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from the learning-how-not-to-run-a-business? dept.
Bridge International Academies — a chain of inexpensive private schools — has ambitious plans to revolutionize education for poor children. But can its for-profit model work in some of the most impoverished places on Earth?
[...] Bridge operates 405 schools in Kenya, educating children from preschool through eighth grade, for a fee of between $54 and $126 per year, depending on the location of the school. It was founded in 2007 by May and her husband, Jay Kimmelman, along with a friend, Phil Frei. From early on, the founders’ plans for the world’s poor were audacious. ‘‘An aggressive start-up company that could figure out how to profitably deliver education at a high quality for less than $5 a month could radically disrupt the status quo in education for these 700 million children and ultimately create what could be a billion-dollar new global education company,’’ Kimmelman said in 2014. Just as titans in Silicon Valley were remaking communication and commerce, Bridge founders promised to revolutionize primary-school education. ‘‘It’s the Tesla of education companies,’’ says Whitney Tilson, a Bridge investor and hedge-fund manager in New York who helped found Teach for America and is a vocal supporter of charter schools.
[...] Bill Gates, the Omidyar Network, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the World Bank have all invested in the company; Pearson, the multinational textbook-and-assessment company, has done so through a venture-capital fund. Tilson talked about the company to Bill Ackman, the hedge-fund manager of Pershing Square, which ultimately invested $5.8 million through its foundation.
[...] Rather than approaching profitability, the company was operating at a loss of $1 million a month. In March of this year, May went to London to provide testimony to Parliament as part of a series of hearings about the British government’s international-development efforts in education, including $4.4 million of British government funding for Bridge that had allowed them to expand to Nigeria. In April, the committee chairman issued an open letter to Britain’s secretary of state for international development saying no further investments should be made until there has been ‘‘clear, independent evidence that the schools produce positive learning outcomes for pupils’’ and that there were ‘‘serious questions about Bridge’s relationships with governments, transparency and sustainability.’’ Those questions were echoes, perhaps, of the same question that Bridge skeptics had asked from the beginning: Even if its big dream made sense in theory, could it actually work amid the complicated political forces and brutal poverty of the nations whose children were most in need?
Source: The New York Times
When Bill Gates, Zuckerberg and the World Bank are involved, what could go wrong with the "Tesla of education companies"? I guess there's no need to worry about sustainability and transparency when there's Microsoft Office and Facebook profiles on the table.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @04:26PM (4 children)
There aren't any jobs for educated people. Don't these fools know education is a scam to trick people into pricing themselves out of the job market? It's a trap!
(Score: 2, Funny) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday July 03 2017, @04:30PM (3 children)
Eh, at its most basic it's a money-grab from Western government to profit from shithole countries -- kinda like Iraq and Afghanistan, except without the gunfire and killing.
Of course, that money would be better spent repatriating the savage Islamist economic migrants back to their respective shitholes, but what do I know? I'm so privileged I can walk down the street at night unarmed without being beheaded or subject to the "sexual emergency" of some base savage monkey.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Lagg on Monday July 03 2017, @05:00PM
If the western governments were capable of the mindset and logistical knowledge required to teach an 8th grade black kid lit, pre-algebra and arithmetic for $54-100 without subsidy or conditions most issues in the world probably wouldn't be an issue.
Also you made me visualize an EF walking down a dark chicago street, hearing an ominous sound, only to turn around and see a hungry eyed arab rushing him. Gets tackled and fucked so hard his head pops off. Arab gets up and walks to a hot dog cart since the sexual emergency is over now.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 03 2017, @05:53PM
This:
Colombian drug lords (and others who profit from their activities) have bought out most of the real-estate on Key Biscayne (Miami), they'll pay $1M+ for a tiny old house so they can knock it down and build a mini-mansion in the little enclave that they are formed there in the early 2000s. Friends of ours (who ultimately sold out for $1.3M because they had a larger than average lot), used to talk with them in the evenings - they were just so happy that they could let their kids play in the street without fear of kidnappers, etc.
Income inequality has its downsides, even for those on the "winning end" of the game.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday July 03 2017, @07:18PM
Y'ever been in a Turkish prison...?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...