That could be embarrassing. "Objective" teacher performance measures all seem to be as bad as, if not worse than measuring programmer performance with SLOC.
Oddly enough it looks like the proposals he was trying to ram through in New Jersey look like a attempt at teacher union busting. Why Zuckerberg would involve himself in that is a bit of a mystery.
While he seems to be the public face, it could be that a lot of the money doesn't come from him.
The article mentions that this $1 billion investment will go toward "free education and free healthcare for low-income students in the Palo Alto area".
So comparing the two it's obvious that the investment is going into an unsustainable model. The way I'm thinking about this, that could be for one of a few reasons.
1) They want to pour a lot of money into research and development to figure out how to improve education. Concentrate a bunch of money into one place to figure out how to improve the overall model.
2) They want to show how they can do better than public education system.
If they're after #1 I can see no reason why they wouldn't try to give back by sharing data from their research.
If they're after #2 then it's obvious they're simply creating a facade (an unsustainable "model" implementation of what primary education should look like). Depending on the results they'd be looking to sway public opinion that private sector can do better than government.
Needless to say, #1 is constructive, and #2 IMO is highly destructive.