Thanks Honorable George Werner; Liberia’s Minister of Education for the clarity. I think those making noise should wait to join MOE to give this a trail.
Well,excuse some of us who are not on the Bridge bandwagon and are demanding more information from the Minister. If Liberia has $65 million to pay Bridge, why does it need Bridge? Why not spend that money on the same process and deliverables Bridge offers; competent personnel hiring, training, technology and supervision? Simply, the Minister and the Ministry failed to do the things they’re passing off to Bridge.
Simply put: Let’s give the people a break, and give this idea a try. We did so man for years, and it was still called a mess. We’ve got this that has proven records of success, why can’t we try, too? I’m on the fence for this; my attention is focused in, though…. Thanks, Kevin for this great piece.
Pilot??? I am completely shocked by the information provided here by Kevin and pose to support this decent and most effective way to give the poor people children a better education that will resonate with them till eternity then an unsophisticated one that is currently being provided due to the huge financial and other capacity challenges faced by government.
Information is quite important in a society that is gullible and sentimental as ours.
Bridge as you known, you’re indeed living up to the detects of your name…...Filling the gap in #Education and providing a better platform that benefit the rich kids to the poor kids that emerges from the slums.
Kudos Minister Werner, your courage to transform and reform education in Liberia should be as a believe that takes eternity to destroy. Stop making politics with education….
The problem in Liberia is FUNDING. Rwanda has achieved great success. They spend 4.8% of GDP on education. Compared to Liberia which spends 0.6% of GDP on education. 4.8% may not seem like much, but it is 800% more than Liberia. Yet we keep saying the Liberian system is broken. It is broken because it is underfunded.
This is a country where the ONLY CAT scan machine in the country has gone UNREPAIRED for 2 years, because government officials claim they cannot find the $200,000 needed for maintenance/repairs. The mammography equipment has not worked for two years.
This is a country that pays government officials $650/day in per diem to travel, and legislators make nearly $180,000/year in salary and benefits. But we cannot fund education. These are UNSERIOUS PEOPLE!
I don’t understand when we (Liberians) keep fighting the change we say we need, how is Bridge a problem to a already troubled education system? for me, it is not about trying, it is about innovation and tagging a system that works and provides the recipe for the problem we face, the old order keeps failing, it is time to do more than rather just complain (as usual) about something we barely know about..
go get it Bridge, if you need support, don’t hesitate to ask..
Argument 1: Teachers are Robots - How robotic can one individual be when they have a conscience? It is human nature to interact wherever and whenever they are sharing anything. So for somebody to say that teachers using educational/teaching guides to give lessons are being robotic is a farfetched argument. Argument 2: Tuition fees not cheap - Here is something debatable. First, is there any business that would exist without an economy? I guess not, and does any company ever have control of the prices of things in a particular economy? I believe the answer is no. That being said, when pupils are being provided with sufficient learning and exam materials, being sponsored in times of hardship, being provided with a modest place to study and the teachers are also getting paid for their trouble using the same fees, I would like anybody to highlight a more affordable system than Bridge’s. The model clearly states that Bridge does not make – until a certain threshold is met – and for that reason, it is fair to say that the future looks very encouraging from a neutral standpoint.
Argument 3: Bridge’s claim of being better than government schools – Most things done by the company so far have been put under serious scrutiny and the situation might not change anytime soon. For that reason, wouldn’t be wise for the arguing parties such as the joint civil society, to commission their own studies already!
Argument 4: Bridge undermining Public Education – It has been widely known that competition breeds success and only when a particular system gets challenged, does it really focus on improvement. With that in mind, how is what Bridge does undermining the public system? I feel like this is not an argument at all, because all parties are interested in the same thing, education for all. Instead of waiting for change, be the change by helping bridge a gap.
Argument 5: Liberia’s move – This is up in the air with all other governments’ actions and bids to fix problems in their states. Isn’t subcontracting of education similar to issuance of tenders for national and multinational companies to bid for projects within a particular state e.g. road/railway construction. If a multinational company gets awarded the tender, who eventually wins? Isn’t it both parties, since the country gets the needed product/service at the right quality and the contractor gets paid. How can education be any different?
