice if someone provided a small amount of money to try that out.

ncallaway• 12 years ago

I'm currently in the process of investigating the literature on correlations between teacher pay and student outcomes.

Would you mind listing some studies showing point (2). I'd really appreciate anything you've got handy.

aaronharnly• 12 years ago

I don't agree with their proposed remedies, but the book "Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses" by Eric Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth has thorough documentation of the disconnect between spending and outcomes.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0691130000

jseliger4• 12 years ago

I don't mean to be that jerk, but I'm going to anyway: citations are needed on this: "Statistical studies have long shown that..."

"We"—schools, society, etc.—can't really control parenting. But we can control schools, and per the articles I list here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/susan-engel-doesnt-... , it is probably possible to get substantially better outcomes than the ones we're getting now, chiefly through better teachers. At the moment, most public school teachers are paid in lockstep based on seniority—CS teachers and PE teachers get the same pay—and can't be fired after their second or third year of teaching, and that creates a lot of perverse incentives.

gfodor2• 12 years ago

""We"—schools, society, etc.—can't really control parenting."

Sounds like you need a citation of your own. I'm sure you could come up with hundreds of ways to apply money towards the solution of improving parenting.

cjensen3• 12 years ago

See aaronharnly's comment for a book full of cites https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7739206

ceras3• 12 years ago

"We"—schools, society, etc.—can't really control parenting.

Programs exist for this with some positive results. Here's one from a quick Google search: http://evidencebasedprograms.org/1366-2/nurse-family-partner...

danielweber20• 12 years ago

"We"—schools, society, etc.—can't really control parenting. But we can control schools,

I agree with this statement as it is. But I think it's one of the problems.

There have been complaints elsewhere in this thread about the strict work rules under which teachers operate. And I agree with them.

You know the story of the drunk looking for his keys under the streetlight instead of in the bushes where he lost them, saying "the light's better here"?

If we keep on expecting schools to be the magical institution that fixes society's problems, we are going to keep on being disappointed, all the while greatly bothering all the people working at the school in the meantime.

danielweber20• 12 years ago

It's really really hard to figure out which correlations mean something. If the New York Times says tomorrow that wearing knit caps during pregnancy makes your baby smarter, then all the high-conscientious women who are high-income to be in the NYT's readership will wear knit caps. 20 years later when you measure, sure enough, there is a correlation between knit caps in pregnancy and educational outcomes!

You have to work hard to correct for all these effects. For example, is there a difference between : single mom because mom never married; single mom because parents divorced; single mom because dad died on a business trip?

gfodor2• 12 years ago

It's easier to figure out if correlations mean something if they make intuitive sense. We're not talking about knit caps, we're talking about the notion that kids are more likely to be successful if they have two parents raising them instead of one, all other things being equal. This is borderline common sense, just like it is also borderline common sense to suppose that kids having parents who are uneducated drug addicts are less likely to succeed than those who have successful educated parents.

cjensen3• 12 years ago

All good points; which is why I was careful to call it correlation instead of causation. For example, distance from the Canadian border is also well-known to correlate with education outcomes (with larger distances correlating with worse outcomes).

That said, by far the strongest correlation is with dual parents. I don't know if anyone has studied the details you ask for, but it does stand to reason that a single parent -- of either sex and regardless of cause -- has a much tougher life and therefore less time to spend one on one with their child.

mantrax5• 12 years ago

This is why Steve Jobs used to say "everyone can throw money at a problem and fail to change anything", but people chose to see it as the excuse of a greedy businessman (who actually did donate to a number of projects privately).

Throwing money at a problem and forgetting about it almost never works. It just breeds corruption. Case in point.

Well, in a way the money wasn't wasted. Mark really needed the positive PR back then what with The Social Network movie and all the privacy vulnerabilities and abuses of Facebook. He got his PR. Facebook surviving was worth $100 million to him, so good job. Facebook survived. So he stopped donating.

x43b• 12 years ago

"He got his PR. Facebook surviving was worth $100 million to him, so good job. Facebook survived. So he stopped donating."

