A By-the-E-Book Education, for $5 a Month - NYTimes.com

Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.

Dennis Abudho and his family of five children live in a one-bedroom house without electricity in Bandani, an informal settlement in Kisumu, Kenya. Abudho is active in the PTA at Bridge International Academy in Bandani, where his four oldest children (three boys and a girl) are in baby level, first, third and fifth grade. You might not expect someone like Abudho ? who said he is a casual laborer, operating a bread machine at a local mill and bakery ? to have four children in private school. But he can afford it ? the cost of school for each child at Bridge, including books and materials, is the equivalent of $5.16 a month.

Why doesn?t Abudho send his children to public schools? One reason is that there aren?t enough of them in Bandani. Informal settlements in Kenya, and many other places, have few public schools because their inhabitants are unregistered; legally, there are few children who need school.

But even when public school is available, learning may not be. Public schools in poor countries are mostly overcrowded ? there can be 100 or more children in a class. While there are heroic teachers, there are many others for whom teaching is more a sinecure than a vocation ? they are absent half the time, and not actively teaching when present. Since they have no supervision, this behavior incurs no penalty. Materials may consist solely of a chalkboard. Coursework usually consists of rote learning and memorization.

Moreover, public schools are most often not free. Parents everywhere are assessed school fees ? some real, some bribes (like ?teacher motivation? fees).

People who can afford it, then, turn to private schools that charge between $2 and $10 a month per child. James Tooley and Pauline Dixon of Newcastle University in England, who research and champion low-cost private schools, found that in the slums of some major cities in India and Africa, more children go to private schools than to public schools. (Tooley is also a co-founder of a chain of them, Omega Schools, in Ghana) The vast majority of the private schools are microbusinesses, run by individuals in their backyards or living rooms.

In my last column, I wrote about schools run by the Bangladesh anti-poverty group BRAC, which give children who dropped out of or never entered school a free education of better quality than the public schools. Most remarkable, BRAC has 40,000 such schools, in seven countries. BRAC, the world?s largest nongovernmental organization, can afford this because it has a steady income from the businesses it runs and it is a trusted favorite of large donors, particularly rich-country government aid agencies.

There is only one BRAC. But is there another way to provide affordable education to poor people on a giant scale?

Bridge is betting that there is ? in fact, its business and academic models are based on scale.

?Anyone can do one school,? said Shannon May, who with her husband, Jay Kimmelman, and Phil Frei founded Bridge in 2007. ?Some are good and some are bad, but none will be radically different than what the public system offers.? May said that one school doesn?t make enough money and can?t raise capital to invest in teacher training and supervision, preparing lessons, creating books and materials. A single mom-and-pop school can?t know about research on how to teach. ?The only way to have a really game-changing experience is to scale it,? she said.

From the very beginning, Bridge planned to be big. As a for-profit business, it would have to live on school fees alone. The founders wanted to invest in high-quality curriculum, textbooks, storybooks, learning toys, technology and research. The only way they could keep their school fees low, then, was to amortize this investment over large numbers of schools with large numbers of students ? at least 50 per class. (Bridge argues, with good supporting evidence, that teacher-student ratio ? unless the number of students is overwhelmingly high ? matters much less than other factors.)

Bridge got off the ground in 2009 with a $1.8 million investment from the Omidyar Network, a philanthropic investment firm that aims to provide early money to businesses and projects with the potential to transform a field. Another major investor is Learn Capital. Its biggest partner is Pearson, whose management of school tests in New York City and elsewhere has raised so many alarms. (See here, here, and here.)

Bridge now has more branches than any other business chain in Kenya and is growing by a new school every 2.5 days. It plans to expand to other countries next year. Individual schools break even, but the company itself will not be profitable until at least 2015, when it aims to be teaching half a million students.

The key to Bridge?s rapid growth is standardization ? an ?academy in a box,? it says ? which Bridge takes to absurd lengths. At any given moment, for example, every Bridge second-grade teacher in every school is teaching exactly the same lesson. That lesson is created by a group of master teachers, who write out a word-for-word script and transmit it to each classroom via an e-reader.

Bridge sent me two scripts ? a third-grade drama game in which small groups of children rehearse and perform skits in which they play the parts of animals, and a fifth-grade lesson on the angles of a triangle.

It?s far from rote learning: The lessons budget time for students to work individually and in groups, for the teacher to walk around and interact with students as they work, for games, praise and for a class cheer. The math lesson plan looks like a normal one, but instead of ?explain the idea of a right triangle? it writes out exactly what to say and do.

?If you have people who haven?t taught before, it?s not always intuitive what to say,? said Michael Goldstein, Bridge?s chief academic officer. And how long to take ? the scripts also help teachers in the difficult task of pacing, he said.

