PA: Fighting Common Sense Charter Regulations (And Ducking Responsibility)

 Governor Tom Wolf has been trying to fix some of the most broken parts of Pennsylvania's lousy charter school law

The regulation changes were not exactly radical. Here's the state's brief summary:

The regulation establishes a minimum standard for charter school, regional charter school, and cyber charter school applications; better ensures The regulation establishes a minimum standard for charter school, regional charter school, and cyber charter school applications; better ensures non-discriminatory student enrollment policies as required by the CSL; clarifies that charter and cyber charter school boards of trustees are subject to the Public Official and Employee Ethics Act; requires standard fiscal management and auditing practices; details the tuition payment redirection process for charter schools entities and school districts; and a clarifies that charter schools, cyber charter schools, and regional charter schools must comply with section 1724-A of the CSL related to the provision of health care benefits.

None of the proposed regulations are more stringent than federal regs. Most of them are similar to rules in other states. Publish the non-discrimination rules for student selection that you're following. Submit to an audit now and again. Hold your board members to the same ethical standards as every other public official and employee in Pennsylvania. 

Who could possibly oppose that?

You know who-- the charter industry and their fine GOP friends in Harrisburg. But after the new regs cleared the Independent Regulatory Review Commission, the GOP Senators threw a last minute block, trying a procedural resolution to protect the poor, oppressed charter schools of Pennsylvania. 

But the absolute money quote comes from Senate Education Chairman Scott Martin, who after decrying that following the same rules as any other public school would be "punitive" for charters, offered this sad plea:

This will rob students of future learning opportunities and send vulnerable students back to school districts that are ill-equipped to meet their needs.

Ill-equipped? Ill-equipped??! Goodness, but if there were only someone with power, like elected representatives of the taxpayers of the state--even one who was, say, in charge of a committee all about education in the state--then maybe that person could make sure that the school districts were well-equipped!

Are Pennsylvania schools ill-equipped? Well, hell, that's not the legislature's problem. Just their opportunity. 

This little showboat of a resolution will be vetoed by the governor, at which point the GOP will need to muster a 2/3rds majority in both chambers, which they can't. So this gesture is theater to please the donors. Throwing in the chance to deny legislative responsibility for public education in Pennsylvania is just a bonus they throw in for free. 

It's Okay To Stink

I just read another essay by another educator who was not comfortable with the idea of a student saying she was bad at a school subject.

I see this thread from time to time, this insistence on denying that students are bad at something. "No, you just weren't taught that well" or "Your teacher lacked the right tools" or "You are the victim of too-low expectations" or "You just needed more opportunities to master the material and concepts." Sometimes these ideas make it all the way into policy: if you are a teacher of a Certain Age, you may well remember sitting in a PD session in which you were told earnestly that "All can learn all." 

No. Some students are bad at some things. This should not come as a surprise; all human beings are bad at something.

Part of it is simple time management and the choices we make. I could probably become good at conversational Chines, but my personal judgment is that, given the limited utility or interest it would hold for me, I'm not willing to invest the amount of time that would be involved--particularly because investing that time in learning Chinese would take time away from other things that I am committed to being Not Bad at. 

We have a finite number of hours to invest, and we all make choices about how to invest them. It's a weird brand of age-ism to imagine that students do not make similar choices. I don't believe in lazy students, but I absolutely believe in students who will sit in your class and make a rational decision that they do not want to invest the kind of time in your subject that judge would be necessary. That's the kind of classroom negotiation I found myself involved in-- not "how can I stoke fires of passion in you so you'll get off your lazy ass" but "how can I convince you that I can, in less time than you think, provide you with some skills and knowledge that has more utility than you imagine."

Part of it (at least at the high school level, where I taught) is that due to some combination of wiring, experience, aptitude, inclination, and other mysteries of human development, people have certain skills, even as they don't have certain other skills. 

I had a couple of friends who could use a free half hour to learn yet another instrument. I also had a friend who practiced his instrument daily, for an hour or more, and never did actually get particularly good at it. I banged my head against Algebra II for a year, and simply couldn't grasp it. One of my adult summer jobs was working at a catalog store call center, and I was empirically, objectively, and anecdotally bad at it. 

Part of it is speed. Some students just get there so much faster than others. Which takes us right back to the matter of making decisions of what to invest time in. Students are mostly figuring on getting out of school at age 18; you've got till then, and if it's going to take more time than that, well, you can't have it. 

