- Public K-12 schools are facing budget shortfalls amid reductions in government funding.
- Steve Schwarzman, the billionaire founder of private-equity firm Blackstone Group, recently gave a $ 25 million donation to his public high school.
- Such donations to public K-12 schools are rare, especially compared with their private counterparts.
- Given the budget shortfalls, Schwarzman recently told a group of 3,000 superintendents that public schools need to start privately fundraising the way universities and private schools do in order to stay competitive.
- Many educators were enthusiastic, but others worried it would exacerbate inequality and said it was no replacement for state and local government funding.
Roughly an hour before Steve Schwarzman, the billionaire founder of private-equity giant Blackstone Group and occasional adviser to President Donald Trump, was set to deliver a speech in Nashville to a crowd of 3,000 at the National Conference on Education, he bemoaned the state of public education in the US.
“The world keeps moving faster and faster and the US is falling behind,” Schwarzman told Business Insider, calling out the country’s deficits in arming students with computer literacy, coding, and other skills that have grown increasingly important in the modern job economy. See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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