This is not going to work correctly because the government of Libeira lacks the capacity to regulate the system.Thus,it makes so easy for things to get corrupted. Why didn’t the partnership start with some of the private school systems in Liberia that are doing better. By doing this, we keep the money in our economy. I don’t think the system is so messy to the extend that Liberians themselves can nor handle it. There are private schools in Liberia that are doing well. Why not partner with those and grant them the technical support? You don’t address the problem when you bring in foreign company. What is the research that can prove that Liberia is similar to other countries where Bridge may have succeeded if we are bringing them in on the basis of success in those countries? How independent are the findings about Bridge’s success? Corporate giants are experts in public relations and it is hard to trust them. We had many agreements signed and most end up nor being implemented correctly due to corruption aND lack of capacity. Does MOE has the capacity to monitor this deal?
As an investor in Bridge Academies, I expect Kevin Starr to support the company’s take over of Liberian elementary schools. After all, this deal would result in rapid returns on his investments. Too bad, he resorts to playing loose with the facts while smearing critics. He begins by mislabeling Bridge as an “African” company. He would be hard pressed to name a single African investor in the exclusive white male Silicon Valley backers of this venture. If Africans and others are crying foul, it’s because we seen these “well-intentioned” schemes play out to our detriment time and time again. And when it all comes crashing down, Kevin and all the other we-know-better-than-Africans-what’s-best-for-them set will be nowhere around to pick up the pieces. If the school-in-box route-teaching method employed by Bridge Academies is so great, why not sell it in the U. S. first? Truth is, the company is a bottom feeder, preying on the weakest of the weak. It avoids countries where educational and teaching standards are enforced. Far from encouraging competition (as Kevin suggested), the company secured its take-over of Liberian school through a no-bid process from a government noted for high levels of corruption, even by African standards. The author claims this deal isn’t going to make anyone a ton of money, as if Bridge Academies is a non-profit. Far from it, the company’s own pitch to investors highlights the obscene profits to be made in this “market,” meaning its automaton schools for producing uncritical worker bees. Kevin is dismissive of “tribal” rights and adopts a breezing tone that’s completely inappropriate given the gravity of what’s at stake. Bridge Academies and its know-it-all fat cats are not only endangering the future of Liberia. They are also putting at risk the principle of universal public education, which has benefited their societies for hundreds of years. All on a whim and with the cockiness of a high-roller at a craps table. I wonder if he would be so cavalier about radical policy changes that affected the education of his kids?
“you can tell me what the UN actually does.” 207 people died in service to the UN in the last 4 years and UNMIL paid dearly (still does) to bring the peace and security to Liberia that makes your investment possible in the first place. Show some respect to the ecosystem that makes your bravado possible. Also, look at the legacy BIA left in East Africa (http://globalinitiative-escr.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/May-2015-Join-statement-reaction-to-WB-statement-on-Bridge-14.05.2015.pdf). And stop acting like BIA won’t turn a profit in Liberia. You don’t think modern citizens know the worth of data? How much do you pay to use Twitter? Nothing? oh. SSIR, you promote content that literally scoffs at the idea of all nations coming together and empowering someone to pay attention to the right to education? Weak. Sauce.
I’m still confused by the statement ‘Bridge is an African education company’. What is African education? I would like to see bridge apply that education model in the USA and become an ‘American education company’. And here is why.
My direct classroom interactions with students minted by the pre-college public education system here and with some of the teachers who teach them equips me with plenty of knowledge of how broken that system is. That segment of the education system in the USA is virtually as decrepit and failed as Liberia’s when compared taking into consideration the standard of living in both countries. Many US students leave high school with no ability to perform simple arithmetic operations, and some still go to slimy mold-infested classrooms to be taught by teachers who are vexed with the lack of public support for their schools.
The ‘high impact’ investments by those who are professedly ‘helping the public system deliver’ in poor communities in Africa should be applied in the USA where the need for them equally exists. Deliver those non-privatization ‘public-private partnership’ models and their ‘innovative’ solutions to, for example, Chicago and Michigan and help those states resuscitate the education quality, or lack of it, in their poor neighborhoods.
That’s my brilliant suggestion for solving America’s failed pre-college education problems. And I’m not even the Director of a ‘high impact’ investment foundation yet.
“Bridge is an African education company…”? The married founders - CEO and Strategy Officer of Bridge - are 39 year old software and sociology grads from Harvard and Stanford, He sold his assessment management software to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and she did a PhD on China.
Thank you C. Patrick Burrowes and Eric Hancock for your comments which clearly settle the matter. Actually, Bridge failed in the US (California). This is why the funders need to recover some of the $500,000 start up funding they put up working with a publishing company (they know which). No government with proper democracy would outsource education to a private firm. You do not expedient on education because the learners are people on whose errors you cannot undo at some future time.
