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posted by martyb on Monday July 03 2017, @04:16PM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 2) by NewNic on Monday July 03 2017, @05:56PM (5 children)

    by NewNic (6420) on Monday July 03 2017, @05:56PM (#534514) Journal

    Pay for clean water, mosquito-bite prevention, clean toilets, and the internalization of clean living.

    In some cases, what the children need are paper, pencils and other school supplies. There are schools available to them, but only if their family can provide the materials needed for the classroom.

    --
    lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @06:45PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @06:45PM (#534535)

    Believe it or not, there are plenty of ways to transfer ideas to people without requiring them to sit in chairs of a particular shape, using tools of the industrialization.

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @07:36PM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @07:36PM (#534544)

      Wow, if only every child living in poverty could afford an apple ithing and fiber to their home!

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @07:43PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @07:43PM (#534547)

        It's very easy to teach kids just about anything that they'll need in life without requiring special tools.

        • (Score: 2) by BK on Monday July 03 2017, @07:47PM (1 child)

          by BK (4868) on Monday July 03 2017, @07:47PM (#534549)

          That's right. All formal education is a waste. </sarcasm>

          --
          ...but you HAVE heard of me.
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @07:54PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @07:54PM (#534554)

            Schooling often gets in the way of education, especially when your schools have many things in common with prisons, like they do in the US. Our rote memorization prisons do a poor job of educating people about anything more advanced than basic math and English.

            Not all formal schooling is a waste, but 99% of it is. That 1% makes it better than nothing, however.