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.
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?
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.
Seriously, compare the life outcomes of single-parent households by breaking out the reasons for single-parenthood. http://www.clasp.org/resources-and-publications/states/0086.... There is a lot more going on than "no dad -> sucky results."
Zuck needs to figure out what the real causes are before pouring another $100,000,000 down the drain.
Would you mind listing some studies showing point (2). I'd really appreciate anything you've got handy.
"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.
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.
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.
Programs exist for this with some positive results. Here's one from a quick Google search: http://evidencebasedprograms.org/1366-2/nurse-family-partner...
Programs like "Nurse-Family Partnership – Top Tier" already operate. I know because I've written numerous Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Healthy Start Initiative (HSI) proposals (see more about the program here: http://blog.seliger.com/2013/12/15/hrsas-healthy-start-initi...) that attempt to do just this. I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies, so I see citations like yours all the time. Next time I write an HSI or similar program, I'll cite "Nurse-Family Partnership – Top Tier." Doing so isn't going to make the program any better, because HSI has been operating for a couple decades, under different names, and hasn't accomplished much on a large scale, in part because of the scale-up problems described in the first paragraph.
Ideas like "Nurse-Family Partnership – Top Tier" sound good, but the gap between the real world and the proposal world is quite wide (http://blog.seliger.com/2010/04/11/the-real-world-and-the-pr...). Zuckerberg has evidently learned this.
Apologies for the length of this post, but the issue is a complex one that is hard to explain and harder to understand—hence all the links!
I understand that scaling is very difficult. But what makes you think scaling these types of programs is harder than scaling those that directly target education? In fact, the first link you provide talks about the difficulty of scaling an educational program.
I'd love for there to be strong evidence backing a scalable program that addresses generational poverty, be it an educational approach or not, but I don't know of any. Until we find that, I really don't think it's helpful to limit public discourse to only one potential solution to such a complex problem.