Some of the resistance to allowing students to say "I'm bad at the maths" is that such evaluations are often based on lousy data. Lousy data includes things like the Big Standardized Test all the way down to the ability to look around the room and realize that everyone is whipping through the work way faster than you are which is problematic because A) everyone gets to their own destination at their own time in their own way and B) we have an unfortunate tendency in our culture to associate "swift" with "good." 

Lousy data can also include the voice of an important person in your life who keeps telling you you're lousy at this, that, or anything. (Ask any teacher--the worst parent-guardian conferences are not the ones where you are compelled to defend yourself against the guardian, but those where you feel compelled to defend the student against that guardian.)

So I completely agree with the impulse to deny the "I'm bad at maths" statement because it's based on bad data. And any bad data that the students are allowing to shape their self-image absolutely must be debunked.

But in the urge to dispel the cloud of low self-esteem we perceive hanging over the child, teachers need to be hugely careful to avoid toxic positivity and happy gaslighting. Again, if you went through teacher school at a certain time, you may have been taught to never flat out respond to a student by saying, "You're wrong." But sometimes they are, and trying to pretend that they aren't, exactly, really, just makes them wonder if either you or they are crazy. 

By all means, make sure that you're talking about what you're really talking about. Don't say "I stink at grammar" when it's more accurate to say "I bombed the last test." But recognize that, first of all, bombing the last six tests might reveal a significant pattern, and second, telling a student, "You're not a good judge of your own strengths and weaknesses, and your insights about yourself are invalid," is not a particularly affirming message. 

How to untie this whole knot? 

The root of the problem here is not that Pat thinks "I'm no good at writing." The problem is the oft-unspoken subtext which adds up to "I'm no good at writing and that just proves that I'm a worthless human being destined live in a van down by the river where I eat cat food off a hot plate until I die alone and unloved."

It's not the conclusion about their capabilities that needs to be challenged; it's the implications being attached.

We bump up against this a million different ways. When prepping my students for peer reviewing of writing, I had to repeatedly emphasize that "this paragraph is unclear" is not synonymous with "you are ugly and stupid and have no right to take up space on the planet" because students are reluctant both to take criticism and to give it. I worked hard to establish some critical distance--the writing is something you do, not who you are. 

It's useful to be able to identify your weaknesses. You can learn techniques for working around them, for strengthening them, even for avoiding situations where they will be a liability. But it's very not useful to see them as an immutable blot on your own character and worth as a human being. 

It is okay to be bad at something. It is exceptionally human to be bad at something.

Viewing a particular weakness as a significant flaw is part and parcel of the idea that every student in school the same race at the same time to the same finish line. They are not. In fact, part of the point of becoming an educated person is figuring out what trail you' want to follow, and part of figuring that out is assessing your own strengths and weaknesses.

It's okay for a person to be bad at something, and it's okay for a student to know it and say it. It's not okay to view that weaknesses as a character flaw that's etched in titanium. Students aren't there to all fit into the same mold, but to create a mold of their very own. 

Every successful journey starts with a realistic understanding of where you are. The response to "I stink at math," doesn't need to be, "Oh, no, honey, you don't." It can be instead, "Yeah, you're an awesome person, but you kind of do. Now, what can we do about that." 

ICYMI: Juneteenth, Jazz and Family Reunion Edition (6/19)

Crazy busy weekend here. Town has a blues and barbecue festival going on, and my extended family is gathering for our first annual June Is Way Easier For Getting Together Than December Thing. So dig into this week's reading list, but don't look for me anywhere on line today.

I worked at a No Excuses charter and here's what I know

From back in May, this piece from a former KIPP teacher does a good job of breaking down the problems with the No Excuses approach.

Caught in the culture wars, teachers are being forced from their jobs

Well, this is discouraging. The Washington Post ran some analysis and found like 160 teachers who have lost their jobs in the culture wars.

What occupation has the highest burnout rate?

Deseret News has the news that plenty of teachers already suspected.

Why the nations needs the #TeachTruth Movement

In Word In Black, Jesse Hagopian talks about the need to fight back against the "CRT" panic and other laws pushing teachers not to teach the whole truth.

Do parents really want control over what students learn?

Nancy Flanagan asks if maybe something else is the driving force behind all this ruckus.

Parent sues school district leaders for discriminating against white students

This is New Jersey, but expect more of this baloney in the months ahead. 

Charter schools' influence on Pennsylvania politics

They have lobbyists and money and they know how to work both. From the Bucks County Courrier Times. 

