After the publication in The Economist of a glowing article about the for-profit schools that Bridge International Academies is opening across Africa, India, and other impoverished regions, readers reacted to the article with informed outrage and indignation. The respondents were some of the best informed international aid workers in the world. Please read what they said.
The responses can be found here.
I have recently been engaged in a public debate with hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson, one of the leaders of the “reform” movement. In addition to founding Democrats for Education Reform, which supports charter schools and high-stakes testing, he helped to create Teach for America and sits on the board of a KIPP school in the Bronx (NYC). In our offline exchanges, he mentioned that he was in London for a meeting of the board of Bridge International Academies, and I told him that I oppose for-profit schooling. When someone runs a school to make a profit, the bottom line is profit, not children or education. Re Bridge International Academies, I believe that for-profit entrepreneurs should not substitute for the government’s obligation to provide free, universal education with qualified teachers. When they do, it relieves the government of its obligation to do so. Liberia, for example, has recently agreed to outsource its primary education system to Bridge. I think that is reprehensible because Liberia is off the hook. What happens to the families who can’t pay?
Whitney, my new BFF, sent me a letter explaining why Bridge is doing good work in poor countries, doing what the government does poorly or not at all. While I don’t agree with him, I think you should hear his point of view, unfiltered.
Tilson writes:
Hi Diane,
I suspect you’re going to oppose Bridge no matter what I write because it’s a mostly non-union for-profit business that typically charges poor parents tuition.
But what the heck – worth a try.
As background, Bridge runs more than 460 low-cost private schools, serving nearly 100,000 students, in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria and, soon, India and Liberia (which is in the process of inviting school management companies like Bridge to run its schools; in September, Bridge will implement its model to try to turn around 50 currently failing public primary schools in partnership with the government).
One thing both you and I agree on is that poverty has an enormous effect on a child’s ability to learn. This is exactly what Bridge has set out to help solve. Bridge addresses one of the world’s most severe and vexing problems: that children in the ~800 million families around the world subsisting on less than $2/day (roughly half in India and most of the rest in sub-Saharan Africa) are getting little/no education, thereby almost certainly trapping them in desperate poverty.
Most of these children attend at least elementary school (K-8), which is now usually free even in the poorest countries, but there are two big problems: 1) they’re really not free: the schools charge various fees for uniforms, textbooks and supplies, teachers demand bribes to pay attention to a child, etc.; and 2) the government schools are horrifically bad – not inner-city U.S. bad, but 10x worse. For example, teacher absenteeism averages 25-35% in surveys in various poor countries, plus 25-50% of the teachers who do show up aren’t teaching – they’re hanging out, running side businesses at the school, etc. Thus, the effective absenteeism rate is ~50% (Bridge’s, in contrast, is 99% lower at 0.5%). And the half that are in the classroom are teaching a mere 2 hours and 19 minutes a day on average and are barely literate themselves: 65% of teachers in Kenya couldn’t pass an exam based on the curriculum they teach.
Consequently, the parents of roughly half of these children worldwide instead send them to low-cost private schools, somehow scraping together the fees, which average ~$6/month (not much different than what they’d be paying anyway at the supposedly “free” government schools). These schools, typically microenterprises run by local entrepreneurs who might have a high school education at best, are scarcely better than the government schools, but at least the teachers show up every day (otherwise the parents won’t pay).
This is where Bridge came in. Its co-founders looked at this market and asked: “How can we guarantee quality for these parents, as a price point they can afford?” They looked at the core challenges – teacher preparedness and absenteeism, absence of learning materials, lack of monitoring and evaluation, etc. – and designed a model to tackle them. By designing the model for scale, Bridge was able to invest up front in research and development, technology and training.
Essentially Bridge goes to some of the most marginalized communities in the countries it operates in, identifies local talent, trains them in pupil-centered learning and gives them the resources they need to be great teachers. It then provides a comprehensive central support system for these teachers, and uses technology (tablets and smart phones) to monitor attendance and learning outcomes.
