Zuckerberg to Donate $100 Million to Newark Schools

online.wsj.com

15 points·grellas··7 comments

I think this is terrific news and I'm really pleased to see Mark Z. setting up a foundation and investing a significant amount of money in such a worthy cause as education. Having said that... am I being too cynical... or is it just a coincidence that this announcement should come just before the release of The Social Effect movie which, from everything I've read, paints Mark in such a bad light? Is the $100 donation announcement an example of Facebook PR in damage control? It doesn't detract from the good the $100 million will (hopefully) do, of course, but the timing is interesting...

tl;dr Just In time for the movie!

Newark spends about $22,000 a year on each of its 40,000 pupils, but only about half of its students graduate.

That's over $260,000 per student over 12 years!

It's great that Zuckerberg is donating about $100 million to the worthy cause of education, but in this instance I find it hard to believe that lack of money is the problem.

It would be very cool if even a tenth of this was put towards online education systems. $10M could go a long way towards improving online education, esp. with Facebook as a partner!

That's $100 million in Facebook damage control, I'd say.

For maximum effectiveness, he should probably have donated it to the Gates Foundation and earmarked it for education.

Why does he remind me of Beeker in that photo?

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