Edelblut's past helps explain his destructive policies

Frank Edelblut is the anti-public ed chief of New Hampshire's education system. This piece in Seacoast online looks at some of his connections in the past that illuminate his positions in the present.

5 myths about education gag orders

PEN America with a quick explainer that debunks some of the common arguments for teacher gag laws.

NC Charter School Mandate, “Skirts for Girls as Fragile Vessels,” a No-No.

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider takes a deeper look at the decision against the North Carolina charter school's dress code. (I also wrote about this decision over at Forbes.com)

Stop politicizing this thing that can only be solved through politics

McSweeney's bats clean-up again this week, God bless them.

Over at Fornes.com this week, I also wrote about Education and the Politicizing of Everything (and how that gets in the way of actual solutions, as well as thinking about why Not Bad Is Not Good Enough

Does USED Have a Real Teacher Plan?

Earlier this month, Education Secretary Cardona issued a statement about USED's plan to "supprt and elevate" the teaching profession, to "recruit, prepare, and retain great teachers." In other words, take some federal action to reverse the Great Teacher Exodus. Is there anything useful there, or is it just some federal smoke-blowing? Welll.....

When Cardona first pitched the plan (during an address at the Bank College of New York), he led with a description of the problem that sort of gets it. 

A great teacher in every classroom is one of the most important resources we can give our children to recover from this pandemic and thrive. Yet, even before the pandemic, many states and communities experienced shortages in qualified teachers, including in critical areas such as special education, bilingual education, career and technical education, and science, technology, engineering, and math education. The pandemic has only served to make these shortages worse—falling hardest on students in underserved communities. It’s not only our responsibility but our commitment at the Department of Education to encourage, invest in, and lift up teachers across America. The future of our country and our children’s futures depend on it.

"Lift up" is a great rhetorical beat, and "support" is a lovely word. But teaching is a field where broad rhetoric has to be turned into specific, concrete actions (eg "Today I will teach pronouns" is not an actual plan). So what have we got here.

Cardona brings the receipts for the argument that teacher pay is too low. 20% less than other college-educated workers. In 38 states, teachers who are head of four person household qualify for two or more government benefits. But this is not something the feds can fix, so "President Biden and Secretary Cardona have called on states and districts to increase teacher salaries" is a nice idea, but of no real practical use. My wife's local is currently in contract negotiations; pretty sure "the President said you should give us a raise," is not going to get them anywhere.

The "fact sheet" for this release includes ideas such as using Title I and IDEA funds to boost teacher salaries. Not sure how that plays out on a local level.

Cardona proposes to "invest in a strong and diverse teacher pipeline" which is a nice idea, and there is apparently some money to do... something. $132 million for Teaching Quality Partnerships, which is supposed to make teacher prep programs better, except that you can only improve programs that exist and dropping enrollment has led, at least in my neck of the woods, to program cut backs. We've lost actual capacity in the pipeline, and that will have to be built back somehow, but that can't happen if there is no demand. 

Cardona also calls for a $350 lump of money for the Education Innovation and Research Program to give it "a new charge to improve teacher recruitment and retention." This is not particularly encouraging; the old charge for the program is "create, develop, implement, replicate, or take to scale entrepreneurial, evidence-based, field-initiated innovations to improve student achievement and attainment for high-need students" and then evaluate them--the "entrepreneurial" tells is this is some more neo-liberal "the private sector can do it better" baloney. 

Other "strategies" sound pretty fluffy. "Supporting teachers in earning initial or additional certification in high-demand areas" could mean anything from paying their bills to sending them a weekly "attagirl" email. Also, the specific high-need areas listed are special ed and bilingual education instead of, say, everything.

Or "supporting teachers by providing them and students with the resources they need to succeed, including mentoring for early career teachers, high-quality curricular materials, and providing students with access to guidance counselors, social workers, nurses, mental health professionals, and other specialists." These are some good items (though "high-quality curricular materials" could mean anything), but how to provide them? Federal grants to hire some of these positions? 

Or "creating opportunities for teacher advancement and leadership, including participating in distributive leadership models," which is okay, I guess. Not as cool as that new representative engagement council for parents' groups that includes even the astro-turfy National Parents Union. 

There's one good, concrete idea on the list-- helping teachers pay off their student loans.

The fact sheet mostly lists an assortment of grant programs, thereby underlining one major detail here, which is that USED isn't so much proposing new initiatives and ideas as much as they're just trying to get Congress to inject some more money into the programs that already exist. On the one hand, I see how that might be an easier sell; on the other hand, if the existing programs were providing great solutions already, we wouldn't be where we are now.

