$1 million survey on Zuckerberg’s gift yields little data

The city of Newark, N.J., dropped $1 million on a survey asking residents how to spend Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million gift to the city's schools. But the survey was unscientific and its answers are too simplistic to be of any use, university professors and city education leaders tell the Newark Star-Ledger.

Now the city is going to pay an undisclosed amount for canvassers to give another survey, this time crafted with the help of academics.

So why are Newark officials doling out such a chunk of the Facebook founder's gift on a survey when city funds are tight?

Education writer Dana Goldstein of the liberal Nation magazine suggests that it may be a way for Mayor Cory Booker to avoid seeming high-handed in how the mega-gift is doled out and in how he treats the city's schools.

Booker has no doubt watched former D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty's doomed backing of schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee (who said "collaboration and consensus-building are quite frankly overrated in my mind") and Michael Bloomberg's much-criticized appointment of education newbie Cathie Black to head the city's schools. He's learned he needs to "tread carefully," Goldstein writes.

(Photo of Zuckerberg: AP)