The display of ignorance by the supporters about how education works is sad. If anyone cared to find out, Kenya has always had a private education system until 2003 when free education was introduced to fulfil an election promise. The government there had always only provided teachers for the public system leaving governance and management to lay boards just like in the US. This is not working in the whole country because it is a new way of providing education. It is an obligation and not a desire for good education to take place in Kibera or Gorogosho. This should not be confused with the need to do good. Here in Africa, education is a resource that should be distributed ethically and correctly because it still empowers learners to escape poverty. The Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings identified the access to education as one of the grievances that led to the conflict and many refugees were refusing to return to Liberia until there was schooling for their children. The new government in 2006 pledged to provide free primary education. It is incredible to see that the very president who pledged to do that is reneging on that promise. Who controls private schools? What business person does anything for free? It is insulting to think that just because some officials are corrupt, everyone has lost the capacity to think as well.
For those of us who toiled on the ground in Liberia (for five years)trying to help Liberia’s education system recover using funds from the international community - yes a big chunk of it through the UN are horrified to read that there are people actually defending the outsourcing of a public education system to a private for profit firm. Liberia’s inequalities perpetuated through the testing of children in order to enrol for grade one will intensify and make the rural areas unable to afford schooling. In a country where even the law justified different laws for the urban (read Monrovia)and the hinterland this is a return to the past more inequitable society.
Good functioning school systems are resilient, evidence the system in Zimbabwe where everything else collapsed leaving schools producing the top most students even when competing at other levels with South Africa.
“Um, that’s called impact investing, and it’s generally considered a very good thing.” Great article, Kevin! Let’s hope that this movement of blended social/financial impact really does prove arguments like this wrong and that social enterprises like this really can make at least a modest profit that make them truly “investments”. On another note, I might steal this quote, of course. “It’s easy—and often lazy—to be ideological, to slip into the warm tribal bath of “rights” and villains and idealized notions of what’s supposed to be.”
Greetings:
I have been saying and asking a simple question throughout my many comments about this venture. Why did the Government of Liberia not contact educational experts like the present president of the Tubman University in Liberia, one of the former Ministry of Education experts Ms. Christine Tolbert-Norman, who has also written books for the Liberian school system, the present president of the University of Liberia, Dr. James Tarpeh, and those TRUE and TESTED and WELL documented Liberian education experts to weigh in on this kind of a venture for Liberia. I continue to ask these questions but unfortunately no one else has picked the call up. I guess it is because as an investigator I am trained to look to the experts in the various fields before I form an opinion. I would like to see our known Liberian experts give their thoughts on this before I make my opinion known. Not that my opinion would matter, but at least by me calling upon others to ask some of those that I have mentioned herein to kindly weigh in on this issue, we Liberians might help us come to a much better conclusion as to whether or not the GOL made a wise decision. Dr. Burrows has weighed in on this and perhaps he could consider asking those mentioned in my comments here to kindly give us their professional opinion. Kind Regards
Never read such ideological drivel dressed up as “just give it a go!”. Untrained staff delivering prescribed courses. Yes it is cheap, yes it is better than nothing but it is not an education program but a cheap substitute. This is charity at its worst and paternalistic.
So who will provide the chairs, the building, the transportation, the funds, the pencils that are now non existent in the schools? The Minister of education, a former clinical therapist for the mentally challenged, has no idea how to run an educational system. Other African countries are educating their children with no help from these outsources. Liberia has abdicated its responsibility. Sitting in a well lit, warm comfy home with a full stomach and sending curricula that is so far divorced from the reality on the ground is a disaster waiting to happen. I see the colonial mentality is again live and well . The poor students are left to this when the government officials have their kids in elite schools abroad. Shame on Liberia
While I realize it is now commonplace here in the US to belittle those who you disagree with to give them disparaging nicknames, the “Mr. Rapporteur” name used throughout the piece is his job title. His name is Dr. Kishore Singh, and he is with the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights with the UN. He has a long career in international law, human rights, and education, the synopsis of which would take far longer than a surfing session with you. If you want to learn about what the UN-HCR does, you can read up on it here: http://www.ohchr.org/
When you respond to Dr. Singh’s remarks, you write “Whoa, Mr. Rapporteur. Take a breath. It’s a 50-school pilot. That’s two percent of the country’s schools.” This is misleading, and in fact contradicts your more recent post on this topic. In fact, the agreement *starts* with the 50 schools for the 2016-2017 school year. For the future, “The PPP, which will see the government contract out all primary schools within five years, will reportedly cost the government £65m in total.” That is why - in your less-than-fully paraphrased version of what Dr. Singh wrote - he said “Liberia is **on the brink** of committing a “gross violation” of its international obligation under the right to education with plans to outsource the running of publicly funded schools, a United Nations chief warned last week.” Where I added emphasis to the phrase “on the brink”. The researchers involved in the evaluation have posted an open letter from April 14 encouraging stakeholders to “be patient with the expansion plans” and they encourage the Minister to “stick to your public commitment that any significant scale up of PSL will await the results of the randomized evaluation.”
