Zuckerbergs give up on holistic, trauma-informed, culturally responsive schools

After 10 years and $100 million in donations, tech billionaire Mark Zuckerberg and his pediatrician wife, Priscilla Chan, will close two tuition-free private schools in low-income, minority, Bay Area communities next year.

No explanation was given to parents, but the schools were unable to raise funding from other sources, board chair Jean-Claude Brizard, a former schools chief in Chicago, told the New York Times. Staff turnover was high. Co-founder Meredith Liu died in 2023.

The Primary School opened in East Palo Alto to provide social services, health care and "trauma-informed," "culturally responsive" learning to needy children and their families. (Two-thirds of students are Hispanic, and the rest come from black or Tongan families.) It added a second campus in San Leandro. It started with pre-schoolers and added a class each year. Next school year, it's last will offer clases through eighth grade.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is pledging $50 million in education savings accounts for students, transition services to find new schools and help for families in the East Palo Alto and San Leandro communities.

The Primary School doesn't report test scores or other achievement measures. Brizard implies in a Times interview that the school "struggled to make enough demonstrable progress that it could convince public funders, or even additional private backers, to support it."

This was an experiment in what's known as "community schooling." The Primary School focused on addressing "barriers to learning," such as "poverty, housing insecurity, racism, and other stressful and traumatic situations," access to an early childhood program and health issues. It began working with families in the first years of life to "support the wellness and growth of parents alongside the wellness and growth of their children."

It should have helped, and perhaps it did. But the school's web site doesn't have much to say about teaching reading, math and other academic subjects, other than saying that "our curricula and programming provide opportunities for children and families to learn about other cultures and ways of thinking, and to explore and share their own cultural identity."

I'd love to know how The Primary School teaches reading and math and how it measures progress. What did they learn about what worked and what didn't?

LeBron James provided lots of extra funding for district-run I Promise schools in Akron, Ohio. Again, these are "community" schools with lots of social services for very needy children. And academic results have been poor.