Tag Archives: Diane Tavenner

Facebook Billionaires Walkout on Impoverished Students

12 Aug

By Thomas Ultican 8/11/2026

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) withdrew support for The Primary School (TPS) a private school in East Palo Alto that they founded. CZI also withdrew support for the associated smaller Woodroe Woods School across the bay in San Leandro. When it was revealed that CZI support would be withdrawn, both schools announced closures at the conclusion of the 2025-2026 school year.

TPS was founded by Pricilla Chan and Marideth Liu in East Palo Alto, a poverty area in the center of opulence. Chan is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s wife and a former pediatrician. Liu earned a BA in Economics from Dartmouth and an MBA at Harvard Business School. She is a graduate of the D.C. Public Schools and was the chief financial officer at Match Education, a charter management organization. Unfortunately, Liu died in April 2023 which probably precipitated these closures.

However, one of the more prominent reasons for pulling support according to Chan was performance. Or as Diane Ravitch put it:

“[T]hey are withdrawing their funding because they are disappointed by the school’s test scores. Test scores!”

A report from Stanford University says, “From the beginning, TPS focused on starting earlier in children’s lives, building sustained relationships with families, and aligning supports across the systems that shape development.” The tuition-free school aimed to support the “whole child” with wraparound services which included free dental checkups, early-intervention screenings and wellness coaching for parents.

What happened? Was it Boredom?

When billionaire business leaders “look at K-12 education and go, ‘Man, how hard can it be to improve this thing?’” The director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, Rick Hess replies, “Well, it’s incredibly hard.”

Here is some historical perspective. Zuckerberg announced one of he and Chan’s first major charitable gifts, a $100 million grant to Newark, N.J., public schools, on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 2010. The Facebook billionaire thought he could pick the next superintendent and send Newark down the road to privatization. He did not understand the nature of Newark’s school district or how public education actually worked. He ended up with Cami Anderson as superintendent instead of his choice Jean-Claude Bizard, the billionaire education reformers’ hero of Rochester, who had just received a 90% no-confidence vote from that city’s teachers. Brizard took Rham Emanuel’s offer in Chicago and Zuck’s $100 million generated surprisingly little influence in Newark. (The Prize Pages 97-149)

The TPS effort was completely under CZI control. In 2015, they put up a little more than $7 million and established a non-profit entity. A board was created with five members including Director CEO, Pricilla Chan, President COO, Merideth Liu and three others including Director Diane Tavenner. Liu was the only paid board member. (see 2015 tax form 990 ID: 47-3334579)

Diane Tavenner was the founder and CEO of Summit Public Schools in 2003. It is a charter management organization that serves schools in California and Washington State. She also served in various capacities on the board of the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA). Mark Zuckerburg became aware of Tavenner’s approach to digital learning in 2013 and offered to upgrade the software she was using. Like other tech-billionaires, he wanted to prove the viability of personalized learning, meaning kids at screens. Tavenner last served on the TPS board in 2017.

Big changes came to the TPS board in 2022. Jean-Claude Bizard came on board as chair. Pricilla Chan announced she will no longer be on the board in 2023 as did five other board members. For the first time in 2021, Merideth Liu no longer served in a paid position and in 2022 she was no longer on the board. This is just supposition, but it appears the she was already sick and the entire board was aware of it.

Some of the personnel choices at TPS were bizarre. Both Diane Tavenner and Jean-Claude Bizard went through training in the Broad Superintendents academy. Broad trained administrators have a horrible reputation for hiring many consultants, stirring up labor problems, promoting school privatization and creating budget deficits. An egregious example of this is the damage inflicted in Oakland, California by four consecutive Broad trained administrators.

It looks like Merideth Liu’s illness was the likely culminating incident that led to CZI stepping away from their billionaire financed experiment in East Palo Alto.

