What Zuckerberg can learn from Bono

Apparently, Facebook tycoon Mark Zuckerberg didn’t learn his lesson the first time…or he is so desperate for positive PR, that he will waste millions of dollars on fluff projects that don’t actually achieve anything. I’m referring to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s latest donation to a government school monopoly ($120 million to San Francisco Public Schools).

I previously wrote about Zuckerberg’s misguided philanthropy here. Miami Herald columnist Glenn Garvin had a great article deconstructing Zuckerberg’s unwise charity that appeared in today’s Albuquerque Journal.

Of Zuckerberg’s donation to the Newark Schools, Garvin had this gem:

“The result might be titled No Consultant, Bureaucrat or Union Goon Left Behind. Consultants took $20 million right off the top, routinely charging $1,000 a day for services like public relations, human resources and other stuff that’s been around since the beginning of corporate time but which apparently had to be reinvented for Newark.”

The good news is that people can change. Remember the musician Bono who was once the world’s leading spokesman for foreign aid (another means of well-intentioned people propping up failing systems)? Now, Bono has come around to saying, “Aid is just a stopgap. Commerce [and] entrepreneurial capitalism take more people out of poverty than aid.”

It’s a start, maybe someday Zuckerberg will realize that school choice and a healthy infusion of free market forces (choice and competition to name a few) will do more to benefit American students than pouring additional millions into broken systems.