Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is set to donate $100 million to the Newark school system. This could bring in a total donation of $200 million as Newark’s mayor, Cory Booker, has been working on raising another $100 million from private foundations and others.
Zuckerberg is setting up a foundation with $100 million in Facebook stock to be used to improve education in America, with the focus being on Newark. The potential donation would amount to over 20% of Newark’s budget of $940 million.
Newark spends about $22,000 a year on each of its 40,000 pupils, but only about half of its students graduate. Of those who do, only one-fifth go on to four-year colleges. More than 85% of the Newark students at community colleges need remedial help in math and English.
Foundations and wealthy investors have been recently donating large sums of money into education to make changes. The money usually comes in exchange for something like increased pay for teachers or measures to make sure teachers are effective.
At this time, it doesn’t seem that Zuckerberg or Facebook have an agenda, but this donation is part of a bigger plan. According to a source familiar with the situation, Booker is charged with setting up plans and rallying community support for them. According to a source close to the matter, the mayor plans to aggressively pursue plans for big changes in the school system. Booker used crime as the focus of his first term and will make education the center of his second.
This would be Zuckerberg’s largest gift to date. In 2009, Facebook was valued at about $7 billion. Now, with over 500 million users, their value has more than tripled to $23 million. Zuckerberg himself added about $5 billion to his fortune, which took him to #35 on the Forbes 400 with an estimated fortune of $6.9 billion. This puts the Facebook CEO ahead of Apple’s Steve Jobs, who sits at #42 on the Forbes 400.
#1 on the list of richest people in America is Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates. He is worth about $54 billion and his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has not only funneled around $5 billion into K-12 education, but also donated $100 million last year to overhaul how teachers are trained and evaluated in the Tampa Hillsborough County School District.