FILE- In this July 9, 2011, file photo, Mark Zuckerberg, president and CEO of Facebook, walks to morning sessions with his then girlfriend Priscilla Chan during the 2011 Allen and Co. Sun Valley Conference, in Sun Valley, Idaho. Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced Thursday May 29, 2014 they are donating $120 million to the San Francisco Bay Area's public school system. Zuckerberg and Chan, a pediatrician, discussed the donation in an exclusive interview with the Associated Press. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson) 
 
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 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are donating $120 million to the San Francisco Bay Area's public school system. 
 
 The couple's gift will be spread over the next five years and is the biggest allocation to date of the $1.1 billion in Facebook stock the couple pledged last year to the nonprofit Silicon Valley Community Foundation. 
 
 "Education is incredibly expensive and this is a drop in the bucket. What we are trying to do is catalyze change by exploring and promoting the development of new interventions and new models," Chan said in an interview Thursday at Facebook's Menlo Park, California, headquarters. 
 
 The first $5 million will go to school districts in San Francisco, Ravenswood and Redwood City and will focus on principal training, classroom technology and helping students transition from the 8th to the 9th grade. The couple and their foundation, called Startup: Education, determined the issues of most urgent need based on discussions with school administrators and local leaders. 
 
 Zuckerberg and Chan, a pediatrician, discussed the donation in an exclusive interview with the Associated Press. It was Chan's first significant step into the public spotlight and the couple's premier interview together. The two met while studying at Harvard and married in their Palo Alto backyard on May 19, 2012 — the day after Facebook's stock began publicly trading in a rocky initial public offering that now seems a distant memory. In 2010, they joined Giving Pledge, an effort led by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett to get the country's richest people to donate most of their wealth. 
 
 "I'm really focused on connecting the world. That's my main thing, and you're primarily focused on children," said Zuckerberg, turning to Chan. "And we're able to do some of this work together, which is neat...There are interesting overlaps." 
 
 Chan, 29, and Zuckerberg, 30, have made philanthropy a central theme of their life together. The two made the largest charitable gift on record for 2013. That $1.1 billion donation was on top of another $500 million the couple gave a year earlier to the Silicon Valley foundation, which helps donors allocate their gifts. 
 
 "I just think that philanthropy is a fancy way to say that you care about others and that you want to serve others. And that's been a part of me for as long as I can remember," said Chan, fresh from a pediatrics residency shift at the University of California, San Francisco medical center, where she works primarily with underserved, immigrant families. "(We) have this amazing opportunity it's really important to me that we use this opportunity to continue to give back and create even more change to affect other people's lives." 
 
 Last year, Zuckerberg was No. 21 on the Forbes list of the world's richest people, right behind Amazon's Jeff Bezos and ahead of well-known billionaires such as activist investor Carl Icahn and philanthropist George Soros. He owns Facebook stock worth over $27 billion. In 2013, as the median yearly pay for U.S. CEOs crossed the $10 million mark amid a widening income gap, Zuckerberg took a symbolic annual salary of $1. 
 
 Though it's been long in the works, the latest gift comes at a time when critics are still questioning what became of Zuckerberg's $100 million donation to Newark, New Jersey's public school system. Four years ago, he announced the donation flanked by then-mayor Cory Booker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. A recent New Yorker article criticizes the donation and the chain of events it set in motion. While well-intentioned, the money has so far failed to fix the city's ailing school system. The process lacked meaningful community input and much of the money has been spent on high-paid contractors and consultants. Four years later, the money is nearly gone and a lot of people are angry. The story's most poignant quote is from Vivian Cox Fraser, president of the Urban League of Essex County, who says "Everybody's getting paid, but Raheem still can't read." 
 
 Zuckerberg said the Newark experience is "a big influence on our thinking" with the Bay Area donation. Taking the long view, he's quick to point out that the results in New Jersey are too early to measure. 
 
 "The schools and programs that the folks put in place, only now are they ramping up and students are starting to go through them. So you won't know what the outcomes are until like 5, 7, 10 years from now," he said. "That said, I think there are some things that are going generally better than we'd expected and some things that we've definitely taken as lessons." 
 