The evidence is showing that it is succeeding: Bridge pupils reach fluency at twice the rate of their peers, as shown in the attached study, The Bridge Effect. This is the equivalent to 32% more schooling in English and 14% more in math (0.34 SD in reading, 0.13 SD in math effect size).
And most importantly to parents in Kenya, a few months ago Bridge students earned historic results on the KCPE, the exam given to all 8th graders in the country, which largely determines which students will go to high school, and of what quality. Bridge students were 2.5x more likely to earn a score that qualified them for National Secondary Schools (the highest-rated schools) and 2.4x more likely to earn a score that qualified them for County Secondary Schools (the next-highest-rated schools). Overall, Bridge students had a 60% pass rate (a score of 250+ on the 500-point scale) vs. 44% nationwide, with a 264 mean score vs. 242 (a 0.37 SD effect size). In summary, based on measured pupil growth in terms of standard deviations above the control, what happened with Bridge students on the KCPE is among the largest impacts ever seen in a large-scale education intervention globally.
Perhaps most importantly, Bridge is developing and supporting a cohort of confident and ambitious young people and giving them the opportunities for a better future. It secured over 100 scholarships for its graduating class to attend high school in the US and Kenya and is working on a long-term scholarship program. I recommend you watch this clip of a 13-year-old Bridge graduate and scholarship recipient, Grace, talking to a crowd of 1,200 women. I don’t know many American kids that age with that such confidence, poise and eloquence. And here’s a picture of Rahab, who performed for Liberian President Sirleaf last year and led her dance team to a top-10 placing at the national music competition last year:
Bridge has its critics. The more successful Bridge is, the more threatening it is to the local teachers union and educational establishment, so they’ve been stirring up lots of trouble for Bridge, threatening regulatory action, spreading rumors, etc. Bridge’s global ambitions have also drawn the ire of Education International, the global union federation of teachers’ trade unions.
In response to critics, let me be clear: neither you nor I would send our kids to a Bridge school. To make the schools affordable ($6/month doesn’t go very far, even in poor countries!), extracurriculars are limited and the facilities are pretty basic. There’s no glass on the windows. The campus is small. The floors are concrete. Children sit at benches. But, this is similar or better than what other schools look like in the area.
The teachers all teach off teacher guides, developed centrally to align to the country’s educational standards and delivered wirelessly to a small tablet device like a Nook or Kindle. Thus, if you walked into a 3rd grade math class at any of Bridge’s ~400 schools in Kenya at 10am on Tuesday, you would find the same lesson being taught. Each class might be at different places in the lesson according to the needs of the kids, but all teachers are on the same scope, sequence and lesson plan. They still have to maintain order, engage the class in discussion, help struggling students, etc. – but they don’t spend any time developing a curriculum or lesson plans.
One of Bridge’s core successes is getting teachers to master classroom management techniques. They are taught how to lead a class without beating the children, which is very common. Many Bridge students say that this is the first time they have teachers who listen to them, allow them to ask questions, and develop a positive relationship with them.
About 30% of Bridge teachers in Kenya have a teaching certificate. Interestingly, based on the careful tracking and evaluation Bridge does of all of its teachers, it can detect no difference between the certified teachers and those who aren’t (Bridge does a three-week training program for all new teachers, whether certified or not).
To track the progress of every student, Bridge develops and regularly administers internal tests, whose results are collected centrally, so it can tell which students have mastered the material that was just taught, and let principals and teachers know which students need extra help.
To your argument that “it lets the government off the hook so it need not provide a free public education system for all of its children. It will outsource it to Bridge.” I agree that, in a perfect world, the governments of Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Liberia and India would provide a truly free, quality education to all children. OK, now let’s get back to the real world. Have you ever been to any of these countries? I can assure you that it will be decades before any of these countries even come close to this goal. In the meantime, Bridge is ready, willing and able to provide this right now – at a cost far below what governments are spending (Bridge estimates that Kenya spends ~$350/pupil/year vs. Bridge at less than $100 – for a far better result). In light of the cost and outcomes, the more governments (like Liberia’s) that engage Bridge as a partner to deliver publicly-financed education, the better. In fact, I hope that Bridge’s future lies in this area – performance-based government contracts – rather than charging poor families for something that we both agree should be free.
