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Today, Mi is 33 and founder of a startup that aims to give Chinese kids the kind of education American children receive in top U.S. schools. Called VIPKid, the company matches Chinese students aged five to 12 with predominantly North American instructors to study English, math, science and other subjects. Classes take place online, typically for two or three 25-minute sessions each week.
Mi is capitalizing on an alluring arbitrage opportunity. In China, there are hundreds of millions of kids whose parents are willing to pay up if they can get high-quality education. In the U.S. and Canada, teachers are often underpaid—and many have quit the profession because they couldn't make a decent living. Growth has been explosive. The three-year-old company started this year with 200 teachers and has grown to 5,000, now working with 50,000 children. Next year, Mi anticipates she'll expand to 25,000 teachers and 200,000 children.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22 2016, @02:06PM
It's going to administrator/manager types (school systems tend to be alarmingly top-heavy), to sports, and especially to an never-ending construction rush that is largely justified by those sports. (We need a new swimming pool with more lanes for our swim team! We need more athletic fields!) Around here they barely get one building done before they start complaining about how inadequate some particular (inevitably sports-related) aspect of it is, and how they need this new building that will solve their problem. Now new buildings mostly come out of county-level taxes, not federal funds, but money's money -- if they'd quit building all the time, they wouldn't need as much federal funding, or alternatively they could hire more teachers to reduce class sizes and improve outcomes. But really, they'd just hire more administrators.