As I see it, tagging countries as "evil" is a "thought-terminating cliché". Even in the third reich, there were people trying everything in their power to do good. It's a bit of a semantic argument, but those people fighting the good fight generally don't think of themselves as fighting "against their country" but rather "for their country" and against the individuals who took over it.
There were no good people at the end of the USSR fighting for the USSR. They fought for their country in the sense of their individual nations, but anyone fighting for the USSR was fighting for what really was an evil empire.
If you've invested the amounts we're talking about here, and made the statements they made about their investments at the get-go, and have the vast resources they have for tweaking and improving these programs, then you can, you know, put a bit more into making them work, instead of shutting them down in one very conveniently timed political climate. It's their money and they can do whatever they want with it, but the whole thing reeks of political expediency either out of spinelessness or shallow original motives.
>>The East Palo Alto project was the billionaire couple’s second major intervention in a city’s education system, after a controversial 2011 gift of $100 million to the Newark public schools. Some experts and community members claimed that the money was largely squandered.
Yeah, the dangers of investing anything in Jersey. Tony Soprano laughs in his grave.. Joke aside, that much earlier project seemed like one very inexperienced attempt that was mishandled right from the start. Giving that much money to a bunch of ambiguously honest bureaucrats is just asking for disaster. Especially when you as the donor have zero internal presence in or real experience with the system you're donating to.
Assuming it's a problem that can be solved by more money. The US has the fifth-highest amount of education spending in the world, behind countries like Luxembourg and Norway, but ahead of Germany, France, UK, Sweden, and Belgium. Some problems can't be fixed with money alone, and throwing good money after bad is foolish.