The Primary School Enrollment

It May Have Been Working

In the Stanford study, TPS preschoolers were compared with results from The Big Lift a San Mateo County education effort:

“Although the overall Big Lift population outperformed TPS, with rates ranging from 53% to 61% across the same years, that group is generally higher income and faces fewer of the adversity factors linked to lower school readiness. When compared to the demographically similar subgroup, whose readiness rates ranged from 28% to 32% over the same period, TPS outperformed that group consistently across all four years.” (Page 28)

In grades three and up testing, the study found:

“Across both subjects, TPS consistently outperformed local East Palo Alto schools, including both charter and non-charter schools. In Spring 2025, though results varied across individual schools, 14% of local East Palo Alto students met or exceeded the literacy standard and 10% met or exceeded the math standard, compared to 26% and 25% respectively at TPS. This gap held consistently across all three years of available data.

“At the same time, TPS’s results remained below the California statewide average, which stood at 47% in both literacy and math in Spring 2025.” (Page 30)

In their conclusion, the Stanford researches stated:

“The Primary School (TPS) set out to prove that children thrive when the systems around them work together. Nearly a decade later, the evidence is clear that this approach makes a real difference for children and families, and the evidence is also instructive about what it took. Children who moved through TPS’s early childhood programs developed stronger language skills, received developmental support earlier, and entered school more ready to learn. Families grew in resilience, built social connections, and navigated systems that had previously felt inaccessible.” (Page 36)

The TPS approach to serving the “whole child” was clearly working.

Conclusion

It is very clear to me that Pracilla Chan’s low test score complaint was baloney. She was tired of TPS. She had lost her friend in the adventure and lost interest in East Palo Alto. Like the billionaire reformers who proceeded them, CZI dropped a mess on the local public school district and wiped their hands of the adventure.

The Wall Street Journal article on the closing noted that having one major backer in perpetuity hadn’t been the original plan. CZI claimed to be after a model that “could be sustained through primarily public investment.” That indicates that from the very beginning Zuckerberg and Chan were looking for taxpayers to assume the burden.

Poorly thought-out billionaire philanthropy is a too common plague on the public.

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Saint Louis School Board Stalls Privatization Agenda

24 Aug

By Thomas Ultican 8/24/2021

The August 19th headline in the Saint-Louis Post Dispatch reported a new plan “sparks school board outrage.”The board accused Better Futures STL of trying to usurp its role. Better Futures soon cancelled the launch of its new program and Superintendent Kelvin Adams apologized for not sharing the extent of his involvement in a plan described as “a new St. Louis education blueprint that serves all children.”

The Post Dispatch went on to outline Better Futures as being started in April by Opportunity Trust, Education Equity Center of St. Louis, Forward Through Ferguson, WePower and others. Fenton, a pricey New York public relations firm, stated that Better Futures was developing a “community-designed plan over the next 12 months to reimagine an equitable K-12 public education system.” Superintendent Adams and Mayor Tishaura O. Jones are both on the new organization’s advisory council.

Kelvin Adams Involvement Not a Surprise

In a magnificent article about the history and demise of public schools in St. Louis, Jeff Bryant detailed the neoliberal philosophy driving the city’s leadership. The hiring of Kelvin Adams was a result.

Mayor Francis Slay served four terms starting in 2001. He brought in Teach for America (TFA) and championed charter schools. When circumstances beyond the school district’s control led to a large deficit, Slay successfully recruited and financed a new slate of school board members in 2003.

Within a month of taking office, the school board voted to hire Alvarez & Marsal (A&M), the corporate turnaround consultants to run the district. A&M had never worked in a school system before. Former Brookes Brothers CEO William V. Roberti became the de facto superintendent of schools. The results were a disaster. District financing became so untenable that the state took over.

To solve the mess in Saint Louis, the state turned to the New Orleans Recovery School District and hired Paul Vallas’s chief of staff, Kelvin Adams. At the time, Peter Downs, president of the elected school board, called Adams unacceptable. However, Adams’ thirteen-year tenure is attributable to his popularity among Saint Louis’s neoliberal embracing business and political leadership.

School Privatization

In 1981, Rex Sinquefield and David Booth a fellow MBA student at the University of Chicago formed the California based financial firm Dimensional Fund Advisor (DFA). Today the company oversees more than $350 billion in global assets. DFA pioneered index fund investing.

