How Would You Use $100M To Help Save Public Schools?

Photo Credit: Casey West

The  February 2011 issue of Fast Company has a compelling article on the current conversations around fixing America’s public schools. Author Anya Kamenetz comments on the new energy around education reform and the money that has been allocated to the cause. She quotes Derrell Bradford, an education reformed from Newark New Jersey who said: “for the under-40 set, education reform is what feeding kids in Africa was in 1980″.

This brings the article to focus on Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent $100 million donation to reform of the Newark Public Schools. Although the plans for the $100M haven’t been solidified, Zuckerberg has already gotten behind merit based pay for teachers, closing failing schools and establishing more charter schools. Kamenetz argues though that this $100M might not end up helping anything because Zuckerberg is moving forward on a non-innovative templated reform model that hasn’t been overly successful to date: increase resources; but business people in charge; measure success by standardized test scores.

Fast Company continues this article by asking people from various professional backgrounds what radical ideas that would implement with $100 Million.  The first of 13 ideas really struck me as a parent:

“In the first few years of life, there are 700 new neuron connections formed every second. The achievement gap between a child born into extreme poverty and one of the professional class is evident by age 3. Yet public policy doesn’t engage the first five years of life. We still think of those years as belonging to the family, though this period is crucially important to the development of our workforce. With $100 million, I would build new centers for preschoolers, infants, and toddlers, with three teachers per classroom. Data show that kids with this level of instruction and focused play enter kindergarten in a position to compete.”

–Daniel Pedersen, president of the Buffett Early Childhood Fund

Many families make real financial sacrifices so that mom or dad can be home with the kids in those first five years. Should we actually be making an effort to focus less on family during those years and more on “socialization” and instruction? Are we swaddling our kids too much during these important years? If you had $100 Million to help fix our schools, is this where you’d put your focus?

Read the entire Fast Comany article and the “13 Radical Ideas for Education Reform” here.

About Mike Johnson

My Family. Boston Sports. Music. Food. Video Games. Founder of Playground Dad. Live in Northern California with my wife and 4 daughters. The Wire is the best TV show ever. My daughters still tell me I'm funny and that's all that matters to me.

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  • NJ

    I don’t think there is a better way to stimulate your small child’s neurons than spending time with them. Why would you pay someone else to do that? I can think of a million places to spend $100 million and none of them would be on infants/toddlers.

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  • Pete V.

    I would establish a tax-protected college savings account for every student in the district. Then, I would use the $100 million to launch and fund a program that rewards parents for helping their kids with homework by depositing funds into the kids’ college savings accounts.

    A web-based system could be developed to enforce parent participation.

    Even an extra couple thousand dollars at the end of high school would be a welcome reward for a college-bound student. But it would be use-it-or-lose-it — if the kid doesn’t go to college, the funds are returned to the program.

  • Elizabeth C.

    While I think parents are incredibly important, an amazing pre-school/daycare environment can only be additive and beneficial for infants. 90% of brain development happens before the age of five and most parents have to work, especially lower socio-economic families, so they need to have affordable and amazing childcare systems to help prepare their children for school.

    Also, more and more children are arriving unprepared when they begin school. And when they arrive unprepared, they have a tendency to fall behind. I think that sets off or coincides with a whole host of other educational problems: holding a kid back (and the cost to the state), having qualified teachers to work with and bring that child up to grade level, etc.

    Granted, I’d love for money to be spent across the board at every level. But, I do believe it’s important to make sure infants are getting the proper stimulation and learning in AND outside the home.

    Here’s a site dedicated to addressing school readiness in Virginia: http://www.smartbeginningsshr.org/