Is that really true? I thought Zuckerberg gave more in 2013 to charity then any other person in the United States.

Link: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/10/zuckerb...

lmm3• 12 years ago

Good thing Jobs didn't need to pay for any PR, he has an army of fanboys that will defend any amount of selfishness from him.

rayiner2• 12 years ago

Experiments like this expose a really fundamental problem with how Americans approach the issue of poverty. We're convinced that the solution to poverty is education and funding education, because it has to be to validate our political assumptions. For a liberal, it would be tough to swallow the idea that cultural dysfunction (fatherless kids and the gangs that fill that power vacuum) is a root cause. For conservatives, it would be tough to swallow the idea that free market globalization has simply left places like Newark to die. So we pump ever more money into education, and blame teachers for not solving problems that are totally outside the scope of their ability to solve.

jpadkins3• 12 years ago

I was with you until "free market globalization has simply left places like Newark to die."

Can you explain that in more detail? Detroit is the counterexample where the firms did not offshore the jobs, but the city still got decimated. I'm not sure how "free market globalization" is the root cause. Maybe you could say as "other countries industrializing has simply left places like Newark to die" but I don't think our economic policies could slow or reverse that trend.

rayiner2• 12 years ago

Detroit was decimated because Americans started buying Japanese and Korean cars. That was possible because of free-market globalization.

Now, I'm not saying that on the whole the world isn't better off as a result of free-market globalization. On the net, the gain to consumers in Phoenix from cheaper foreign goods might well outweigh the loss to workers in Newark. But I don't think it's controversial to say that alternative policies could have left Newark better off than it is now, even if they are globally less efficient, or that economic conservatives tend not to highlight the downsides of pro-globalization policies. Nobody comes out and says: "more competition means more efficiency, but it also means there will be winners and losers, and lower-skilled workers in America are likely to be the losers."

Donzo• 12 years ago

From the article in The New Yorker, Ras Baraka is paraphrased as saying:

"The Booker-Christie-Zuckerberg strategy was doomed, he said, since it included no systemic assault on poverty."

Poverty truly is this issue.

Giving meal tickets to a bunch of proclaimed "reformers" is not the solution, as this case proves.

Until every child has a warm place to sleep, food to eat, and at least one devoted adult to discipline and encourage them, children will be "left behind," to use the phrase of yesterday.

I say this as someone who statistically excelled at teaching reading in the West and South sides of Chicago for nine years.

I also say this as a member of the human race.

DanielBMarkham• 12 years ago

Wow. $100 million.

Put into a trust, you could pull out interest every year, say $2 million, and have your project funded forever.

What would the project be? Well, if you set the funding up that way, that's the beauty: you could try different things with that $2 million every year and see what worked the best. That way, instead of trying to "fix" a problem, you could create a system that would continue to help find optimizations.

Hell, one year you could give away cash prizes. Another year hire in-home tutors for at-risk kids. Another year you could try some kind of vouchers. You could on and on like this, continuing to experiment and evolve. Or you could just write a check to somebody.

Maybe Zuck has learned that you don't write checks to fix systemic problems.

Maybe.

TheMagicHorsey12• 12 years ago

The problem with schools in a place like Newark is that they serve as a rare source of economic opportunity in an otherwise shithole neighborhood. Schools are a font of money in a place where almost every other economic activity is illegal.

That's why reforming a school is a shit show. Its the place where everyone is feeding at the teat.

Here is one possible solution for a billionaire to try. It won't work for anything but a tiny minority of students at the moment, but it will shine a light on how our education problems are a problem of the education bureaucracy, and not of the students.

Set up a magnate boarding school, outside of the city (perhaps even outside the state). Run it EXACTLY the way you want to run it. Let anyone apply. Give admission based on a lottery ... not on the basis of an examination ... so no one can accuse you of taking only the best kids.

Offer free room/board/education.

Start only with first graders. Then add a grade, every year, as your first class ages. In 12 years you will graduate your first class of students.