In 2005, Rex and his business partner wife Jeanne returned to Missouri ending his absence of more than 40 years. Since returning he has become a major force in Republican politics and has demonstrated a thorough disrespect for public education. Rex claimed,

‘“There was a published column by a man named Ralph Voss who was a former judge in Missouri,’ Sinquefield continued, in response to a question about ending teacher tenure. [Voss] said, ‘A long time ago, decades ago, the Ku Klux Klan got together and said how can we really hurt the African-American children permanently? How can we ruin their lives? And what they designed was the public school system.’”

Sinquefield was a major reason Josh Hawley was elected to the US Senate. Rex also spent $2.5 million trying to get Missouri’s income tax replaced with a sales tax and spent another $1.6 million attempting to have teachers evaluated using testing.

He has consistently championed lower regressive taxes and market based solutions.

On July 31, 2018, Neerav Kingsland, the founder of New Schools for New Orleans, announced on his blog that billionaires John Arnold and Reed Hastings had pleged $100 million each to start The City Fund. Kingsland is the new Fund’s Managing Partner.

In addition to the non-profit, they have also created an associated political action organization called Public School Allies. In 2019, Allies sent $20,000 to Saint Louis’s Civil PAC.

City Fund has spent large amounts of money developing local organizations to promote implementation of the portfolio model of public education management. The portfolio model directs closing schools that score in the bottom 5% on standardized testing and reopening them as charter schools or Innovation schools. In either case, the local community loses their right to hold elected leaders accountable, because the schools are removed from the school board’s portfolio.

The Opportunity Trust is their partner in St. Louis. City Fund has made a three year $5.5 million grant to the Trust. Opportunity is also a TFA related business. Founder and CEO, Eric Scroggins, worked in various leadership positions at TFA for 14 years starting as a TFA corps member in 2001-3.

The 2017 Opportunity Trust founding board consisted of John Kemper, Diane Tavenner, Maxine Clark and Eric Scroggins. (See 2017 tax form 990 – EIN 82-1838644)

Diane Tavenner is the founder and CEO of Summit Public Schools, a charter management organization that serves schools in California and Washington State. Tavenner is a former board member of the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) and currently serves on the CCSA member’s council.

In 2018, John W. Kemper succeeded his father David Kemper as President and CEO of Commerce Bancshares Inc. Biz journal noted,

‘“He will be a good steward. Cities need good banks to take care of the community, and Commerce is a well run company,’ said cousin and friendly rival Mariner Kemper, chairman of UMB Bank, Missouri’s second largest, with $20.6 billion in assets.”  

Kemper also sits on several local boards including KIPP St Louis.

Maxine Clark is the daughter of Eleanor Roosevelt’s traveling secretary. She was President of Payless Shoes before founding Build-A-Bear Workshop which grew to over 400 mall based stores. Clark retired as CEO in 2013. Since leaving Build-A-Bear, she and her husband have concentrated on civic endeavors. Ladue News reports,

“Among their biggest successes is the launching of the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) Charter Schools in St. Louis. There are two elementary KIPP schools and two middle schools, and this fall, KIPP St. Louis High School will welcome its first freshman class. As a public charter school, KIPP St. Louis High School will operate like a private college prep school.”

Clark calls her latest project “Delmar Devine.” It is a play on the local term “Delmar Divide,” for the line of demarcation separating predominantly white St. Louis from the North Side, where the population is nearly all African-American. She is using Housing and Urban Development money to remodel the 1904 built St. Luke’s Hospital into a mixed use facility with apartments and office space. Many of the new tenants are part of the segrenomics business selling education services to urban poor. They include: Teach for America, The Opportunity Trust, IFF, Education Equity Center of St. Louis, KIPP St. Louis and Navigate STL Schools.

Business elites like Maxine Clark and politicians like Mayor Tishaura O. Jones are making a terrible error in judgment. The public school system is the backbone of communities and the foundation of democracy. Furthermore, unbiased research shows that public schools consistently outperform either private schools or charter schools.

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