Peg Tyre, veteran journalist, published a balanced and well-written article about Bridge International Academies in the New York Times Magazine. BIA operates numerous low-fee, for-profit schools in Africa and its investors hope to spread its brand across the world.
Investors in Bridge include Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Pearson, and other familiar names.
The founders had no education experience but they had experience creating successful tech start-ups. They wanted to disrupt education in the manner of Uber and AirBNB, the leaders of the new tech-based economy. They raised $100 million. Their schools cost parents a few dollars a month. Teachers deliver scripted lessons, written in the U.S. and delivered daily to them on an iPad. BIA opens its schools in poor countries where the quality of public education is low. They hope to do good while doing well.
Critics, including me, see BIA as a way that these countries slough off their responsility to provide education by outsourcing it. Critics see it as neocolonialism. Huge numbers of families can’t afford to pay the low fees. Kids are kept out of school when their parents don’t pay.
BIA was supposed to generate huge revenues. However, it is losing $1 million a month.
That is the only metric that counts. If they don’t turn a profit, they will close shop and move on.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is colonialism, both is practice and in attitude. The profit motive, which introduces the worst kinds of ‘incentives”—to use their horrid language, has no place in public education. At home, our colonial past is not past at all, but is continuous and pervasive. This piece in Truth-out is a cogent analysis of the the Water Protectors and their wider role in protecting and asserting indigenous knowledge systems.
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/41146-the-future-of-us-education-is-standing-rock
LikeLike
I know we’re all supposed to be angry at these companies but this dynamic will always exist in a market economy.
The people we should be mad at are elected leaders and “experts” who swallow this stuff whole because they all but worship tech CEO’s.
Stop treating these people like oracles. Treat them like any other contractor- that’s what they are.
How many public schools have already spent a bundle on tech product because these salespeople and the politicians they bought are pushing it?
They’re NOT oracles. They’re government contractors delivering a service. They’re no more “mission driven” than someone who provides janitorial services. At least be clear on what this IS- it’s government contracting. Start there and the public is less likely to get ripped off.
LikeLike
Agree, except it defames janitorial services, which add value, to be lumped in with tech tyrants.
LikeLike
But this article is about what our tech CEO’s are doing abroad. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had a State Dept w/a bead/ agenda on foreign policy that encompassed & molded/ influenced our corporate ventures abroad? I suspect our corporate sallies into foreign territory– especially under the current admin, which has cut diplomatic budget by 30% & has grossly lagged even in filling immediate State Dept positions– are moving ahead under the radar & doing what they damn well please.
LikeLike
Read it but did not find it “balanced”. Yes, a few negatives were inserted for appearance sake, I suspect. But over all, the enormous issue of colonialism and racism is right there in our faces yet never explored.
The profit motive is the taproot of colonialism and it is the dominator in this story.
Loose money running around the world, inserting itself anywhere it can is a VERY old story.
Never mind that the money knows nothing about educating youth and never mind that it makes debtors of parents who fall for the phony marketing ploys. And finally, never mind that democracy can never come alive when governments are bought out, sold off and removed from their civic obligation to provide excellent public schools FOR ALL
Well financed wrecking balls is what they are.
LikeLike
The Facebook board includes Marc Andreeson who said India was better off under colonialism, Peter Thiel, who described as an oxymoron, women voting and capitalistic democracy, and Reed Hastings, who called for an end to democratically elected schools boards.
The tech industry moguls are a leaking cesspool of colonialism. Last year, the richest 1% shifted $4 tril. from our nation to themselves.
LikeLike
This story is a microcosm of what is happening here in the states. The same players are using their cash to buy influence to have their way with our young people, especially our poor black and brown young people. Charters,vouchers, and depersonalized learning are home grown colonialism with the same types of hyper marketing and exploitative tactics. The goals are the same too. They want to break unions, destroy the teaching profession and make a profit. The tech tyrants buy complicit representatives to clear a path so they can shift public money into their corporate pockets. We also have too many representatives that could care less about public education and are more than happy to get the government “out of the education business.”
LikeLike
Getting the government out of education is synonymous with exploiting kids and communities for profit
LikeLike
One of BIA’s founders said, in an interview that a 20% return to investors was expected.
For-profit, schools-in-a-box, no surprise, it’s connected to Gates. The funder of Aspen’s Senior Congressional Education Staff Network- Gates, of course.
LikeLike
BIA was supposed to generate huge revenues. However, it is losing $1 million a month.
That is the good news. But will these tech-happy one size fits all colonialists learn anything from the losses? Somehow I doubt it.
LikeLike
Good for BIA! These tech tyrants make so much money they ignore the loss and continue their campaign to destroy public schools.
