The greenroom at the Ed Sullivan Theatre, where “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” is taped, is a bland way station distinguished chiefly by trays of uneaten snacks, but on a recent Thursday it felt like Richard Scarry’s Busytown. Eleven celebrities bustled about, emissaries from DonorsChoose.org, an organization that public-school teachers can use to solicit donations for classroom needs. These luminaries, along with forty-seven others, had secretly flash-funded every DonorsChoose project in their home cities or states—a fourteen-million-dollar undertaking that encompassed more than eleven thousand projects.
As they waited to go on the show to announce the initiative, Best School Day, they seemed thrilled not only by their mission but by their own diversity. Charles Best, the founder of DonorsChoose, introduced the hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons to John King, Jr., the Secretary of Education. “The national Secretary of Education?” Simmons asked, just checking. Then he inquired about charter schools: “How’s that work? They get a part of the over-all money available, like prisons?”
“Well, I wouldn’t think of it exactly that way—”
“Same thing,” Simmons said. “Same exact thing, except school is cheaper than prison, which is sixty thousand a year. Prison is where the black and brown communities learn how to behave.” As King nodded gamely, Simmons kicked up his sneaker toes to underline his point: “Shoes with no laces is jail culture—in jail, they take the laces out so we can’t hang ourselves.”
Torrey Smith, the 49ers wide receiver, gave the Craigslist founder, Craig Newmark, an entry-level tutorial in football. Afterward, Smith marvelled, “He lives in San Francisco and had no clue who the 49ers were.” Newmark confessed to utter ignorance: “I’m a nerd, old-school, and the jocks and we never got along.” At this point, Stephen Colbert raced in, pumped everyone’s hand, and raced back out to get ready. Colbert, a DonorsChoose board member, inspired Best School Day, last May, when he auctioned off his “Colbert Report” set for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and used the proceeds to help fund every project in his native South Carolina.
Yvette Nicole Brown, the “Community” star, said she was overjoyed to have helped fund all of Cleveland. “I’m trying not to look at the list of projects, because I have all this beautiful makeup on, and I want to have my ugly cry in private,” she said. “The first project I ever funded was crayons—a teacher wanted sixty-four packs of crayons for her kindergarten kids. I got thank-you notes written in crayon, and I was a blubbering mess. This project is making the world smaller and bigger at the same time—smaller for the babies and bigger for the rest of us.”
Twitter’s Biz Stone funded Boston and Richmond, California, then persuaded his co-founders, Ev Williams and Jack Dorsey, to follow his example. All three men wore black shirts and an air of cautious cerebration; this would be their first joint appearance on television. Stone remarked that exposure to people from a diversity of backgrounds like those in the room “is where creativity comes from—meeting other kinds of people, neuroscientists and painters, is how you grow.” He turned to Dorsey, Twitter’s C.E.O., and suggested that the service’s little-noticed translation feature for foreign-language tweets should “translate all languages in real time.”
Dorsey frowned and said, “It’s not real time, and the translation is not great.”
“I guess if you miss one word it could be a problem,” Stone acknowledged. “You get ‘Putin is attacking!’ instead of ‘Putin said, “Welcome!” ’ ”
Dwight Howard, the six-feet-eleven Houston Rockets center, was studying the crowd from the sofa. “I’m just humbled to be around all this greatness,” he said. To him, it felt worlds away from his schoolboy days at the tiny Southwest Atlanta Christian Academy, where “we really struggled,” he said. “All our books were hand-me-downs from other schools. Education was out there, but we couldn’t reach it. But Barbara Smith, my P.E. teacher, pushed me every single day—if I got in trouble in math, slacking or being the class clown, she’d come find me and say, ‘You have a purpose, Dwight.’ That really stuck to my heart.”
Tim Ferriss, the productivity guru, remarked that “education is the Archimedes’ lever for cultivating problem solvers, rather than people who are part of the problem.” Then, grinning, he went off message for a moment: “If I had this room as a dream—all these people, as well as chocolate-chip cookies, carrots, and beer—I’d have to journal it intensively to really dig into what it meant.”
The group trooped up to the stage to introduce themselves and announce their donations to the world. Afterward, the Twitter founders posed with Dwight Howard for a one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-others photo. As the social-media execs returned to their ongoing consideration of how to expand the globe by shrinking it, Howard took his leave, waving down fondly: “Bye, Shorty! Bye, Shorty! Bye, Shorty!” ♦
