The Primary School, an educational facility started by Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, has shut its doors, becoming the latest in a series of failed attempts by billionaires and the ultra-wealthy to fix the education system.
The school, which closed in June, opened in 2016 as a tuition-free private school designed to go beyond education by providing services such as free dental checkups and wellness coaching for parents. Roughly 540 children enrolled during its years of operation.
The closure followed a decision by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a nonprofit established by the billionaire couple, to stop funding the school after the 2025-2026 academic year. In announcing the decision, the organization said it would invest $50 million over the next five years in East Palo Alto, Belle Haven, and the East Bay to help families navigate the transition. The funding will support education savings accounts—$10,000 for elementary students, $2,500 for preschoolers, and $1,000 for children in early-childhood education—as well as early-childhood programs and family engagement services.
The Primary School was a passion project for Chan, who regularly visited the campus, read books to kindergartners, and appeared in a curriculum video with Sesame Street’s Elmo. She had previously said that, through her work as a physician and at an after-school program in a Boston housing project, she noticed that children were often siloed.
Despite her hands-on approach, the school struggled with some of its nontraditional elements. Teachers, for instance, were required to sign nondisclosure agreements, and the school experienced high turnover among principals. Finding the right curriculum and policies also proved challenging as administrators tried to determine the best approach to teaching students.
That led to some frustrations for Chan, who told The Wall Street Journal last year, “The outcomes just weren’t where [the board] would have wanted them to be or, frankly, anyone would have wanted them to be.”
Despite those criticisms, parents were upset as word of the school’s pending shutdown spread. Every teacher returned for the final year despite the looming closure.
The education challenge
The Primary School’s shutdown came as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s mission evolved, shifting from social advocacy toward scientific philanthropy. But it was hardly the first school founded or heavily backed by the ultra-rich to fold.
In 2019, AltSchool, an educational venture founded by ex-Googler Max Ventilla and backed by Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Laurene Powell Jobs, closed its schools to focus on becoming a tech company, selling edtech software. That venture had run a series of for-profit micro-schools across the country, closing half of them in 2017 after burning through capital. A total of 240 students, including 2 of Ventilla’s children, attended AltSchool’s campuses in its final year.
In 2022, the Donda Academy, a school founded by Kanye West (Ye), shut down abruptly following the backlash to his antisemitic comments. Approximately 100 children paid $15,000 per year to attend that school.
The closure led to a lawsuit alleging, among other things, that students were not allowed to sit in chairs, the Holocaust was omitted from history classes, and the school offered only one lunch option: sushi. The complaint further alleged that teachers were not required to have first-aid or child-abuse reporting training and that the school ignored state regulations governing learning plans. It also said the school had no janitorial services or proper trash cans because West had forbidden the use of cleaning products containing chemicals.
The shutdown of the Primary School hasn’t deterred other billionaires from launching educational ventures. Jeff Bezos has funded a Montessori-inspired preschool network. Elon Musk also runs a private school at the SpaceX headquarters that allows children to opt out of topics they do not like and does not assign grades. He has also discussed plans to open a university in Austin, Texas, which the SpaceX and Tesla CEO wants to call the Texas Institute of Technology and Science, or TITS.