Hire the best teachers. Spend a lot on infrastructure. Teach programming/science/technology. Make partnerships with the best universities. Get internships for your students in start ups and companies, using your connections. Maybe your own company can hire some of them.

Show the world what kids from an inner city failed neighborhood can do, without the interference of these teachers and their unions.

When your kids succeed, however spectacularly, or modestly, that will be a beacon.

Encourage your graduates to give back to the school. You will still hemorrhage cash every year, it may never be sustainable without your continued involvement ... but it would be the kind of experiment that would leave an impact for decades ... and if you succeeded in making it sustainable, maybe for centuries.

primitivesuave• 12 years ago

There is a real discussion over this by education reformists, and for 100 million dollars you could make two or three of these.

javajosh• 12 years ago

This comment is ignorant beyond belief! Have you ever been to Newark? It's a huge, bustling city - actually, New Jersey's largest city. When you make absurd claims like "[schools] serve as a rare source of economic opportunity in an otherwise shithole town" how can anyone take anything you say seriously?

TheMagicHorsey12• 12 years ago

I go by what I see. I should probably have said "neighborhood" not city.

Do you see how people cling to those fucking administrative jobs, while screwing over kids, like those jobs are the last life preserver on a sinking ship.

Every school district has teacher's unions that are a pain in the ass ... but only in Newark do you see an utterly corrupt organization defended tooth and nail by entire neighborhoods, without regard for how the children are effected.

Its ridiculous. People treat the firing of clerks like its a genocide of a colonized people.

Omniusaspirer2• 12 years ago

If graduation rates truly are only 67%, I can't help but question how many generations it'll take before the town becomes a "shithole" (if you don't consider it one already like the OP).

cbr• 12 years ago

     Give admission based on a lottery ... not on the basis
     of an examination ... so no one can accuse you of taking
     only the best kids.

It's better than that: if you admit based on lottery you're providing the randomization for a randomized controlled trial. Either you or someone else can measure the difference later in life between applicants that are and aren't admitted.

edtechdev2• 12 years ago

Except it's not random who applies for the lottery. And also charter schools are notorious for rejecting students for various reasons that public schools are not allowed to use, including rejecting special ed students, all in the name of making their test scores look better: http://nepc.colorado.edu/newsletter/2013/05/tcr-dirty-dozen

bradleyjg2• 12 years ago

An out of state boarding school starting with six year olds? Doesn't that sound an awfully lot like an orphanage to you? I don't think many parents would go for it. Even Eton in its heyday waited until 11 or 12.

TheMagicHorsey12• 12 years ago

If I was a poor parent in a neighborhood with no other options, I would send my kid to the boarding school.

Kids would be sent home for holidays, and weekends even (if the parents want to pick them up).

I think some parents would leap at the chance to have the week free, so they can work. Childcare is a big problem in the inner city.

People I know would be taken care of by grandparents, old neighbors, trusted older kids, etc., while their mothers would work (in the case when father was absent).

Might as well trust an institution.

Lavery2• 12 years ago

At the end of their 12 years of boarding school, is it still fair to say that these are kids from an inner city failed neighborhood? Much of the challenge with education in poor (inner city or rural) communities is that, at the end of the day, the kids still have to navigate the stresses and risks of home life. Eliminating that for all or most of the year (depending on your school calendar) would stack the deck hugely in your favor, and by the end of their high school abroad it would strike me as dishonest to refer to these kids as being "from Newark".

In my limited experience with kids from elite boarding schools (which tend to draw from already wealthy communities), graduates of these programs seem to tend more towards the culture of the school than that of their hometown. I think this effect would be even more pronounced in your proposed system.

damon_c• 12 years ago

Who would you say would be the losers in this scenario?

2arrs2ells• 12 years ago

Schools like this - proof points that low income students can succeed - already exist today!

For example: Summit Public Schools in California, FirstLine Schools in New Orleans, Excel Academy in Boston - just to name a few I've seen first hand.

