“You don’t want to be hostage to even the well-meaning generosity of a philanthropists,” said Casey Cobb, an education policy professor at UConn’s Neag School of Education. “You don’t want to be held hostage to their vision or their way of getting there.”

Morgaen Donaldson, director of Education Policy Analysis at the University of Connecticut, said Connecticut should consider the wealth of existing research on what works for disengaged teenagers when developing how it will spend the money.