 One of the positive outcomes Zuckerberg points to: Newark's teacher contracts, which, among other things, provide for performance-based pay bonuses for the district's best teachers. He says the contracts are "better than anything that had been negotiated before...to reward teachers who were the top performing teachers and hold teachers accountable who were not performing well." 
 
 Zuckerberg admits that he and local leaders could have done a better job engaging the community and soliciting ideas about how to spend the money. 
 
 "I think one of the things that we took away from this is that we wanted to do our next set of work in a place where we can engage more directly with the community and a place that we care about a lot. The Bay Area just fit that well," Zuckerberg said. 
 
 The couple's broader philanthropic goals center on children, education and health, though Zuckerberg is also active in immigration reform. Last year, he and other tech leaders formed Fwd.us, a political group aimed at changing immigration policy, boosting education and encouraging investment in scientific research. Through Facebook, he's also spearheading Internet.org, which aims to connect the more than 70 percent of the world's 7 billion people who are not yet online. 
 
 Connecting the world and children: That's the stuff of dinner conversations in the Zuckerberg-Chan household. A child of Chinese immigrants who arrived in the U.S. on a refugee boat, Chan recalled an early memory that shaped who she is. It was the time her mother left to give birth to her younger sister and she was left with her grandparents. 
 
 "I remember thinking when my mom was absent that it's my turn to step up and care for my grandmother and my grandfather, and I've carried that with me ever since," Chan recalled. She was two and a half at the time. 
 
 Zuckerberg, who turned 30 earlier this month, said he and Chan are inspired by Bill and Melissa Gates and others who believe philanthropy "isn't just something where you can wake up one day and decide to give away a bunch of money and do it effectively. Like anything else, you need practice." 
 
 To help prepare for their charitable work in education, Zuckerberg and Chan decided they needed hands-on experience. Chan has taught 4th and 5th grade science at a local private school and Zuckerberg has run an after-school program on entrepreneurship. 
 
 "We talked about the education work that we wanted to do and she made this point to me that I wasn't going be one of those people who (try to help by giving) money to places but had never taught anything myself," Zuckerberg said. He didn't think he'd have time to teach while running Facebook, but Chan set it all up. He says, "it actually ended up being awesome." He still meets with the students regularly. 
 
 All the talk of children leads to talk of kids of their own. 
 
 "Well one day, but right now." Chan said. 
 
 "That's a yes," Zuckerberg cut in, laughter all around. 
 
 "Yes, but, we are a little preoccupied with other people's children right now," added Chan. ||||| Facebook 
 
 To mark the birth of their baby daughter Max, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, announced Tuesday that they will give away 99 percent of their Facebook stock to philanthropic efforts over their lifetimes. At the moment, said stock is worth $45 billion. 
 
 
 
 Jordan Weissmann Jordan Weissmann is Slate’s senior business and economics correspondent. 
 
 This is admirable. Some of us might be a tad wary of megasized charitable gestures from billionaires because they a) tend to come at public expense via tax deductions; and b) often seem geared more toward satisfying the donor's ego that doing demonstrable good in the world. But I think that as a rule, we would all prefer that our modern overlords give away their riches rather than pass them on to their children. 
 
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 But the move is a tiny bit worrisome, because Mark Zuckerberg's record with philanthropy is somewhat checkered—and has arguably fueled some political havoc in one major American city. So, let's discuss: Should we be optimistic here about how that $45 billion is about to be used? 
 
 To start, let's talk about what, precisely, the actual news is today. We already knew that Zuckerberg and Chan planned to give away most of their wealth. How? Because they signed onto the Warren Buffett's and Bill and Melinda Gates' "giving pledge," in which America's richest promise to donate most of their money to philanthropy. So the first story here is that Zuckerberg and Chan are, like Buffett, going to give away substantially all of their fortune, rather than just the majority of it. (Gates is aiming for a mere 95 percent, for some reason.) The second big story is how they're planning to distribute that money. Rather than, say, follow Buffett's footsteps and dole out their resources to other people's foundations, the couple is starting the Chan and Zuckerberg Initiative, an organization that will initially focus its efforts on “personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities.”1 The upshot is that the couple see themselves as philanthropists in the Gates/Mike Bloomberg mold, using their money to fund very specific causes close to their hearts. 
 