For further information, attached is The Bridge Effect, a cover story in the Economist last year about low-cost private schools, and here’s a link to an eight-minute video Bridge made: https://vimeo.com/110485199
I’d welcome any questions or comments you have.
Best regards,
Whitney
Just when you thought that educational entrepreneurs had gone as low as they could go, along comes an app to pay children to study and respond to prompts. Patrick Leddy, the developer of the cash-for-grades app, has previously developed apps for selling custom tailored clothing, financial services, medical devices and cosmetics.
Launching first in the U.S. in December, the cash-for-grades e-learning app Incentify is based on the premise that children will be willing to study or do homework chores they don’t want to do in return for cash or other rewards.
“All of our technology is based on Harvard University studies, which have determined … whether kids responded to incentives and did better in school or not,” said Incentify’s CEO and founder Patrick Leddy. “And sure enough, conclusively, they do respond better to incentives.”
Leddy argues that before engaging with teachers and educational content at school, children need to be motivated to study instead of day dreaming or playing games.
“The classrooms are not at the speed of the children,” he told Techtonics. “The children are the Google generation. So how is it that we expect the kids to run at light speed outside of the school, but when they get in the school, they’ve got to slow down to horse and buggy?”
The Google generation – young people with “instant gratification” at their fingertips – can benefit more from e-learning than a traditional classroom, said Leddy. “We know for a fact that e-learning all by itself teaches a kid faster than teacher, pencil, paper and book.”
Dangling “a carrot” in front of kids to entice them to study is a model Leddy intends to take to other parts of the world to empower girls, in particular, who often are married off at an early age.
Whatever the reason for early marriages, Leddy argued children who earn money while learning are unlikely to be sold off for a dowry.
There are at least two things wrong with this app.
First, the app is based on the work of Harvard economist Roland Fryer, Jr., who has long sought the economic incentive that would lead to higher grades and test scores. His efforts have been funded with millions of dollars. He has paid children for getting higher grades or test scores, and he has paid them to read books. His efforts have come to naught, although children did read more books for pay but they did not get higher test scores or grades. So, the basic claim–that this incentive is effective–has no evidentiary basis.
Second, modern cognitive psychology rejects the belief that rewards will promote better outcomes. The work of Edward Deci, Dan Ariely, and other cognitive psychologists have shown that extrinsic rewards may get short-term results, but they do not last and they eventually undermine motivation. Daniel Pink has written about the importance of their studies (Drive) and why the real spurs to motivation are intrinsic, not extrinsic. It turns out that people are paid to do something that matters, they will stop doing it when the money stops.
Public education in California is under siege by people and organizations who want to privatize the schools, remove them from democratic control, and hand them over to the charter industry.
The attack began when Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor. He stacked the state board of education with a majority of charter school advocates (even though only 4% of children were enrolled in charters at the time) and slashed billions of dollars from the budget of the public schools.
The attack continues today, as billionaires add their clout to the charter industry. Eli Broad is the point of the spear, with his unaccredited Broad Superintendents Academy, which has “trained” would-be superintendents in his management techniques and sent them out to reorganize schools, and whenever possible, close them down. Broad has proposed to open 260 new charters in Los Angeles, which would mean that 50% of the students in the district would be enrolled in charters. Other billionaires, such as Reed Hastings (CEO of Netflix) and David Welch (of Vergara notoriety), have joined the fight against public schools and their teachers.
The Golden State is often a bellwether for the nation.
Governor Jerry Brown, a progressive on many other issues, has defended the charter industry and blocked efforts to regulate it. California has had some of the biggest charter scandals in the nation, starting with the collapse of the California Charter Academy in 2004, which went bankrupt and stranded 6,000 students. The state has for-profit charters, including the California Virtual Academy (CAVA), which was recently the subject of an expose by Jessica Calefati in the San Jose Mercury-News. CAVA is run by Michael Milken’s K12 Inc. It is one of the worst performing schools in the state, perhaps the very worst. But no action has been taken to close it.
