Get the academics right -- not dental care and DEI -- to help needy kids

If you want to help needy kids, learn how successful schools teach reading, writing, 'rithmetic, history and science and do that, writes Naomi Schaefer Riley in the Deseret News. Or give money to people who already are doing that.

Mark Zuckerberg and his pediatrician wife, Priscilla Chan, put $125 million into two schools for low-income students. The PK-8 schools provided wrap-around services such as medical and dental care, wellness coaching for parents and social work support. After 10 years, they've ended the Primary School experiment. Other donors were unwilling to contribute, perhaps because student outcomes weren't very good, as Chan told the Wall Street Journal.

How bad was it? We don't know. But it's not surprising, writes Riley. "The school was not designed around academic outcomes," and "plans for curriculum and school discipline seemed at best unclear." Unlike other experiments with providing health and social services at school -- she cites the Harlem Children’s Zone and its Promise Academy charter schools -- the Zuckerberg-Chan experiment lost sight of the top priority. The "whole child" needs to be able to read, write and calculate to achieve "wellness." Dental care isn't the top job.

Successful businessmen don't always use their skills to evaluate philanthropy, she writes. In 2010, Zuckerberg gave $100 million to Newark’s public schools. "It was a total wash. Most of the money supported consultants and the salaries and pensions of teachers and administrators and the gift accomplished almost nothing as a result."

He's not the only one. "Bill Gates dumped tens of millions into New York public schools to little effect. Before that, Walter Annenberg gave half a billion to public schools across the country to little effect."

Teachers' union leaders say "they can’t teach kids well until we solve societal problems like poverty and racism," Riley writes, but "that's just an excuse." There are schools that work for low-income and minority students.

Billionaires and millionaires with money to spend could fund organizations like the Children’s Scholarship Fund that "support students at private schools — including many Catholic schools — with long records of helping students succeed academically," or give $100 million to "charter school networks like Success Academies where students regularly outperform their wealthy suburban counterparts."

"To educate poor kids you don’t need to reinvent the wheel," Riley concludes. "But you do need to watch what makes one turn."