LikeLike
“The Department of Education has yet to reach out to my office on a plan for rural districts,” said U.S. Sen. Jon Tester of Montana in an email. Tester is a Democrat who is also a former teacher and school board member.
“No matter what Secretary DeVos does, the focus needs to be on investing in our public schools, especially in training and retaining good teachers and educating students of all abilities,” he added. “If her plan invests in supplemental online courses and digital programs for rural schools, that’s fantastic. However, it cannot be at the expense of the existing investments that our public schools rely on.”
And it WILL be at the expense of existing investments unless politicians and “experts” stop acting like a tech CEO fan club and start acting like these people are vendors offering product.
The US Department of Education and ed reform “experts” should NOT be pushing public schools to make reckless investments. Our schools are not testing grounds for their product and public money isn’t supposed to be used to “grow” an industry.
Schools are the customers. They’re in the driver’s seat. Act like it. Demand they show you value before you purchase, no matter how many times Betsy DeVos tells you you’re archaic or old fashioned or whatever sales pitch she’s delivering.
LikeLike
No surprise- “The Converstion”, a site funded by Gates, had an article that referred to school boards as “old-fashioned”.
LikeLike
Anything that is not brand-new is obsolete and needs to be disrupted, for fun and profit.
LikeLike
Peg Tyre has a lot of criticism of the resistance, those pushing back against corp ed reform. Could we face a similar critique? Gracefully and with interest and a desire to process the feedback instead of simply rejecting it?
LikeLike
Michael, a good question. Our view at NPE is that public schools need to be vastly improved. We do not defend them as they are. We want them to be far more equitable and far more focused on creativity and the joys and self-discipline involved in learning. We want an end to the regime of punishment. We don’t like the status quo of NCLB SQUARED.
LikeLike
Viscous or vicious?
LikeLike
“Viscous Reform”
Tilson’s like a viscous storm
Whirling dirvish round the masses
Spreading round the ed reform
Gumming up like thick molasses
LikeLike
Michael E.
Read Chap. 4, “The Destruction of Public Schooling”, from Gordon Lafer’s book, “The One Percent Solution”.
Answering your question for myself, H_LL NO. To do what you suggest would make me an enemy of democracy. It would make me betray my community which needs the economic multiplier effect of local education dollars spent locally to survive. It would make me complicit in child abuse. It would enlist me in racism. (Read the Black Agenda Report.) It would make me an ally of those who work to destroy the primary path women have taken to financial independence.
It would engage me in the plotting to hide the most significant problem facing the nation- concentration of wealth and the Koch’s defunding of common goods.
LikeLike
“Bridge to Knowware”
Bridge to Knowware,
BIA
Techy blowware
What to say?
“Save the native
With our school!”
Quite outdated
Mode of rule
LikeLike
BIA also stands for Bureau of Indian Affairs, of course.
I hear they had some just lovely schools.
LikeLike
Bridge to Knowware! Good one, Poet. I’ll be borrowing it in correspondence with colleagues, if you don’t mind.
LikeLike
Not at all.
You are welcome to copy and distribute anything i write here.
Glad someone likes it.
LikeLike
Of particular note from Peg Tyre’s article:
“Since entering into the agreement, Bridge has moved formidable resources into Liberia. Justin Sandefur, an economist at the Center for Global Development in Washington and principal investigator in the Liberian schools study, told me recently that he worried that ‘there was no longer a governance firewall between the interests of a commercial company and the Ministry of Education, which is supposed to be advocating on what is best for Liberian children.’ In April, Sandefur, along with seven others, published an open letter cautioning the Liberian government against rapid scaling and to consider a financially sustainable model. In June, Werner gave Bridge the go-ahead to operate dozens of new schools.”
In his 15 June 2017 Open Letter to George Werner, Minister of Education – Liberia, Frank Adamson, Senior Policy and Research Analyst, Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) wrote, in part:
“You will be aware of the widespread concerns about how Bridge International Academies blocked independent research in Uganda and have failed to allow external evaluation of their schools whilst making bold claims for their success based on their own internal data.
“This is very poor practice and we would be very concerned if the Ministry of Education in Liberia played a role in extending such practices.
“Our second major area of concern relates to your plans to scale up the initial pilot programme even before findings from the evaluation and research come through.”
Adamson goes on to conclude:
“Such a move makes the pilot programme appear to be one driven largely by ideology.”
It all is so hideously familiar.
LikeLike
This pattern has been repeated so many times that even the pattern is tired of it.
LikeLike
Gordon Lafer, in his book,”…How corporations are remaking America one state at a time”, makes the case that the motivation is corporate bottom line. He dispenses with the argument that it is ideology, providing specific examples.