Jugurtha3• 12 years ago

This is exactly what I had in mind. I'm thinking about the school I'll build when I'll be a billionaire.

And no, it's not an orphanage. These kids are a burden for their poor parents who try to provide for them, and fail, and have their heart torn apart failing that. And the kids see their parents' misery, and have their heart torn apart, too.

It's a convolution of sadness with itself.

I had this exact same plan, starting at the youngest possible age, so they grow with you. The school teaches them everything, so they become normal human beings and not ghetto people. I don't think there's a single parent who'd like his child to grow up in misery, and if there's a way to shield that child from this shit-hole, I think any parent would be willing to do almost anything.

Loughla3• 12 years ago

"The school teaches them everything, so they become normal human beings and not ghetto people. I don't think there's a single parent who'd like his child to grow up in misery, and if there's a way to shield that child from this shit-hole, I think any parent would be willing to do almost anything."

Who decides what 'normal' is? What makes your upbringing better than 'ghetto people'? You're walking a very, very fine line between what is best for children, and what is just cultural indoctrination. Do you see how easy it is to slip between the two?

What you're operating under is called cultural relativism. Melville Herskovits said it best, "Judgements are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation." In other words, while you may believe that a 'ghetto' upbringing is worse than what you had, you came to that conclusion under a biased observation. Yes, there is a higher crime rate in 'ghetto' areas, but that has less to do with culture, and more to do with opportunity. When you have 0 opportunity, you tend to become hopeless. So, we'll educate the kids, make sure they conform to our standards, then release them back into hopeless areas. What outcome is that looking for?

And yes, there are parents who would prefer that their children not simply be 'white washed' into cultural conformity based on someone else's standards.

badsock• 12 years ago

Your thesis seems to be that education could be made better simply by making it private rather than public, and that it would be so obviously better that it could serve as a beacon.

Given that there is evidence of very successful schools run by governments outside the USA (Finland is often used as an example, but it is certainly not alone), despite the fact that they have bureaucracy and unions, why do you believe this?

TheMagicHorsey12• 12 years ago

No. My thesis doesn't care who runs the school outside the city. Only that it should be outside the reach of these dysfunctional city institutions and neighborhoods.

Let anyone run them.

A billionaire is necessary only because the current political system brooks no competition. The teachers will not allow it. Their cushy incompetence would be put in sharp relief if something like this were to succeed.

JPKab• 12 years ago

I'm guessing you don't have children. Putting children under the age of 12 in a boarding school isn't the best idea. Putting kids under the age of 8 in a boarding school is simply a terrible idea. They need too much care at these ages.

If you're idea is done in the context of replacing foster homes for kids who are removed from their parents by social services, I suppose it can work.

TheMagicHorsey12• 12 years ago

I disagree.

There are many successful societies where boarding schools are the norm for the most wealthy and successful people. I don't just mean China and India, where it is extremely common. I mean also England, where it had been more common, and has now become less common; Wealthy WASPS in the North East of America have a few institutions where they send their kids; there is at least one public boarding magnate school that is highly regarded in the American South ... I don't remember its name, but a quick Google will provide I'm sure. There are many other examples.

The idea that a child is best served at the bosom of his parents might be right in the best of circumstances. It is certainly NOT right in an American inner city neighborhood.

Now if your goal is to say, I refuse the best solution, because I hold out for the dream of solving all inner city problems at once, and turning these neighborhoods into pleasant neighborhoods ... then I say, cheers.

You are precisely the reason why we need a billionaire for this venture ... public money will never come to support something so radically different.

ceras3• 12 years ago

Let anyone apply. Give admission based on a lottery ... not on the basis of an examination ... so no one can accuse you of taking only the best kids.

That doesn't fully counter the "creaming effect" argument unless you assume the applicant pool is a representative sample of the population.

