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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @08:16PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @08:16PM (#534561)

    The goal is to keep children in schools longer, without teaching them anything useful. Instead of teaching them real mathematics, economics, ... , teach them stuff that is completely useless. When they will eventually make an escape from such a "school", they will find themselves inadequate to meet the challenges of daily life, thus making them poorer and more slave-like.

    From "Silent weapons for quiet wars"

    The quality of education given to the lower class must be of the poorest sort, so that the moat of ignorance isolating the inferior class from the superior class is and remains incomprehensible to the inferior class.

    Link:
    Silent weapons for quiet wars [conspiracyarchive.com]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @10:04PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @10:04PM (#534589)

    I found this in a copier too. Is this yours?

    worker bees can leave
    even drones can fly away
    the queen is their slave

    Everything found in a copier is true occult knowledge.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @11:04PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @11:04PM (#534601)

      Who would do such a thing? Why write some fiction and then dump it in a photo copier?

      Well, I gotta tell ya. The person(s) who wrote that is dangerous. If all that is untrue and pure fiction, then you have nothing to worry about and we can all give a sigh of relief, but look closely, it has been implemented. They don't fear a few "conspiracy theorists" (a term invented to discredit those who question the official story), the masses will be given enough 6th-grade level entertainment that they cannot won't pay attention.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 04 2017, @04:38AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 04 2017, @04:38AM (#534682)

        Well, after writing about a page and a half chasing my thoughts, I might see why you linked it.

        I have absolutely no idea how to get the average person to see the things I've seen and realized, and you're absolutely right about the education offered to the masses being a sham.

        It doesn't matter whether the document is authentic or not.