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In Sept. 2010, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, NJ Governor Chris Christie, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Oprah Winfrey announced an exciting step for education reform in America: Mark Zuckerberg would be donating $100 million to improve Newark public schools, a potentially transformative opportunity. This week, nearly a year later, the ACLU-NJ filed a lawsuit on behalf of a local parents' group to find out how that donation, and the plan for what to do with it to benefit their children, came about, since the City of Newark refused to share. The city of Newark hasn't responded with details, but the mayor of Twitter has: @CoryBooker: All grants of Zuckerberg $ have been made public. New grant announcements coming in Sept RT @bluejersey Update public on Zuckerberg's gift The next morning, he told the Newark Star-Ledger that he had disclosed everything, and that the records don't exist. Wait, what? Below, you'll find a detailed q+a to clear up as much as possible on our end.

A year ago yesterday, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" to announce he was making an unprecedented $100 million donation to help reform Newark's struggling school system. A year later, the spending of the "Facebook money" - as it's become known in Newark - has gotten mixed reviews. The process got off to a bad start when the first $1 million was spent on a public survey that critics called a waste of money. That was followed by months of political missteps and public-relations debacles related to politically linked firms hired to help spend the donation. But in recent months, the Newark-Facebook team seems to have gotten its act together, according to interviews with community leaders and education experts inside and outside of New Jersey. With a new Newark schools superintendent on board and a new head for the nonprofit group overseeing the project, the first Facebook dollars are showing up in Newark classrooms.

"In numerous previous posts I have summarized New Jersey charter school enrollment data, frequently pointing out that the highest performing charter schools in New Jersey tend to be demographically very different from schools in their surrounding neighborhoods and similar grade level schools throughout their host districts or cities. I have tried to explain over and over that the reason these differences are important is because they constrain the scalability of charter schooling as a replicable model of "success." Again, to the extent that charter successes are built on serving vastly different student populations, we can simply never know (even with the best statistical analyses attempting to sort out peer factors, control for attrition, etc.) whether the charter schools themselves, their instructional strategies/models are effective and/or would be effective with larger numbers of more representative students. Here, I take a quick look at the other side of the picture, again focusing on the city of Newark. Specifically, I thought it would be interesting to evaluate the effect on Newark schools enrollment of the shift in students to charter schools, now that charters have taken on a substantial portion of students in the city. If charter enrollments are - as they seem to be - substantively different from district schools enrollments, then as those charter populations grow and remain different from district schools, we can expect the district schools population to change.  In particular, given the demography of charter schools in Newark, we would expect those schools to be leaving behind a district of escalating disadvantage - but still a district serving the vast majority of kids in the city."

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg made quite a splash last year when he donated $100 million to help fix Newark's troubled schools not only because of the size of the gift but its promise of involving Newark residents in deciding how the money would be spent-funds that the city would match.  According to Joan Whitlow of the Star-Ledger's NJ.com, that promise of "citizen-centered" involvement has fallen by the wayside with the announcement that the Foundation for Newark's Future will be dispensing Zuckerberg funds.  Whitlow reports that the foundation's board has three voting and one nonvoting members, only one of whom is from Newark, and that's Mayor Cory Booker.  The only way to get on the board, according to Gregory Taylor, the foundation's president and CEO, is to donate at least $10 million because the foundation has to "raise enough to match the original $100 million."  

Newark's new schools superintendent, Cami Anderson, outlined a broad plan on Friday to reshape the state's largest school system, including closing poorly performing schools and lifting standards for charters. Although many of the changes echoed similar efforts in New York City, Ms. Anderson cast the blueprint as one tailored to the needs of Newark, a district where some parents, teachers and other stakeholders have grown resentful and suspicious of outsiders after more than 15 years under state control. But in what was perhaps a sign of difficulties to come, her presentation before parents, teachers and residents at Rutgers-Newark on Friday evening was drowned out by shouts for her to return to New York City, where she worked as a superintendent under schools Chancellor Joel Klein.

In a motion filed just after noon today in Superior Court of Newark, the ACLU of New Jersey announced it is suing Newark, accusing the city of violating numerous OPRA regulations and demanding the release of all correspondence between Zuckerberg, Booker, Gov. Chris Christie, and Acting Education Commissioner Chris Cerf surrounding the September 2010 donation.

