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 When it was revealed that CZI support would be withdrawn, both schools announced closures at the conclusion of the 2025-2026 school year.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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