The $100 million grant from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg towards Newark’s schools continues to attract scrutiny. The Facebook money and other donated funds are being closely tracked by the Newark Trust for Education. NJ Today Managing Editor Mike Schneider sat down with Ross Danis, President & CEO of the Newark Trust for Education, about where the money is going.
The entity created to distribute the Facebook grant — Foundation for Newark’s Future — is not the first foundation to contribute substantial amounts of money to school reform and school improvement in Newark. Danis said that when the Foundation for Newark’s Future first launched, there were already 49 other foundations. Considering the staggering amounts of funds dedicated by private donors, Danis said it was important to map out who’s doing what and where to keep people from bumping into one another. In doing so, he soon discovered how complicated tracking the money is.
“As you might imagine, money goes from foundations to say a provider like, maybe, young audiences to the arts, who then regrants the money to someone like Alvin Ailey who lands in a school, never through the district,” explained Danis. “So when you go to central office it’s really hard for them to know whats actually happening in their schools.”
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Interestingly, Danis discovered that while tracking $92 million worth of resources from 50 different funders, school by school, program by program, math programs had the least amount of money allocated.
“I’ll say that it’s the least funded of all the programs. There are STEM programs. In fact, if you went to the net navigator on our website you can put in STEM and find out where its taking place, what schools its being addressed in.”
While the organizations and the people behind them are well-intentioned, Danis said that the amount of money and the number of involved lead to a “clustering” of resources
“You start attracting providers, consultants, programmers who each have their own idea of what they think is effective. Schools become “go to” places, so certain schools kind of become the place programs start landing.”
The reasons why certain schools attract donors varies, according to Danis. “Perhaps there is a principal there who is quite adept at writing grants, has relationships with people,” Danis said. “Then once something gets a foothold in one place, other people start to come. .. We have a survey that we just completed that suggests upwards of 45 percent of all of the programs supported by external resources are clustered in fewer than 10 schools.”
Danis said that he and the Newark Trust are doing is to put a spotlight on what’s happening where and allowing others to take a look at that data and decide what should happen.
“We actually think that this is something that needs to happen in cities all across America. It’s never been done before and for the most part it’s not a sector that’s particularly used to having a spotlight put on them.”