Blinkky• 12 years ago

This is pretty much exactly what the Milton Hershey School does. "Today, Milton Hershey School is a cost-free, private, coeducational home and school for children from families of low income, limited resources, and social need. The School is funded by a trust established by Milton S. Hershey and his wife Catherine. Milton Hershey School offers a positive, structured home life year-round and an excellent pre-kindergarten through 12th grade education. Our vision focuses on building character and providing children with the skills necessary to be successful in all aspects of life."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Hershey_School

nopinsight• 12 years ago

From my direct experience working in this field for over ten years, parent's attitude and social environment probably account for most of the variation in education achievement at the elementary level. Kids are curious by nature, but acquiring the three Rs (reading, writing, arithmetic) is not built into human nature. It requires sufficient cultural support from the kid's environment and caretakers. Dedicated teachers and good learning process help, but children spend much more time at home and in their neighborhood than at school.

Another factor, not very politically correct to say but real nonetheless, is genetics, although genes likely play a larger role when the subject matter is more complicated, at the high school level and beyond, and when the learning environment is worse. If the teaching system is suitable and children have the motivation to learn, most students can master elementary school materials quite well.

At the high school level though, not everyone can master abstract concepts, like equations involving complex numbers and trigonometric functions, with reasonable effort, especially if their basics from elementary education are lacking. (They may be able to get fairly good at them with Herculean efforts, but few would want to dedicate their whole teenage life to academics.)

Given the hypothesis from real-world experience above, I suspect that reform successes at the high school level is significantly harder to come by than at the elementary one. If anyone has empirical data to support or refute this hypothesis, it would be helpful.

In any case, involving parents and caretakers to support children education is essential for any school reform efforts in poorer neighborhood. This is likely to be more effective at the elementary level when parents have stronger influence over their kids, and other confounding factors (like drugs and love life) are less important than when they become teens.

Parental push is definitely behind the academic success of Confucius regions in Asia: Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and Shanghai-China. All of them perform excellently in international academic assessments in reading, math, and science.

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/dec/03/pisa-re...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_International_Mathema...

hershel• 12 years ago

But there has been cases for schools for inner-city children that showed great results ,for example sabis. Not sure how they did it , but maybe not all is lost ?

gargarplex• 12 years ago

Sorry but you're all wrong. It was a political and pr move timed with the release of The Social Network

robg• 12 years ago

Exactly why we can't trust government with resources. Every dollar must be held accountable.

fleitz• 12 years ago

Startup school receives $100 million in funding based on an idea..... and fails? I wonder if it was a mobile social local school like Color?

It seems that perhaps what is needed is a YC of education that provides small grants and helps with follow-on investment once those small bets pay dividends.

Education is fundamentally pretty simple, you need a room, a teacher, and a few dollars worth of paper. Seems like the ideal thing for a startup. Fundamentally once you teach a person basic literacy and basic numeracy they can spend the rest of their life teaching themselves.

wavesounds• 12 years ago

"It came in the form of philanthropic donations, which, unlike government funding, required no public review of priorities or spending."

This is why we should raise taxes on Billionaires. A lot of them are willing to give away a lot of their money but, no matter how well intentioned they are, they are not as good at spending money for the public good as the government is.

616c• 12 years ago

As a proud NJ-raised kid, I can confirm hat others say about Newark, but with my own personal spin: Newark is a shithole, and no amount of money will fix that problem.

kelvin0• 12 years ago

Sometimes more money without the appropriate structural changes does not yield the intended 'miracle'. This is almost like someone winning the lottery which amplifies their troublesome behaviors ...

icambron2• 12 years ago

I would love to see someone try this experiment: let's say we pay teachers $200K/year, gave them huge discretionary budgets, and put a lot of performance pressure on them. What would happen in place like Newark? I'm not saying that's a sustainable, scalable solution, but it certainly sounds like a good use of $100M.

danielweber20• 12 years ago

It's possible to overpay for a position. If you pay significantly over market rates, it is going to be hard to filter through all the applications, and you need a separate auditing mechanism to check for people, say, slipping $20,000 to the HR person to get themselves on the top of the pile.

BTW, this is an excellent way of fairly determining if a job is overpaid or underpaid: how hard is it to find applicants? Do people camp out for 3 days beforehand for a chance to apply? In case of performance issues, do people cling to their jobs like a drowning man to a life-preserver?

