Back in 2018, Mark Zuckerberg granted the Newark school diction $100 million to improve the education of students in that city. That worked out to be about $2200 per student. Mayor Booker and Governor Christi announced that the money would be spent to create a urban school system that
would be a model for education children, many of them from low-income families and from minority groups.

While there have been at least a few positive outcomes, school administrators from around the nation are not rushing to Newark to learn about improving urban schools. Does the generous Zuckerberg grant suggest that funding is not the elixir that will solve this nation’s very substantial urban education challenges?

The American Recovery Act provided substantial funds for the 500 public school districts in Michigan and the 300 or so charter school district. The Detroit school district original tranche was about $446 million or about $8800 per students. Later that was increased to total new funding for Detroit public schools of about $1.2 billion or $24,000 per students.The schools have great flexibility in spending these funds. Today’s paper describes Dominic Vitti’s plans for spending a considerable a large share of that $1.2 billion. Much of the new funding will be spent to refurbish old schools and build new ones. This is a very costly endeavor.

Two questions arise. First, Michigan is a very low fertility state and the birth rate continues to fall. Michigan attracts relatively few migrants from abroad and loses population each year in the exchange of the native-born population with the other states. Is there any reason to think that the school age population of Michigan will grow in the foreseeable? I foresee controversy in the near future about how to sensibly close schools and merge some of the state’s 13 universities.

Second, given the modest accomplishments of the $100 million Zuckerberg investment in Newark schools, is there good reason to think that the very much greater federal funds in Detroit's public and charter schools will produce very much more favorable results than those reported for Newark’s students?