February 2, 2011 | Read Time: 5 minutes
New York
William A. Ackman, the hedge-fund manager, typically makes “long” investments in companies he expects will become more valuable over time—and he says he’s prepared to take the long view in judging his biggest contribution to date, turning around troubled schools in Newark, N.J.
Mr. Ackman—who, along with his wife, Karen, is No. 17 on The Chronicle’s annual list of America’s most-generous donors—in September pledged $25-million through his foundation to help Newark Mayor Cory Booker improve the city’s schools. The effort, which is sure to be a difficult undertaking, is one of a handful of ways that Mr. Ackman is seeking to broaden educational opportunities for young people.
A Holistic Approach
Through his Pershing Square Foundation, Mr. Ackman is supporting a New York effort to give students incentives to take Advanced Placement courses, two mentorship projects for poor New York students, and a Boston charity that instructs young people in ways to resolve conflicts. While he is keen on exploring incentives and other market-based approaches to education, Mr. Ackman does not seem to have an ideological agenda in seeking solutions.
He was drawn to the Newark effort in large part because of Mr. Booker. The two met a decade ago, back when Mark Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old Facebook co-founder who last year committed $100-million to the effort, was more focused on his own grades than the performance of Newark students.
Mr. Ackman says he likes that Newark offers the chance to take a holistic approach to improving education. He says the effort is about much more than charter schools, though he sees why the schools are so popular with other donors.
“The reason why people invest a lot of money in charters is because they aren’t able to get done in public schools what needs to get done,” he says. “They start with a blank sheet of paper in a charter school.”
Mr. Ackman says that Newark is “open to any and all ideas.” But the city’s efforts to figure out how to spend his money and that of other philanthropists are proving contentious.
The city is wrapping up “phase one,” which has involved canvassing Newark residents and holding 11 town-hall meetings to gather their suggestions. Along with a more-detailed survey that two universities are conducting, those efforts are meant to inform how Mr. Booker and other officials decide to spend the donations.
‘The $64-Million Question’
But some people worry that the outreach efforts are just a charade—and that Mr. Booker, who is generally viewed as in favor of charter schools and efforts to win concessions from teachers’ unions, already knows how he intends to spend the money.
“The $64-million question is, does he have a plan, has he had a plan? Is it a plan that’s consistent with the kinds of education-reform values he tends to be associated with?” says Paul Tractenberg, co-director for the Rutgers University’s Newark Schools Research Collaborative, which, along with New York University, is producing the longer survey.
Mr. Tractenberg says he doesn’t have an opinion on that question. But others long involved in education issues in Newark have formed a separate group, Coalition for Effective Newark Public Schools, to ensure that local voices are heard in the decision-making process.
Junius Williams, director of the Abbott Leadership Institute, in Newark, and an organizer of the coalition, says that while he’s glad the school system is receiving so much money and attention, his concern is that the effort will ignore past studies and plans, like one the last superintendent put in place, for improving schools.
“I don’t think we need to start rebuilding our house on a new foundation when it really needs to have some new walls and ceilings,” he says, adding that he wonders how, exactly, the survey will help inform decisions about school improvement.
People like Mr. Ackman and Jennifer Holleran, who heads Mr. Zuckerberg’s new foundation, Startup: Education, say they did not receive specific plans for how the money should be spent—those will come out of the outreach process. The results of the surveys are expected to be released in March.
But there’s also concern about a lack of coordination among the various government and nonprofit officials working on the efforts.
Mr. Tractenberg says that from the ground, it “looks like a mess.” Ms. Holleran says there “probably should be more” coordination than there is but that it’s still early.
“It would be nice to have everyone lined up ahead of time, but that’s not the way this initiative started,” she says. “It’s a work in progress, and it’s working its way forward nicely.”
Small Projects, Big Hopes
Mr. Ackman, of course, is not involved in the day-to-day efforts to improve Newark’s schools, nor is Mr. Zuckerberg, whom Ms. Holleran says she contacts by e-mail a few times a month.
Mr. Ackman says his approach to education is driven by the simple belief that “every child in America is entitled to a first-class education.” Like businesses, he says, schools fail largely because of bad decisions on the part of people running them.
While he’s given some money to big education groups like Teach for America, he prefers to give money to smaller efforts. One such program is Reach: Rewarding Achievement, which gives cash awards to students at a handful of New York schools who get passing marks on AP exams. Mr. Ackman’s foundation has committed $6.2-million to the program.
In Newark, he hopes for big things. He says he would love to see traditional public schools thrive—but that if some of them don’t, there have to be consequences.
If charter schools prove to be “the only model that works in Newark, it will become more and more charter,” he says. “But hopefully we can have successful public schools.”
