Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is so often the villain in the story of American politics. Sometimes, he is censoring social media at the behest of a political party. Other times, he is planning on solving male loneliness by getting people hooked on fake virtual friends. Sometimes, he is even daring to provide schooling to children.
That is the latest controversy Zuckerberg finds himself in after it was revealed that his collection of 11 properties in Palo Alto’s Crescent Park included a private school. That small private school had three full-time teachers and 14 children from kindergarten to fourth grade (including Zuckerberg’s two children). Worst of all, the very existence of the school violated Palo Alto city code.
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This all seems a little less nefarious when you consider that this secret code-violating “school” began as an option for a few families who went into homeschooling during the COVID-19 pandemic. Palo Alto schools were not even fully reopened by the start of the spring 2021 semester, despite it being clear that children should be back in person by the beginning of the fall 2020 school year. The Zuckerschool (which went by the only mildly less silly name “Bicken Ben”) continued as parents decided to keep this “pod of home-schoolers” for educational stability, according to a Zuckerberg spokesperson.
If there is one thing we learned during the pandemic, it is that educational stability is a necessity for students. These parents may just be on to something.
But, without Palo Alto’s oversight, the Zuckerschool might be doing terrible things, such as offering advanced lessons and future honors-level classes for these children. The Palo Alto Unified School District did away with those classes in favor of “de-laning” students, making sure all students are taking the same base-level classes so none of them think others may be smarter than them. This dumbing down of classes for all students was done in the name of “equity,” with Honors English and Honors Biology being targeted for making non-honors children feel self-conscious about their academic ability.
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If Mark Zuckerberg is running a secret school, how can the Palo Alto school board make sure those children are dumbed down to match the level of the lowest-achieving students in the school district? What is truly more important, helping students learn or making sure that we drag high-achieving students down to achieve full equity?
The Zuckerschool is now moving out of Crescent Park to a different location, taking its lack of equity and debatable impact on traffic in the neighborhood with it. The sacred Palo Alto city code will once again be honored, equity will be maintained, and no one will have to reckon with the fact that this whole “controversy” only exists because of the indefensible school closures that set children back for years. Everyone wins, except maybe for all the children in Palo Alto schools who are being told that they shouldn’t be smart enough to take honors classes.