LikeLike
We should be so lucky here in the US that people such as “Frank Adamson, Senior Policy and Research Analyst, Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE)” should write similar cautions against similar widespread applications of similarly dubitable ed-curricula here in the US!!
LikeLike
This is a fairly typical piece pushing ed tech:
https://www.the74million.org/article/mesecar-personalized-learning-and-the-new-federal-education-law-3-states-leading-the-way
This is a real disservice to public schools. It’s bad advice. Investing huge amounts of money and time into this with NO due diligence is a bad idea.
The idea that whole states should upend their education systems based on over-hyped promises by vendors is insane. It’s nuts. Would they treat any other product like this? Just take the salespeoples word as gospel? Who does that?
LikeLike
Save Our PUBLIC Schools and SAVE OUR YOUNG! PLEASE, NO MORE GATES, Zuckerberg, National Governors Association, and more…
LikeLike
Sort of ironic, if resonant the BIA schools remind me of the reservation BIA schools in AZ & NM, which had some awful consequences and were being largely displaced when I was in AZ back in the 80-90’s. It is especially consonant w/commenters who invoked colonialism, which is an appropriate description of Bureau of Indians Affairs schools, at best.
LikeLike
I hope you will enlarge on that thesis w/some details. Have to admit I am a voracious reader of Erdrich & similar authors. I too suspect current Bridge Academy teachers in Africa, being as they are pd by– & their curriculum derivates from– US corp-ed sources– are simply promulgating W colonial viewpoint.
But even if they are not– even if their curriculum is simply literacy & numeracy– by their very presence there, they will be seen as a predatory Western presence… Unless they provide this service for FREE.
LikeLike
It is repulsive to take money from the world’s most impoverished parents for profit. It is equally disgusting to take the money for profit from the governments that are responsible for the world’s most impoverished parents, money that could have gone to public schools. What makes it truly sickening is the way this “international” (white) company or corporation treats the parents, children, and script readers who get caught in its contractual web. After reading many of the astroturf comments attached to this NY Times Magazine article, I am reminded of just how horrible it is for a charter to force parents and teachers to do its advertising. And the glossing over of how that doctoral candidate doing research was arrested and held, the gall! This is venture capitalism. This is neocolonialism. This is sick.
LikeLike
“Choice” is conjoined with the self-absolution provided by the buyer beware defense, which business uses to justify exploitation of the most vulnerable.
LikeLike
Interesting. I think what you are saying is that the ‘school choice’ mantra is designed to appeal to those at the bottom of the economic heap– who find themselves with very few choices, if any. Caveat emptor– let the buyer beware– is a hollow mantra for those who must choose between something and nothing. ‘School choice’– a choice between public & private school, where the cost is the same– offers the guy at the bottom of the barrel a choice, where before he had no choice. Having a choice means coming up in this world.
If I am parsing this correctly, ‘school choice’ is a way of responding to the poorest among us [keeping in mind that US children below the poverty line currently account for 40% of all children]– w/o actually responding to child poverty.
LikeLike
In reading the article, I was struck by the teachers’ enormously high absenteeism rate in some of the countries mentioned. Why would they be absent a third of the time? I can’t think of a reason other than the teachers not getting paid enough to live and having to look for other, better work in low paying, gig economies.
LikeLike
LeftCoastTeacher, I was browsing several studies online re: teacher absenteeism in various African countries. Statistically, the biggest reasons are illness and lack of teacher housing/ distance of school from home/ difficult terrain/ poor transportation. These issues are particularly significant in rural areas; one study summarizes “teacher absenteeism in the rural areas appears to be conditioned… by the systemic problems of poverty, disease and food insecurity.”
LikeLike
Who created the statistics about absenteeism- profiteers? False claims about the failure of U.S. schools were made. Negative propaganda about schools and teachers can be dismissed as cries of “wolf”- they have earned zero credibility.
LikeLike
That our own US corp-ed companies are trying to make an investment profit off poverty-stricken African countries is pathetic and repugnant. Yes, that’s colonialism. Yes, that’s the Ugly American involvement that encourages anti-Western insurgents. It is beyond me why these locales are not the targets of FREE education, funded by our wealthy American foundations. !!??
LikeLike
The foundations are villainthropic.
LikeLike
Fantastic word!
LikeLike
With this model, as with every other large scale, top down “development” program imposed on countries in Africa, the local people don’t have a stake in it. It isn’t theirs — and they can’t make it their own — and when the billionaires pull up stakes, it will fold up like a circus tent.
Some people never learn.
LikeLike
SDP,
BIA is like Walmart. If they close, they leave everyone worse off
LikeLike