Short answer: no.
Now for the longer answer.
All of a sudden, the interwebz are buzzing, or at least humming mildly, with news of a highly-standardized education-flavored business that has been found accomplishing awesome things in Kenya, and, hey, maybe there's a lesson for schools everywhere in what they've accomplished. (You can find some of the gushing here and here.) The company is being unironically touted as a McDonald's. Yay?
This new enthusiasm is prompted by a working paper by some reputable economists (Guthrie Gray-Lobe, Anthony Keats, Noble winner Michael Kremer, Isaac Mbiti, and Owen Ozier)-- "
Can Education Be Standardized? Evidence from Kenya."We'll get to that in a moment, but let's set up a little context and history first.
About the company
NewGlobe is the corporation behind this operation, and Bridge International Academies is their product. (Actually, Bridge International Academies used to be the businesss, and at some point, fro some reason, they rebranded as NewGlobe.) We've looked at them on this blog before.
Jay Kimmelman graduated from Harvard in 1999, launched an edu-business (Edusoft), sold it, and decided to make his mark in education more globally, opening the first Bridge Academy in 2009.
Kimmelman communicates his vision pretty clearly. On his
LinkedIN page, the description of Bridge used to include this: "Bridge disrupts the education status quo by ensuring that every child, regardless
of parental income, has access to the education he or she deserves." But that word "deserves" cuts several directions, and it raises the question-- who decides what these children deserve?
Nowadays his LinkedIn focuses on NewGlobe "supporting visionary governments to transform their public education systems at speed and scale" as the "world's leading cloud-powered learning solution for populations living on less than $2 per person per day."
The "cloud-powered" part is important to their model. Each Bridge teacher works with a Bridge-provided tablet, from which they get their highly-specific scripted instructions.
Per the working paper, this is backstopped by supervisors who are supposed to check in "teachers" multiple times a day to make sure they're doing what they're supposed to be; these supervisors have scripts of their own, and classrooms are built with large open windows on one wall so that supervisors can more easily check "teacher" work. Bridge often tries to downplay this lockstep standardization, as in
this recent Education Next piece that tries to sell the model as just a bunch of supports and individual professional choices, but
in this NPR piece from 2013, Kimmelman's co-founder and wife Shannon May, lays out the vision:
That "magic" of standardized lesson plans changes the role of the teacher. It allows Bridge to hold down costs because it can hire teachers who don't have college degrees.
Kimmelman himself has frequently compared the company to McDonalds or Starbucks and their model of standardizing and controlling the process so much that the individual meat widgets being employed don't really matter.
The study notes that the schools use technology help standardize, "like many other firms, from Ford Motors to Uber."
You'll be unsurprised to know that neither Kimmelman, May, nor their other founding partner, serial entrepreneur
Phil Frei (who has since moved on)-- none of them have actual background in education. It's no surprise that the vast majority of what's written about Bridge, both by itself and others, is focused on the business aspect. Take this paragraph from a
2013 profile in Wired.
The winning idea — basic education as a business — sounds counterintuitive, but it was central to planning for the couple and their cofounder, Phil Frei. For parents hovering around $2 in income per day, a potentially transformative education for their kids was just one of many things they couldn’t afford. The demand, however, remains enormous — the global market for low-cost private education is $51 billion annually. To meet the demand, May says, “we drive the price point low enough so parents can become consumers.”
From the beginning, not everyone was a fan. When Bridge angled to take over public education in Liberia,
The New Dawn ("truly independent") of Liberia ran a headline about the government facing massive revolts over
selling off the business of educating their poor:
International and local experts say such arrangement is not only a blatant violation of Liberia’s international obligations under the right to education, and have no justification under Liberia’s constitution, but will also deny indigents and poor access to quality education.
Eventually Bridge had to enter
a new "partnership" arrangement in Liberia.
In Uganda, the government shut Bridge down. The
BBC reported in 2016 that officials found problems with "teacher" absenteeism, as well as "teachers" not being able to pass basic literacy and math tests. Two thirds of the students didn't finish primary education. School buildings were unsanitary. After the government pulled the plug after just one year, Bridge took them to court--and lost.
In 2018, the East Africa Centre for Human Rights, a Kenyan NGOI, filed formal complaints against Bridge, alleging that the Bridge violated national and international law with their operational model.
A 2019 study in Kenya found Bridge to be an absolute mess. Officials who looked at the Kenyan Bridge schools “describe this method of teaching as ‘robotic’, ‘too controlling’, ‘disabling the teachers from using their creativity and innovativeness’, ‘neocolonial’ and representing a form of ‘slavery.’”
“I think of it like music,” May said. “There’s a certain order of notes. Those notes have been standardized. They’re on a clef. Piano or forte. The composer is guiding you.”
So there you have it. The lessons are in words, and the words are in a language, rendered in lines on a screen, so there you are. I'm not sure what her argument is here. Maybe it's that musicians have to follow the conductor and the printed music, so teachers should also be required to follow a single conductor. Musicians aren't really free, so teachers shouldn't be, either? But if we're after a music analogy, Bridge would be like requiring every musician in the country to only ever play the same piece on the same instrument at the same time.
