I am Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark, NJ, founder of #waywire, Inc., social media enthusiast – AMA

I am Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark, NJ, founder of #waywire, Inc., social media enthusiast – AMA Redditors!!! Thanks again for the IAmA request last week – you now have my full attention! Looking forward to answering your questions.

Regarding Mark Zuckerbergs $100mm donation:

1) What has it been spent on?

2) What types of schools has it been spent in (public, charter, private)?

See his answer above, but most importantly DIG! To Whom and When did Zuckerburg give this donation. Where did it go!

Mark Zuckerberg once made a $100 million investment in a major US city to help fix its schools — now the mayor says the effort 'parachuted' in and failed

In 2010, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million toward creating an education foundation in Newark, New Jersey. The goal was to help the city's struggling school system.

In an interview with Business Insider, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka said that the foundation did not use the money wisely.

Baraka added that he wishes the foundation would've engaged with local community groups, rather than "parachuting" into the city.

On the stage of The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2010, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, then-Newark Mayor Cory Booker, and then-New Jersey Governor Chris Christie announced a huge gift for Newark, a New Jersey city that's a short train ride from Manhattan. The Facebook founder gave $100 million to reform Newark Public Schools, and other philanthropists later matched that, bringing the total donation to $200 million. The money went toward creating the Foundation for Newark's Future, a group that set out to improve the city's public schools. At the time, Newark's high-school graduation rate hovered at around 60%, 19 points below the national average. Of those who graduated, 90% needed to take remedial classes before entering the local community college. Fewer than 40% of students were reading at grade level. The results of the $200 million experiment were disappointing, according to now-Mayor Ras Baraka and other critics. The foundation had five years to spend the money, and in 2016, it closed its doors.

The Foundation for Newark's Future, partially funded by Zuckerberg, 'parachuted' into the city Zuckerberg wasn't personally involved with the foundation's efforts, and according to Baraka, the group did not spend the Facebook founder's donation wisely. He wishes the foundation would have engaged more with local community members to find solutions specific to Newark. The money "didn't go to the city, and it didn't go to the school system either. It went to a foundation that made decisions about what the money should be spent on," he said at a Wall Street Journal conference on Wednesday. "You can't just cobble up a bunch of money and drop it in the middle of the street and say, 'This is going to fix everything.' You have to engage with communities that already exist … To parachute folks in, it becomes problematic. In a follow-up interview with Business Insider, Baraka explained that he wished the foundation had worked with local groups like the SPAN Parent Advocacy Network, the Newark Teachers Union, and the Newark chapter of the NAACP — which have all focused on local education issues for many years. The foundation may have acted without fully understanding local issues, so it was hard for them to devise good solutions, he said. "There needed to be a discussion with a series of organizations in the city … to talk about the concrete issues and narrow them down to specific things they could’ve impacted over a long period of time," Baraka said.

https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-schools-education-newark-mayor-ras-baraka-cory-booker-2018-5/

>>2946725

>>2946936

Never trust someone who walks quietly and carries a big stick.

>>2946996

Baker Heading is wrong Zuckerberg Money..

E-Mail Trail of Zuckerberg’s $100M Newark Schools Donation Revealed

Anya Kamenetz of Fast Company has a truly devastating article about how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Newark, N.J. Mayor Cory Booker “stage-managed” Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation. Kamenetz reviewed 96 pages of e-mails between Zuckerberg, Booker, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (even though Zuckerberg’s donation was a personal gift, not corporate philanthropy) and others that were released by the City of Newark on Christmas Eve. The city had refused to release the e-mails, citing executive privilege, but a parents group and the American Civil Liberties Union sued and got Booker’s people to reluctantly comply with state law on public disclosure.

http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/550612-zuckerberg-booker-christie-cerf-100-million.html#document/p1

The e-mails are an amazing read. Mayor Booker should also be embarrassed by trying to block the public’s right to know about them via his invocation of executive privilege. Kamenetz writes about the planning team’s discussions “to make the donation look participatory…and making sure the billionaires look ‘modest’ and feel ‘special.’” In one e-mail, a public relations person describes the coverage of Zuckerberg’s “modest life,” which is juxtaposed against the unflattering portrayal of Zuckerberg in the film The Social Network. Our interest in the e-mails is the technical back and forth about how Zuckerberg’s and Booker’s people made the donation work, particularly the efforts, encouraged by Sandberg, to have “citizens put in funds to help match Mark’s money” as well as recruiting big name donors. The team debated platforms for soliciting and processing small donations (DonorsChoose, PayPal, Google, Kiva, Square, Amazon Payments, etc.), consistent with Sarah Ross’s (from Ashton Kutcher’s company, Katalyst) e-mail input that “it’s bad positioning for Mark if only higher end donors are able to contribute to the matching funds in large chunks.” NPQ is equally interested in Newark’s efforts to recruit big name, big money donors. Among the names popping up in the list were Oprah Winfrey, the Eli Broad Foundation (which apparently wanted to condition a potential contribution on who the superintendent of schools would be, not unlike its position regarding support for the state programs of Gov. Chris Christie), John Doerr, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates. Gates gave $3 million for “teacher professional development” and discussed the installation of “panoramic cameras” to monitor and videotape teachers with 360 degree visual and sound coverage to identify what they did well and not so well.

There is even some odd e-mail commentary from Mayor Booker’s fundraising advisor, Bari Mattes, stating that “Mark’s money is not going in to classrooms,” though it is unclear exactly what that means in relation to a donation to the Newark schools. In all fairness, these kinds of interactions between Booker’s and Zuckerberg’s people would have occurred in any city where a philanthropist was waving around a check for $100 million. It is entirely logical that there would be involvement of PR people on all sides to give the donor the press coverage he or she wanted, to burnish resumes and overcome previous negative publicity, and to avoid making statements to trigger opposition from educators and parents. What should concern readers, however, is the extent to which the City appears to have been willing to let donors’ concerns drive policy decisions. Kamenetz suggests that the “smoking gun” in the story is Broad’s desire to condition a grant on the selection of the schools chief. The person chosen, Cami Anderson, is identified in the article as a former executive director of Teach for America; she is also a former chief program officer of New Leaders for New Schools. Late last year Anderson, announced that she would use some of Zuckerberg’s money to pay for teachers’ salaries and bonuses in contract renegotiations, ultimately using about $50 million of the Zuckerberg contribution, much like former D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee did with $64 million in foundation and private donations.

Reading the e-mails, the language and the people involved are very much part of the school reform movement nationally that Booker explicitly lauds in one e-mail. This is consistent with Booker’s 1999 co-founding of Excellent Education for Everyone (E3), which promotes charter schools and vouchers, though in his mayoral campaigns, Booker has disassociated himself somewhat from the voucher side of E3. The Newark schools need $100 million, but Newark voters and Newark’s parents need to know who is making what decisions for the education of their children. Big money, whether from Zuckerberg, Broad, or Gates, shouldn’t trump the democratic process.

https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2013/01/10/e-mail-trail-of-zuckerbergs-100m-newark-schools-donation-revealed/

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