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Comment by merpnderp | Hacker News Reader

You make it sound like Zuckerberg's donation in Newark happened in a vacuum. It happened in tight collaboration with the school system, who stated needs and approved every step of the process. It's not like Zuckerberg stepped in and said "you shall obey!!!" Course in this case it just turned out that not only could the democratically elected government of Newark magically waste all their tax revenue, they were excellent at wasting donated money.

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Nothing happens in a vacuum. With great power comes great responsibility - at some point billionaires can't blame their shit going wrong on other people if they were the more capable ones and clearly felt they were more capable when they set out to do this?

It is ironic that school reform efforts focus so much on metrics to rate teachers and "hold them accountable." Yet, when the school reform efforts themselves fail horribly, they suddenly tell us that the metrics don't tell the whole story as they rush to find whatever scapegoat they can.

"Accountability for you, not for me" seems to be the motto of the movement.

You claim this donation was made in "tight collaboration with the school system," yet, CNBC and The New Yorker say that "One of the criticisms of Newark's school reform has been the lack of input from the community." [0]

These seem to be opposite view points. Do you have a source for that claim? Or perhaps you were saying something else?

[0]: http://www.cnbc.com/2014/05/23/where-zuckerbergs-100-million...

The school system and the community are not the same body. The community is all the people who live there. The school system is the administrators, teachers, & bureaucrats that run the schools.

I do find it rather disheartening that a tech inventor and a PhD in Biology are being looked to as legitimate critics and saviors of public education.

This is actually a pretty solid 1-line summary of the whole problem.

Makes sense as the PhD's and government "experts" in education gave us the unpopular and widely criticized No Child Left Behind and Common Core, which hasn't done anything to stem the flood of unprepared kids going to college and the work force.

Yes, I'm sure GWB staffed his cabinet with "experts." Yes.

Well Obama has had 6 years to fix it. Which makes this less of a republican/democrat issue than a "why the hell aren't we copying Finland" issue. You know like why would government spend all this money on contractors and consultants to figure out a new way to do things when they could just copy a highly functional and successful system? Oh, corruption. Right.

> Well Obama has had 6 years to fix it.

In the world where Obama was a dictator and could unilaterally rewrites statutes, sure.

In the real world, Obama had just under two years (because Congressional terms start earlier than Presidential terms) with Democratic majorities in Congress.

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