"the Profitable Power Of Education: Continuous Learning For Insurance Professionals"
"the Profitable Power Of Education: Continuous Learning For Insurance Professionals" - A child waits at the entrance to Bridge International Academies at the Mukuru Kwa Njenga facility in Nairobi, Kenya. Photo: Brian Otieno for The Intercept
In the early days of Silicon Valley's era of disruption, two Harvard University graduates dreamed up a bold experiment in education.
"the Profitable Power Of Education: Continuous Learning For Insurance Professionals"
Shannon May, who has studied the development of education in rural China, and her husband, Jay Kimmelman, an education software developer, have spied an unexplored opportunity for some of the things that move fast and break. that pass around them.
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"In 2007, we arrived in Africa," explained May in a promotional video for the company they were about to found: Bridge International Academies. "Due diligence had shown us that there was an incredibly high number of enrolled children who were still illiterate after graduation - and was there a possible business model that could solve this? Was there anything that could be done, even if did people say there was nothing that could be done?
The couple did the math and found that parents of poor children around the globe spend billions a year on schooling. Kimmelman invited his former roommate, Phil Frei, a technology consultant, to join as a co-founder. "We all moved to Nairobi in 2008, and within six months, we had the first school up and running," said May.
Over the next decade, Bridge grew into a chain of schools providing a homogeneous curriculum developed by researchers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to hundreds of thousands of students in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Liberia and India. Today, it is the largest primary education chain for profit in the world.
As the company mushroomed, it found ready investors. "It wasn't social impact investors," May said in a 2016 MIT video case study, "it was direct business capital that saw, like, wow, there's a couple of billion people who don't have anybody who sell them what they want."
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But the social impact investment crew was also behind Bridge. The company is funded today by some of the highest profile donors in the game - or rather, the arms for profit of their networks, including Chan Zuckerberg Education, LLC, linked to Mark Zuckerberg; Pearson Education; Gates Frontier LLC, related to Bill Gates; Imaginable Futures, linked to eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar, a major financier of The Intercept; and the Pershing Square Foundation, linked to hedge fund magnate Bill Ackman. The Development Bank of the United Kingdom, the European Investment Bank, and the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank also financed it.
Bridge International Academies' entrance to the Mukuru premises in Nairobi, Kenya. The for-profit education company operates a network of low-cost schools in several African countries, including Kenya.
To become profitable, May and Kimmelman have to scale quickly while keeping costs down. "Bridge International Academies was founded from the first day on the premise of this massive market opportunity, knowing that to achieve success, we would need to achieve a scale never seen before in education, and at a speed that makes the most people dizzy," a first. version of the company's website boasted. To do well with the small margins, thousands of classrooms would be necessary, because each classroom could bring a profit of only tens of dollars a month. "The urgency is because the only way to have a price of $5 a month is if you have hundreds of thousands of customers. We need 500,000 pupils to reach the budget," said May in 2013.
His idea of how to achieve such a scale was simple: the biggest cost when it comes to education is teachers' salaries. But if curricula can be produced and distributed centrally on tablets that teachers read to the class, word for word, teachers' pay can go away.
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"You can't have a brilliant teacher hypothesis and expect to change education for hundreds of millions of children."
That, May believed, does not hurt the quality of education that children receive. While the school reform movement in the United States at the time was fighting against what it called "the soft bigotry of low expectations" - easier curricula for minority students that reflected racist assumptions about their ability to learn - May argued that in Africa, high expectations are bigoted. ""Don't you need to have brilliant teachers in every room to have a well-educated child? "Because honestly, that's how a rich person would think about it," May explained. "You can't have a brilliant teacher hypothesis and expect to change education for hundreds of millions of children."
It was also appropriate to pay those teachers less, he argued. "You have to be able to hire teachers who will be available in the same community as your child. How are you going to get tens of thousands, eventually hundreds of thousands, of teachers to work with hundreds of millions of poor children? They need to be from the same community. They need to face similar challenges. But also economically, they have to be part of the same economy." Hiring teachers who are "part of the same economy" meant paying only a few dollars a day.
Bridge ran into rapid staffing difficulties. "Operations still have a lot of tweaks that they need, but they're working well enough that it makes sense to now unwind the business a bit more," May said at the time. He admitted it was "much harder to hire" good teachers who could grow as quickly as the business, but Bridge pushed ahead with its breakneck expansion, hiring less qualified teachers at significantly less cost than rival public schools.
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In 2022, Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Kremer conducted a study in Kenya to assess the effectiveness of standardized learning in Bridge schools. The resulting report, which Bridge heavily promotes, found that public school teachers in Kenya were paid between $235 and $392 per month plus generous benefits, while Bridge teachers worked longer hours but earned about $ 80 per month with far fewer benefits than their public school counterparts.
"By not requiring post-secondary credentials, which typically represent a smaller portion of the workforce in lower-middle-income countries, Bridge was able to draw from a larger pool of high school graduates," it read the study
Bridge told The Intercept that all the teachers he hires meet the changing requirements stipulated by the Kenyan government. According to Bridge 2017 administrative data, only 23 percent of its primary school teachers held recognized primary education certificates.
Bridge also hit on the second highest cost of education: facilities. According to Kremer's study, while public schools in Kenya were required to have stone, brick or concrete walls, Bridge designed standardized schools largely of wooden frames and wire mesh, enclosed by iron sheets - humorously nicknamed "chickens for children". "The founders of Bridge recognize that the model deprioritizes the physical infrastructure and have argued that this frees up resources for spending on other inputs that can improve the quality of the school," said the Kremer study. "Bridge schools are not made of 'barbed wire'; they have windows with barbed wire," said a Bridge spokesperson.
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"Our biggest challenge is that we need to make sure that we standardize everything," Kimmelman was quoted as saying in "Bridge International Academies: School in a Box," a 2010 Harvard Business School case study. to be able to operate like McDonald's, we need to make sure that we systematize every process, every tool, everything we do." They later revised it for branding purposes to "the academy in a box," May said, "when we realized that everyone here calls a private school a good academy."
Investors were familiar with the model: The company would understandably lose money in the first years, but as long as the growth was stable, profitability could finally be reached. And, with enough scale, it could eventually loosen regulatory hurdles in the same way that ride-hailing app companies get too big for a city or state to do anything but accept and adapt.
And Bridge has seen explosive growth, opening hundreds of schools in Kenya and other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as India, sometimes without obtaining the bureaucratic approvals and permits needed to do so legally.
"Technically, we're breaking the law," May said in a 2013 article in the education publication Tes — a quote that was reused in a 2017 New York Times profile of Bridge. "There would be more people and more organizations willing to try to push the envelope and achieve higher outcomes for students if the regulatory and legal framework was less restrictive," May continued. "You have to be extreme. You have to take real risks to work in those environments. Often there are [laws] that prevent most companies from trying to figure out how to solve these problems."
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Bridge quickly became the darling of the Davos world. The president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, praised the company publicly in a speech in 2015. Whitney Tilson, a New York Bridge investor and hedge fund manager, called it "the Tesla of companies educational" in 2017.
That year, Times columnist Nicholas Kristof lavished nearly 1,000 words of praise on Bridge schools in the West African nation of Liberia, chastising teachers' unions and other opponents of public education outsourcing.
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