 Which is why it's worth recalling Zuckeberg's past charitable exploits. His first major philanthropic gesture, a $100 million gift in 2010 to help the city of Newark reform its public school system, has been described as something of a fiasco. As Dale Russakoff memorably reported in the New Yorker, Zuckerberg knew little to nothing about urban education policy before he met Newark Mayor Cory Booker at the Sun Valley Conference, an annual gathering for power brokers in tech, media, and finance. For that matter, he'd never been to Newark. But Booker impressed him and eventually talked the young billionaire into the nine-figure gift. In Silicon Valley, it's common for venture capitalists to invest in people, not business plans. And ultimately, that seemed to be Zuckerberg's approach. When he appeared on Oprah with Booker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, he explained, “Newark is really just because I believe in these guys.” 
 
 What followed was a fairly messy political drama, as Booker and Christie attempted to push a reform plan that involved closing low-performing public schools and expanding charter schools while transitioning teachers to a pay-for-performance system. Regardless of its merits, the program brought on an angry public backlash that eventually helped elect one of the effort's loudest opponents, Ras Baraka, as mayor once Booker left for the U.S. Senate. All the while, the city spent tens of millions of dollars on expensive education consultants, leading Vivian Cox Fraser, the president of the Urban League of Essex County, to memorably quip, “Everybody’s getting paid, but Raheem still can’t read.” Five years later, the argument about how effective Newark's school reforms have been is still simmering. For his part Zuckerberg argued in a Facebook post this month that the gift was a success, noting that graduation rates were up and that teachers had moved on to a new contract that gave bonuses based on student results, paid for partly through his donation. 
 
 Stepping back from the question of whether Newark schools are better off today than they were half a decade ago, though, the entire story should make it pretty clear that blindly plopping $100 million onto an unfamiliar city to tinker with its public institutions because you generally trust the public officials in charge is probably not a recipe for repeated or sustainable philanthropic success. And insofar as Zuckerberg thinks that's a good way to spread his wealth, I'd be concerned. 
 
 That said, I'm feeling guardedly optimistic, because it seems like Zuckerberg and Chan might have learned a few lessons from their adventures in New Jersey. Last year, they made a similarly huge $120 million dollar donation to improve Bay Area schools but targeted the first installments at incremental changes like improved classroom technology and better teacher training. Meanwhile, his most high-profile public health move to date has been a $25 million donation to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Foundation to fight Ebola, which seems like a fairly sober and smart way to spend your philanthropic dollars. 
 
 Judging by their announcement today, it seems as if Zuckerberg and Chan are moving further away from the helicopter-drop approach to charity. In their joint letter (addressed, a little awkwardly, to their daughter) they talk about spreading Internet access, helping develop better personalized education technology, and building a “new type of school” better connected to public health centers and government services. (It's a bit vague, but sounds an awful lot to me like Harlem Children's Zone.) And, of course, they want to funnel money into medical research. Again, these seem like the sorts of endeavors that aren't going to cause a lot collateral damage and may well do some actual good.
– As of yesterday, Priscilla Chan was no longer married to one of the world's 40 richest people. Bloomberg reports that Facebook's much ballyhooed drop below the $30-a-share mark yesterday caused Mark Zuckerberg to drop from the list. With the stock closing at $28.84, his fortune decreased from $16.2 billion on Friday to $14.7 billion yesterday. That boots him off of Bloomberg's daily Billionaires Index, and behind Luis Carlos Sarmiento, the richest man in Colombia. To hop over him, Zuck's wealth will need to rise $800 million. He's off to a less-than-promising start: Shares opened at $28.40 this morning, down 44 cents.