"In this research note, we estimate a series of models using publicly available school level data to address the following question: Q: Did students in Newark (combined district and charter) make gains on statewide averages (non-Newark) on state assessments, controlling for demographics? Specifically, we evaluate changes in mean scale scores on state assessments (NJASK) for language arts and math grades 6 to 8."

A bill that would offer private and parochial school scholarships to some Newark students would give those children the chance at a bright future that many of their public schools deny them today, Newark Mayor Cory Booker said during a keynote address in Jersey City. Booker spoke to the American Federation for Children, a privately funded group that advocates for school choice in select states across the country. Gov. Chris Christie delivered a keynote address to the group Thursday and also urged passage of the bill, known as the Opportunity Scholarship Act.

For a generation of Newark students, every education decision, including choices on curriculum, spending and superintendent, has been made by state officials in Trenton. That level of state involvement has made the 39,000-student district an attractive laboratory for Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican seen as a national leader on education reform, and for prominent donors, including Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, who have pledged $148 million to remake this city's failing schools. But the influx of money, and the attendant national spotlight, has galvanized a growing movement of parents, educators and elected officials who want the schools returned to local control 16 years after they were taken over amid low test scores, crumbling buildings and charges of mismanagement.

Some of the $100 million that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated last year to help Newark Public Schools has now been spent, and you may be surprised to see where it is going.

"In this brief, I present preliminary findings that are part of a larger, national analysis of newly released federal data, a primary objective of which is to evaluate the extent to which those data yield findings consistent with findings arrived at using state level data sources. In this brief, I specifically explore variations in student characteristics and resources across schools in Newark, NJ."

An update to my post about two schools in Newark whose students and staff were misrepresented by a child advocacy group, the press, and the Newark superintendent

In an historic reshuffling of the state's largest school system, Newark Superintendent Cami Anderson Friday will announce a series of districtwide reforms that include closing seven failing schools and increasing charter school accountability. The measures, which also call for an expansion of Newark's elite magnet school system, are by far the most far-reaching - and potentially controversial - initiatives of Anderson's eight-month tenure.

"On the very eve of the weekend celebrating the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Newark's state-appointed superintendent showed the citizens of Newark that they have no votes and they have no voice when it comes to the fate of their schools."

I did a piece a short while back on TEAM Academy, a Charter school which I thus far admire in Newark, NJ. I admire the school because, while the data I've been able to gather from official sources still indicates that TEAM is far from a statistical match with its surroundings, and appears to have greater cohort attrition than I might like to see, I am, at this point, comfortable stating that TEAM Academy is more comparable than others to its surroundings than other Newark Charters.

Governor uses national platform to pitch for vouchers, dump on Newark public schools

What I'm not for… and I'm not yet sure what's going on here… is pretending that we can simply shut down schools in high poverty neighborhoods, blaming teachers and principals for their failure, and then either a) replacing the school management and staff with individuals likely to be even less qualified and less well equipped to handle the circumstances,  or b) initiating an inevitably continuous pattern of displacement from school to school to school for children already disadvantaged.

What the articles fail to document, however, are the contributions made by members of K12's board of directors. K12's chairman until very recently was Andrew Tisch, of the famous New York Tisch family. Reports are that Tisch just stepped down as chairman just a few weeks ago, but still appears to still serve on the board. He also appears to have been very well-compensated for his position, receiving both stock and options grants from the company. Why does this matter? Because Andrew Tisch and his family are Newark Mayor Cory Booker's biggest financial supporters.

These are some of the 17 new principals - 11 of them under age 40, 7 from outside Newark - recruited this year to run nearly a quarter of the city's schools. They were hired by Cami Anderson, the new schools superintendent, as part of an ambitious plan to rebuild the 39,000-student district, which has long been crippled by low achievement and high dropout rates, but now is flush with up to $200 million from prominent donors, including Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook.

"Half a year after Newark Public Schools launched an "agenda to ensure all students are in excellent schools," the plan has come under a federal civil rights investigation to determine whether it "discriminates against black students.""