Giving Compass' Take:

• Wired magazine reports on a middle school in San Francisco that cost $54 million to build and equip with top-of-the-line resources, only to be plagued by poor planning and management.

• This is a prime example on how simply throwing money at a problem won't solve it. Many of the mistakes that tech companies make applied here: Big ideas without practical strategies to implement them, high turnover, arrogance at the executive level. How can nonprofits learn from this middle school's mistakes?

• Here's why disruption in philanthropy is sometimes ineffective.

Willie Brown Middle School was the most expensive new public school in San Francisco history. It cost $54 million to build and equip, and opened less than two years earlier. It was located less than a mile from my house, in the city’s Bayview district, where a lot of the city’s public housing sits and 20 percent of residents live below the federal poverty level. This new school was to be focused on science, technology, engineering, and math — STEM, for short.

There were laboratories for robotics and digital media, Apple TVs for every classroom, and Google Chromebooks for students. A “cafetorium” offered sweeping views of the San Francisco Bay, flatscreen menu displays, and free breakfast and lunch. An on-campus wellness center was to provide free dentistry, optometry, and medical care to all students. Publicity materials promised that “every student will begin the sixth grade enrolled in a STEM lab that will teach him or her coding, robotics, graphic/website design, and foundations of mechanical engineering.” The district had created a rigorous new curriculum around what it called “design thinking” and a “one-to-one tech model,” with 80-minute class periods that would allow for immersion in complex subjects ...

On opening day in August of 2015, around two dozen staff members greeted the very first class. That’s when the story took an alarming turn ...

Read the full article about the failure of Willie Brown Middle School by Daniel Duane at wired.com.