Did Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million really help Newark’s schools?

In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg made headlines by donating a staggering $100 million to the Newark public school system — but four years later, how much good has the big-ticket donation actually done? A new piece in The New Yorker looks at where the money went, taking a critical view of both the intransigent teacher’s unions and the reformers that seek to replace them. Tens of millions went to buying out old teacher contracts — which Mayor Cory Booker and others saw as a necessary political step before unions would let them remake the current compensation system — while millions more went to consultants and construction projects that offered little tangible benefit to the city’s students. The result was that, by March of 2013, the district was effectively broke, facing a $57 million budget gap. As one local figure put it, “everybody’s getting paid, but Raheem still can’t read.”