When the legislature passed a bill to prohibit for-profit charter schools, Governor Brown vetoed it. This, despite the fact that America has never had for-profit “public schools” until the rise of the charter industry. An associate of the governor told me that the governor did not believe that for-profit schools are inherently bad. I disagree. Any for-profit organization has profit as its highest priority, not education or children. Governor Brown also vetoed legislation to prohibit charters in one district from opening branches in other districts. He vetoed legislation to bar conflicts of interest in charter schools. Governor Brown opened two charters in Oakland when he was mayor, so he must be partial to them. Nonetheless, it remains baffling that Governor Brown would allow vested interests and advocates of privatization to ruin the state’s public schools.
Unlike many other states, California has a well-financed and formidable organization fighting to expand the power of privately managed charter schools: the California Charter Schools Association. It is active in advancing legislation to protect and advance privatization and to block any effort to rein in their excesses.
Begin your reading at this site, Capital & Main. It contains a series about California and the future of public education.
The Network for Public Education Action Fund has drafted a proposal for consideration by the Democratic Party’s Platform Committee.
We call for the elimination of federal mandates for annual testing; for a declaration of support for public schools; for a ban on for-profit charters; for regulation of charters that receive federal funds to assure that they serve the same children as the public schools; for revision and strengthening of the FERPA privacy laws to protect our children’s data from commercial data mining; for full funding of special education; for support of early childhood education; and for other means of improving the federal role in education.
The proposal is in draft form. We will be making revisions. If you see something you think needs fixing, let us know.
Please read our draft proposal. And if you agree, add your name of our petition to the Democratic party. We plan to make the same appeal to the Republican party.
Both parties, we hope, will support the public schools, which educate nearly 90% of the nation’s children. Public schools are a bedrock of our society, in the past, now, and in the future.
Jessica Calefati wrote a blistering series about Michael Milken’s K12 Inc. virtual charter school in California (called California Virtual Academy or CAVA) a few weeks ago. The series caused enough of a stir to persuade State Superintendent Tom Torklakson to order a state audit of CAVA.
Calefati reported that less than half the students at CAVA graduate, and none is qualified to attend a California public university.
The virtual charter industry is noted for high profits and poor performance. Student attrition is high, test scores and graduation rates are low. But profits are excellent, because the “school” receives full state tuition but has none of the expenses of a brick and mortar school. No grounds, no transportation, no custodian, no food services, no library, no support staff, no athletics. And classes that range from 40-more than 100 in number. As Calefati reported in the original series, students may get credit for attendance if they are online only one minute a day. The latest CREDO study found that for every 180 days enrolled in a virtual charter, students lose 180 days of instruction in math and 72 in reading. This is a lose-lose.
It is heartening to see state officials taking action to curb the fraud that runs rampant through its charter industry, unsupervised, unregulated, and unchecked.
Calefati writes:
In a rare move, California’s top education official has enlisted the state’s highest-ranking accountant to conduct a sweeping audit of California Virtual Academies, a profitable but low-performing network of online charter schools that enrolls about 15,000 students across the state.
The audit is the first that Superintendent for Public Instruction Tom Torlakson has asked the state controller’s Office to conduct since he took office in 2011. The request comes two months after this newspaper published an investigative series on K12 Inc., the publicly traded Virginia firm that operates the schools and reaps tens of millions of dollars annually in state funding.
In a statement Thursday, Torlakson said he has a duty to ensure that public money isn’t being squandered and sought the probe into the California Virtual Academies because of “serious questions raised about a number of their practices.” He said the audit would examine the relationship between the schools and the company and the “validity” of attendance, enrollment, dropout and graduation rates reported by the academies to the state.
This isn’t the first time the company has come under fire in recent weeks.
Torlakson’s request follows lawmakers’ calls last month for the state auditor to examine for-profit charter schools operations and Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla’s introduction earlier this month of legislation that would prohibit online charters from hiring for-profit companies like K12 for management or instructional services. The company is also being probed by Attorney General Kamala Harris, who launched an investigation of online charter schools last fall.