Yes, adhering to a script tamps down any spark of teaching genius. But genius is rare. Incompetence, sadly, is not, and Bridge argues that having the script greatly expands the pool of people who can become competent teachers.

Bridge teachers are high school graduates who live in the neighborhood surrounding each school; they get five weeks of training. Bridge hires locally because it wants role models, because the people who live in slums are usually the only people willing to go to work in a slum and because it allows Bridge to pay relatively poorly ? but still more than other private schools. (Teacher salaries are the biggest component of school costs.)

Technology also rules Bridge schools? administrative side. Bridge central staff runs all the schools, which are cashless (this also greatly reduces the potential for corruption). Kenya is the world leader in cellphone banking, and school fees, supply bills and wages are paid by cellphone.

But perhaps the most important factor in Bridge?s teaching is an old-fashioned one: the plain old grind, the ?time on task? that is key to learning. School runs from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., with a slightly shorter day on Saturday. The academy manager watches a full lesson from each teacher every week, and makes shorter visits. There are also roving professional development coaches, and a parent hotline. (Parents in public schools usually have no one to complain to.) Teachers who don?t show up, or don?t teach when they do show up, lose their jobs.

The technology allows for real-time feedback. Students are tested frequently on the material they are studying, the results entered into the e-reader. That allows Bridge to see what?s going on in each classroom, and it allows the master teachers to change the lesson plan overnight to respond to students? weaknesses.

Does Bridge work? The answer is probably. Bridge arranged for its students to be tested alongside neighborhood students in government schools and other low-cost private schools at the beginning and end of second grade. Bridge students generally outperformed the others, in some cases by a wide margin. (Bridge provided me with the private school numbers, which are not on its Web site.)

But the numbers may be somewhat misleading. Private schools almost always outperform public schools ? but much of the reason has nothing to do with schools: these students are richer, and tend to have more involved and better-educated parents.

A good experiment controls for this selection bias and tests only the effects of the school. Bridge does this ? but not entirely. [1] Still, the differences are dramatic enough that it is likely that Bridge is right.

Much rides on Bridge?s fate. There is a movement, championed by Sir Michael Barber (chief educational adviser to Pearson and formerly a top official in the Blair government), and by Tooley and Dixon, among others, to shift government money and international aid toward increasing access to low-cost private schools and so away from public schools. Public schools are failing, but this idea would make them worse, as the reason they are so bad in the first place is that no one with any clout uses them.

Kevin Watkins, a nonresident senior fellow with the Brookings Institution?s Center for Universal Education, believes that proponents of low-cost private schools make exaggerated claims for their effectiveness and their ability to reach the poor. (This dispute is very similar to the American version ? and just as heated. See here for an interesting debate.)

It may be hard for Americans to imagine not being able to pay $5 a month, but it is difficult for Africa?s poor. Abudho said that many of his fellow Bridge parents fall behind in their payments ? and their children have to stay home until the family is paid up. He thinks Bridge should switch to a post-pay system. (Omega schools in Ghana charge a daily all-inclusive fee and provide 15 free days each year ? for those mornings when there is no money in the house.)

And those are the families who can afford private school. ?In our communities, 85 percent of the families in the poorest communities can afford to send all their boys and all of their girls of the proper age to our school,? said Kimmelman, the Brideco-founder.

And the other 15 percent? Some are headed by mothers earning 60 cents a day taking in laundry, or men working on and off for $1 a day. Watkins said that consumption surveys indicate that the poorest spend 70 to 80 percent of their income on food. ?Many of the kids I interviewed who were attending low-fee schools were working in the afternoons,? he said.

But perhaps the most significant difference between the privatized schools debate in America and in Africa is that in Africa there are no free schools ? when you add in fees, legitimate and illegitimate, the private schools cost only slightly more than public ones. ?Are we reaching the poorest of the poor?? said Tooley. ?Probably not. But neither are the government schools.?

FOOTNOTE
[1]To be specific, the test measures students at the beginning of the year to get a baseline. It groups the students into bands by score. The test at the end of the year compares students in each band: Bridge students who scored in the lowest band on the first test are compared to low-band students in other schools. Bridge argues that by comparing students with similar baseline scores, it has effectively accounted for the students? home differences. But those home factors will keep helping the more advantaged students during the school year, and the experiment can?t control for this.

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Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book ?The Haunted Land: Facing Europe?s Ghosts After Communism.? She is a former editorial writer for The Times and the author of, most recently, ?Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World? and the World War II spy story e-book ?D for Deception.?

Source: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/22/a-by-the-e-book-education-for-5-a-month/

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