LATE EDIT

I agree with the discretionary budgets. Each teacher should have an expense account on a credit card for when things come up and s/he needs to buy something.

icambron2• 12 years ago

It's possible to overpay for a position.

No doubt. And I pulled the number 200K out of my ass; it could be a lot of numbers. But on the question of how hard it is to find applicants, it depends what you hold constant: the qualifications or the compensation. Here we're holding the compensation constant and raising the qualification bar however high we can. I'm sure hoards of people would apply to become CEO of Microsoft if that was a thing you could do, but that doesn't mean the position is overpaid. The experiment here is to see if you could get much better teachers by widening the pool of potential applicants to people who who wouldn't normally want to do that, by a) making the pay competitive with other high-skill industries and b) cutting out a lot of the bullshit involved in applying that skill to teaching children. That pool would surely include plenty of people who are already rockstar teachers, but additionally lots of people who think of themselves as bound for, say, business consulting or finance or software engineering. How would you choose among your applicants? I don't know, but I'm sure there are plenty of answers to "if I could turn anyone into a teacher, who would it be? And I how could I maximize their abilities?" Maybe this is actually lots of different experiments with different selection criteria and different degrees of freedom in applying themselves to the task (e.g., in defining curriculum).

brudgers2• 12 years ago

That's the efficiency of the free market. People sought to capture as much of the $100 million as possible while investing a minimum of effort and resources. It's entrepreneurial.

NorthGuy1• 12 years ago

$100M is roughly 10% of Newark's annual budget and was offered as one time funding. Education is a service industry so that 10% is effectively spread thinly across all the schools in the district. This is in stark contrast to Zuck's product development background where 100M can be concentrated into developing a single product that can produce amazing ROI. Perhaps this is why our IT billionaires flounder in education?

edtechdev2• 12 years ago

Wow, a lot of experts on education here.

There are a lot of myths out there about (U.S. K12) education, such as all these "bad teachers" that we can't ever fire because of tenure, and how awful U.S. education is compared to other countries or compared to the U.S. in the 50s and 60s, and how charter schools or vouchers will solve all education's problems.

There is actual data and research out there on all this, buried under all this opinion. Did you know for example that tenured teachers are twice as likely to lose their job as non-tenured teachers? http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/teachers/the-m...

There is also a history behind all this. Before teacher tenure, teachers were regularly fired on the whim of principals or because of getting pregnant. See for example "Why Teacher Unions Are Good for Teachers—and the Public" http://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/winter0607/ravitc...

And see the book "50 Myths & Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools" http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/03/...

As the authors state: "The mythical failure of public education has been created and perpetuated in large part by political and economic interests that stand to gain from the destruction of the traditional system."

Once you get past the myths, I'd recommend doing a little reading on how people actually learn (it's not just dumping information on empty brains). See for example the book How People Learn (free, pdf): http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309070368

Or for the more impatient, watch this beginning of this video Minds of Our Own: http://www.learner.org/resources/series26.html

Or this even shorter video on the counter-intuitive nature of how people learn from videos (criticizing the Khan Academy videos): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVtCO84MDj8

Teaching is an incredibly difficult job, because learning is incredibly complex. A single phrase or gesture can have an enormous positive or negative influence on learning. If you tried spending even one hour in a typical K12 classroom, most likely you'd be eaten alive. It may not seem like many K12 teachers are getting fired, partly because most teachers quit within 5 years.

wglb• 12 years ago

Whenever I hear talk about school reform, or teacher's pay or how long they work, I am reminded of Dean Kamen's http://www.usfirst.org/. I heard him speak last fall, and he points out that a significant part of the problem is the glory and fame attached to entertainment figures and sports figures, rather than to scientists, engineers, and doctors.

His program sponsors local competitions, such as building robots, and other technology-oriented activities.

While the issues raised in the article are valid ones, we need to look at the whole picture.

A Test for School Reform in Newark

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