If Controller Betty Yee finds evidence of gross financial mismanagement, illegal or improper use of public money, a disregard for sound educational practices or repeated failure to improve student test scores the state Board of Education, may — based on a recommendation from Torlakson — vote to revoke the schools’ charters.
The mainstream press in Ohio has turned critical of the low-performing, profitable, politically connected charter industry. Just read this blistering editorial in The Columbus Dispatch.
“If a charter school can’t perform better than a conventional public school, there is no point in having the charter school.
“After all, Ohio embarked on the charter-school experiment to see if there is a way to improve on the dismal results being achieved in many urban and poor school districts, not simply to replicate their failure. The idea was that if student outcomes improved in charter schools, then the schools would continue. But if charters failed to improve on the performance of conventional schools, they would be closed.
“Now, years after the experiment began, some schools are persistent failures, but instead of being shut down, they want to change the performance measuring stick so that they can remain in business.
“Defenders of conventional public schools long have maintained that failure isn’t the fault of the schools, but is the result of the socioeconomic circumstances of their students: Students who come from poverty, broken homes and associated forms of instability, are harder to teach.
“Now, some charter schools, which were created expressly to find ways to overcome these disadvantages, want to be excused for failure on the same grounds — saying their students are harder to teach. But if they’re doing no better than conventional public schools — and in some cases doing worse — there is no reason for the public to continue to fund them.
“But the straightforward experiment went off the rails when some clever operators figured out how to get rich by sponsoring charter schools. And to keep the gravy flowing, they began making major political contributions to the lawmakers who control the gravy.
“And that is why rumors have been flying around the Statehouse about proposals to weaken accountability standards for charter schools so that they can continue to receive millions of taxpayer dollars even as the students they are supposed to educate continue to fall behind. In many cases, particularly with online charter schools, it appears that many students don’t even participate in learning, but the school’s operators continue to be paid by the state as if these students are receiving an education.
“Charter-school lobbyists are waving their checkbooks and urging lawmakers to ease attendance-reporting rules and to continue to pay the schools even if students don’t log in to learn. They also want to absolve charter-school sponsors of responsibility for the performance of their schools, even though this is a key part of their role as sponsors. Lobbyists also want schools to be measured not by how much progress a student makes each year, but by whether the school performs more or less like other schools with similar student demographics. In other words, if a poorly performing school is doing no worse than other poorly performing, then it should get a pass. This is called the “similar students” measure.
“It is less than a year since the legislature passed House Bill 2, hailed as a giant step forward in holding charter schools accountable for their performance. Part of that bill called for the Ohio Department of education to analyze the “similar students” measure, with a report due by Dec. 1. Now some lawmakers are proposing to pass legislation adopting this approach before the education department has even issued its report. So much for sound public policy.
“Because of such nonsense, it’s important to remember why charters were instituted in the first place. It wasn’t to replicate failure and make excuses. And it wasn’t to make a handful of charter sponsors rich. It was to make students successful.”
Day by day, we are making inroads into public opinion. Newspapers in Ohio have been speaking out against the frequent violations of public trust by greedy charter operators. Now the Salt Lake Tribune steps up with a bold denunciation of charter school profiteers. It’s about time.
Inviting the private sector to run schools was a colossal error. For the first time in American history, we have schools claiming to be “public”that operate for public. We have charter schools launched by entrepreneurs, not educators. It is wrong. Many members of the public believe that charters are privately funded, not realizing that it is their tax dollars that are paying off investors.
Here is concrete evidence that the tide is turning. It is an editorial in the Salt Lake Coty Tribune called simply “Charter School Profiteers.”
The editorial board says:
“A handful of private companies have banked more than $68 million from Utah taxpayers over the past three years. The money is delivered through no-bid contracts by people who don’t work for government, but the companies are often connected to political officials.