Look, I'm delighted to have a secretary of education who is not openly or passive-aggressively hostile to public education and the teachers who work there. That may be a low bar to clear, but we don't clear it very often, so hooray for that. And I have always had some serious doubts about what can be done on the federal level that will actually help out on the classroom level. 

So my expectations are low. But teachers are kind of up against it at the moment, and a nothingburger of "We're going to do some more supportive stuff kind of like we've been doing all along, only maybe with more money." It's nice that Cardona notices and makes some of the right noises, but the plan doesn't really rise to the level opf specific, concrete actions that can help. 

What Does Moms for Liberty Really Want?

As folks in Florida--the steaming petri dish in which Moms for Liberty originally grew--it's important to remember the third founding member of the group.

"Founded in January 2021 by Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich, Moms for Liberty" is the pretty standard version of their one-line origin story. Descovitch and Justice make a fine pair of faces for the group--two moms who ran for their school boards, won once, and then once they had a track record, were rejected by voters a second time. 

M4L took a few months to find their footing, aka the issues that they could use to fire folks up. They got into the game by flogging masks, but quickly circled around to "CRT" panic, ferreting out naughty books, and anti-union grievance, all under the umbrella of parental rights. They added a seasoned PR pro in Quisha King (former regional coordinator of Black Voices for Trump), and they also moved pretty quickly to mute the involvement of the third founding Mom.

That's Bridget Ziegler. Ziegler squeaked out a victory for Sarasota School Board in 2018. Ron DeSantis thinks she's swell. And she's married to Christian Ziegler, who just decided not to run for re-election to a county commissioner seat because he'll be busy helping his wife and DeSantis each run their own campaigns (that and new rules that would have made it harder for him to win). Ziegler has some other gigs as well-- vice chairman of the Republican Party of Florida and head of his consulting firm Microtargeted Media LLC.

Christian Ziegler told the Washington Post that he has been "been trying for a dozen years to get 20- and 30-year-old females involved with the Republican Party, and it was a heavy lift to get that demographic" That was in October of 2021, when Ziegler's involvement had gone quiet; Tim Craig at WaPo reported that Ziegler's wife was "loosely" connected to M4L--not that she was a co-founder of this group that emerged to accomplish just what Ziegler had long searched for a tool to accomplish. 

Christian Ziegler's Microtargeted Media ("We do digital and go after people on their phones") was a big player in the 2020 Florida race, on the ground for Trump and other GOP candidates. He pulled in $300K from a Trump-related PAC. He was once a Heritage Foundation Fellow. He's buddies with Corey Lewandowski. He appears to be behind the Protect Wyoming Values PAC (a Trump anti-Liz Cheney proxy), Governor Kristi Noem's election integrity website, and a bunch of other conservative Trump-backing websites. You may remember Andrew Pollack, the Parkland parent who came out against gun control and in favor of hardening the target, getting an invite to Trump's White House among other places. How did he get such big exposure so quickly? Let Pollack explain himself:

Just days after the Parkland shooting, Christian with Microtargeted Media reached out and offered to help guide me with my communications, press relations and he launched my social media outreach channels, giving me a vital distribution channels to get my message out. Christian also helped connect me with his network of elected leaders, so that I could advocate for and eventually pass school safety legislation. This was all done pro-bono and simply because he had a passion to help.

In November of 2021 he was telling Breitbart about the shift in Florida's GOP-Dem balance because pro-freedom conservatives were flocking to Florida out of love for the Trump-DeSantis wing of the party, damping down the Democratic majority (so, sometimes replacement is good, I guess). His critics have called him an "empty-suit candidate" backed by developers' dark money.

All this for a guy who, in 2017 at the age of 29, was a "30 under 30 rising star of Florida politics." In that interview he told an admittedly cool story about meeting GW Bush on a plane at age 9, and opined about the importance of integrity and honesty in politics. He particularly admired business owners turned elected officials, like Medicare fraudster Rick Scott (so, wiggle room on that integrity and honesty thing).

Point is, Bridget Ziegler is married to a well-connected guy who would like to bag some votes for GOP candidates.

Moms For Liberty is very much a GOP joint. There was a time when they tried to lay claim to bipartisanhip; not so much these days. They even won an award from the Heritage Foundation. And they're backing parental rights, but Florida-style, as in all parents have rights to make choices about their children's education as long as the choices are acceptable. Parents should not be free to choose drag queen shows or Certain Naughty Books or a school with anything carrying the faintest whiff of "CRT" Justice has said that they're going to "take over" school boards and then fire everyone and get search firms to find new conservative leaders. 