So, not great. But how are the test scores??
So the business model is using low-cost, mostly-unqualified "teachers" to deliver a scripted curriculum as a way to turn a profit serving poor Third World families. It is, admittedly, perhaps a step up from what might be otherwise available. At the same time, I doubt that any of the deep-pocketed venture money guys and philanthrocapilalists (Gates, Zuckerberg, the International Finance Corporation, even Pearson at one point have all ponied up $$) would allow their own children to be subjected to this form of edu-biz.
But back to why we're hearing about Bridge again.
That study.
Some reformsters are excited, apparently, because maybe Bridge's work is a proof of concept for highly standardized education delivered by low-cost low-skill non-union widgets. Education Next's coverage has a more sedate headline now, but
in the URL they're excited about the "McDonalds of African private schools."
The headline results are that primary students (eight grades) "gained 2.89 years of Kenyan schooling after being enrolled at Bridge for two years, an additional 0.89 years compared to pupils enrolled at other schools over the same period." Pre-primary students “gained 3.48 equivalent years of schooling, an additional 1.48 years compared to pupils enrolled in other schools.” That's based on Kenyan's five subject area tests (which raises the question of what kind of subject area tests is Kenya giving to pre-primary students).
Let's start with the most obvious problem here: any time a study is measuring learning in time units, you know you're reading baloney. Days or weeks or years of learning are just
a sleight of hand for making test scores seem meaningful. What the study actually finds is that test scores went up a little more for Bridge students than comparable Kenyan public school students. I'm not saying that's useless information, but let's talk about what we're really talking about. That will allow us to have the conversation we need to have about just how much we care about test scores (spoiler alert:
way more than we have any good reason to). These are tests scores,
not "dramatic learning gains." Did I mention that the paper is by economists?
Also, don't be distracted by the phrasing of those gains-- it's the "additional" part that matters. but it's the bigger numbers that keep getting reported.
We should remember, too, that getting big gains is easiest when you start in the basement. Kenya's education system has many, many problems.
Digging into the rest of the paper, one finds more of the same old information about Bridge. In Kenya, three quarters of the public and private school teachers have more than a high school diploma; at Bridge, the study found teachers were "younger, less experienced, and more likely to be novice (first-year) teachers" and only one quarter of them had more than a secondary school education. They were paid between one fifth and one third of average public school teacher, and worked longer hours, including Saturdays. Only 23% of Bridge's primary school teachers had a teaching certificate when hired.
Do these unprepared teachers get any training? The study reports that new Bridge "teachers" get a "ten-day training to introduce them to the tablet computers
and provide instruction and practice on delivering lessons from the tablets as well as on entering
student performance data." But thanks in large part to their low pay, Bridge's cost-per-pupil spending is one third of that in public schools. Ka-ching!
The study comments on Bridge's desire to operate "at scale" for one particular sector of the market. Again, other businesses provide the model:
Like McDonald’s, Walmart, and many other firms using standardization, Bridge is targeted to a mass market, not to consumers at the high end of the income distribution.
The report further notes, "the population served by Bridge tend to be non-elite." No kidding. But there attempt to scale through ordinary market means seems doomed. When the study was conducted, Bridge had 405 private schools; since the time of the study, they have closed 293 of them. The marketplace does not seem to want what Bridge is selling-- long hours, unqualified teachers, and "very basic physical structures." In 2017, says the report, almost half of the families that won the lottery for Bridge seats said, "Never mind." But have no fear; Bridge moved to the model it has used in other countries of getting themselves hired by the government, rather than by parents, to help run public schools. Ka-ching!
And once again, as has been the case in multiple countries, Bridge failed at the basic job of keeping students safe, from unsafe building conditions to many teachers whose classroom management technique was a, literally, a big stick.
Peter Coy thinks
Bridge is super duper, that they have "built a better mousetrap," which is one of the poorer metaphors for education I've read. Coy
writes for the New York Times about--surprise--not education, but business and economics. He blames much of the pushback against Bridge on unions.
Asked by Coy for a US analog of their approach of "rigorous public schools for low-income students," NewGlobe mentioned Success Academy (where the school carefully selects
for families that fit their approach) and KIPP. KIPP is certainly an interesting choice; in recent years KIPP has seriously revamped its approach to focus on anti-racism. Co-founder Dave Levin
wrote a letter of deep apology in June of 2020.
There's a legitimate conversation to be had about Bridge's work in Africa, and whether or not it's a good idea to sell a bottom-shelf model to people who barely have access to any shelf at all, though if a Chinese company rolled into the Department of Education and said, "Let us have the contract for educating all your really poor people, but you can't regulate us at all," many people would have some words to say.
But to argue that Bridge has discovered something--anything--that can be used as a proof of concept or model for implementation in the US is baloney. Meanwhile, in 2013
Wired noted that "The founders intend to be serving half a million children in 30 countries by 2015, and 10 million by 2025."