“An extensive examination of charter school spending by Salt Lake Tribune reporter Benjamin Wood shows several companies that exist only to contract with charter schools. While public schools have always contracted for some services, many charters go so far as to contract for their principals and teachers, providing undisclosed profits to the companies while shielding financial information from the public.
“Under state law, the schools must be operated as non-profits, presumably to avoid people profiteering on public education. Charters that contract with for-profit companies for their largest expenses effectively circumvent that requirement. There is no way for Utahns to know how many of their education dollars are ending up as someone’s salary or profits.
“In the meantime, charters are slowly losing one of their most persuasive arguments: that they can educate students for less money than traditional public schools.
“According to a report from the Utah Foundation released last month, Utah charters collect about 10 percent less per student than regular public schools, but they have cost advantages, too. They have fewer non-English speakers and economically-disadvantaged students. Add in the public schools’ requirements to provide busing, to build inefficient rural schools and to provide such things as gang-prevention services, and the cost difference virtually disappears. Looking at test scores, charters track pretty closely to public schools on average.
“In other words, there is no evidence the free-market capitalism allowed in Utah’s charter school system is providing better results for students.
“But it clearly is producing winners. One company that received more than $4 million last year is headed by the sister of the president of the state charter school board. Another company ($1 million from charters last year) is operated by a state legislator, and two others ($4.7 million and $4.5 million last year) are run by relatives of legislators. (Surprise! All three voted in favor of increasing charter school funding by $20 million last session.)
“One of those relatives promised, “We keep it pretty separate.”
“How many charters operate this way? Hard to say, but it’s not all of them. This isn’t an argument for ending charter schools, but it is a system that begs for reform. Otherwise, the worst is yet to come.
“Long before charters, there were non-profit entities providing K-12 education in Utah. They hired their own principals and teachers, and they still do. That is because there are no efficiencies in creating that second entity, but there can be profits.
“And with profits come profit pressures. Some of today’s charters look less like non-profit schools and more like for-profit proprietary colleges. They market on television and employ sales staffs. As charters become more common, competition for charter students increases. Expect to see these for-profit non-profits apply more sales pressure to prospective parents.”
http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/3923608-155/editorial-charter-school-profiteers
The parent-led Public Schools First NC calls on the public to speak out against legislation to create an “achievement school district,” modeled on Tennessee’s failed ASD. The goal of the law is to invite charter takeovers of low-scoring schools.
“An Achievement School District is a bad idea for North Carolina. Taking over failing schools and giving them to out-of-town charter operators does not help students or communities. Yet the House is ready to take up a bill (HB1080) that would create an ASD with five of our most vulnerable elementary schools. Tell your representatives you DO NOT SUPPORT this unproven and unaccountable strategy when state transformation teams working closely with local schools and districts are beginning to succeed. They deserve more staff and funding, not an expensive state takeover!
Tell your legislators to REJECT HB1080! (click here and sign the petition
HERE IS the calendar in the house tomorrow.
Click to access CurrentHouseCalendar.pdf
HERE is the calendar in the senate tomorrow.
Click to access CurrentsenateCalendar.pdf
HERE is the House Education Budget
http://www.publicschoolsfirstnc.org/resources/education-budget/”
This post is not directly connected to education, but it says something about the connection between politics and high finance and the selling off of public assets. Think education.
This comes from the website of “In the Public Interest,” an anti-privatization organization.
New Jersey: The plan by Gov. Christie, Senate President Steve Sweeney, and South Jersey Democratic boss George Norcross III to sell off Atlantic City’s public assets and bust union contracts advances to the next step. “Assembly sources pointed to Atlantic City’s beachfront property as the real prize. Joseph Jignoli and Jack Morris, two politically connected developers with ties to Sweeney by way of public-private developer Devco’s work in Cherry Hill and New Brunswick, could be first in line as plots of land on the coast fall into the state’s hands.”
“Sweeney has repeatedly insisted that he favors monetizing the city’s water by handing the authority over to Atlantic County to cut costs. Phillip Norcross, another brother of George Norcross, is a lobbyist with New Jersey American Water, the company most likely to purchase the authority under a state takeover.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 