I've seen choice fans argue "Hey, wait a minute, I thought the idea is parents could choose what they wanted," and no, that's not the idea at all, and I can almost feel bad for actual school choice advocates who have hitched their wagon to people like M4L who use the same language to mean something completely opposite. Choice MAGA style means choice only for the Right People-- Those Other People over there should have their preferences outlawed. 

So what are Moms For Liberty really after. I'm sure that varies from place to place. I'll bet there are some local M4L chapters with women who really just want their public school to pay attention to them.

But the further back you step and the larger the picture you look at, M4L just looks like one more sucker-covered tentacle of the outrage octopus, which is not so much interested in raising problems to solve them as it is in communicating that thrumming subtext of "Your government and your institutions are filled with evil people that you can't trust, so you'd better get out there and vote." Or as Laura Jedeed wrote in May of this year about the many Moms--

All of them—knowingly or not—are part of the best strategy to win the midterm elections since the Tea Party movement in 2010.

I've often said that M4L feels very Tea Party for me-- not completely astro-turf like, say, Parents Defending Education, but definitely not organic grass roots, either. Of course, what happened with the Tea Party was that the GOP establishment thought they could use a bunch of angry yokels to power up the party, and instead they found themselves pushed to the back of the tent and before they knew it--Donald Trump!. "Let's just poke this giant octopus until it gets angry enough that we can ride it into power," they said, just before the authentically pissed-off beast took a eight-piece bite out of their establishment asses. 

So hard to say what will happen this time. The plan may call for M4L to fade away, like attacking immigrant caravans and The War on Terror, once November passes and the results are in. But history (and recent history at that) tells us that even if you rouse the octopus with lies and baloney just so you can put its suckers to work for you, once it's really worked up and especially if it starts to feel powerful, you may not get it to sink back into the deep.

Which is unfortunate because M4L is doing real damage to teachers, students, public education, and the bonds of trust that help the country function. They may have been raised up to help agitate the base and win some elections; we'll see what else they decide to run at. 

FL: Looking For Staff In South America

 Another small bulletin from the Department of Effects of the Teacher Exodus.

Osceola County is in central Florida, home to roughly 389,000 people, over half of whom are Hispanic. It's the twelfth most Hispanic-majority county in the country, one of three such counties in the state. Their school system has faced the usual issues in recent years, from battles over masking to school board members in prolonged political clashes to hiring an ex-legislator to lobby for the district after that representative resigned his seat over a prostitution scandal. Okay, maybe that last one is a little unusual.

But they have one other usual problem--teaching positions they have trouble filling. 

Can't imagine why anyone in Florida would have trouble recruiting teachers. 140 positions remain unfilled. So they hired a company to headhunt for them--in South America.

School board Vice Chair Julius Melendez has some theories about the problem: confusion caused by the pandemic, disappointment over low salaries and fear of mass shootings, he suggested, "has made it hard to retain veteran teachers and recruit new ones." I suspect having state leaders who are openly hostile to public education doesn't help, either. 

It's not a brand new idea. In 2019, CNN did a whole feature story about districts looking to hire from overseas. Arizona was bringing folks in from the Philippines to fill spots back in 2014, and they must have been happy with the results because it was still a thing in 2019. Osceola calls this a short term fix, but they might want to talk to Arizona about that.

It's an educational rock and a staffing hard place. We know there is not really a teaching shortage, but more of a decent pay, working conditions, and treatment of the job respect shortage, but at this point, we're so far down this hole that if all of those conditions were solved tomorrow (spoiler alert: they won't be, and they especially won't be in Ron DeSantis's Florida) it would still take a couple of years to fill the pipeline again. 

"Any warm body" rules changes and "outsourcing to countries where people will put up with our crap" initiatives are not a solution to the actual problem. All these fans of the free market ought to understand, as I've said before, when I can't buy a Porsche for $1.98, that doesn't mean there's a car shortage. If you can't buy what you want (in this case, the labor of teachers) for what you're offering, you have to make a better offer. 

In the meantime, we'll get more creative solutions of the "anything but improve our offer" variety. Good luck, Florida.

Is There A School-Scripting Miracle In Kenya?

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:

"If you were at one of the other 200 locations right now, you'd be seeing the exact same thing," she says. "In some ways, it is kind of the magic of it."

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.’”

May's response to that critique, given in a friendly interview with Peter Coy, is special:

“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."