So to use your own advice from the above article, let me conclude by saying “Whoa Mr. Starr - take a breath, and wait for the results from the randomized evaluation”.
COMMENTS
BY Jarius Andrew Greaves
ON April 8, 2016 03:51 PM
Thanks Honorable George Werner; Liberia’s Minister of Education for the clarity. I think those making noise should wait to join MOE to give this a trail.
BY Luther Jeke
ON April 8, 2016 04:10 PM
Straight forward and decently written Kevin. Let’s give this collaboration a little break! It’s just a pilot.
BY Pah K Suku Jr
ON April 8, 2016 04:32 PM
Well,excuse some of us who are not on the Bridge bandwagon and are demanding more information from the Minister. If Liberia has $65 million to pay Bridge, why does it need Bridge? Why not spend that money on the same process and deliverables Bridge offers; competent personnel hiring, training, technology and supervision? Simply, the Minister and the Ministry failed to do the things they’re passing off to Bridge.
BY Wainright Y. Acquoi
ON April 8, 2016 09:45 PM
Simply put: Let’s give the people a break, and give this idea a try. We did so man for years, and it was still called a mess. We’ve got this that has proven records of success, why can’t we try, too? I’m on the fence for this; my attention is focused in, though…. Thanks, Kevin for this great piece.
BY Sam K. Sneh
ON April 9, 2016 12:37 AM
Pilot??? I am completely shocked by the information provided here by Kevin and pose to support this decent and most effective way to give the poor people children a better education that will resonate with them till eternity then an unsophisticated one that is currently being provided due to the huge financial and other capacity challenges faced by government.
Information is quite important in a society that is gullible and sentimental as ours.
Bridge as you known, you’re indeed living up to the detects of your name…...Filling the gap in #Education and providing a better platform that benefit the rich kids to the poor kids that emerges from the slums.
Kudos Minister Werner, your courage to transform and reform education in Liberia should be as a believe that takes eternity to destroy. Stop making politics with education….
BY George K Fahnbulleh
ON April 9, 2016 02:05 AM
The problem in Liberia is FUNDING. Rwanda has achieved great success. They spend 4.8% of GDP on education. Compared to Liberia which spends 0.6% of GDP on education. 4.8% may not seem like much, but it is 800% more than Liberia. Yet we keep saying the Liberian system is broken. It is broken because it is underfunded.
This is a country where the ONLY CAT scan machine in the country has gone UNREPAIRED for 2 years, because government officials claim they cannot find the $200,000 needed for maintenance/repairs. The mammography equipment has not worked for two years.
This is a country that pays government officials $650/day in per diem to travel, and legislators make nearly $180,000/year in salary and benefits. But we cannot fund education. These are UNSERIOUS PEOPLE!
BY Paul NEWON
ON April 9, 2016 02:49 AM
I don’t understand when we (Liberians) keep fighting the change we say we need, how is Bridge a problem to a already troubled education system? for me, it is not about trying, it is about innovation and tagging a system that works and provides the recipe for the problem we face, the old order keeps failing, it is time to do more than rather just complain (as usual) about something we barely know about..
go get it Bridge, if you need support, don’t hesitate to ask..
good luck..
BY Vick
ON April 9, 2016 04:05 AM
Argument 1: Teachers are Robots - How robotic can one individual be when they have a conscience? It is human nature to interact wherever and whenever they are sharing anything. So for somebody to say that teachers using educational/teaching guides to give lessons are being robotic is a farfetched argument. Argument 2: Tuition fees not cheap - Here is something debatable. First, is there any business that would exist without an economy? I guess not, and does any company ever have control of the prices of things in a particular economy? I believe the answer is no. That being said, when pupils are being provided with sufficient learning and exam materials, being sponsored in times of hardship, being provided with a modest place to study and the teachers are also getting paid for their trouble using the same fees, I would like anybody to highlight a more affordable system than Bridge’s. The model clearly states that Bridge does not make – until a certain threshold is met – and for that reason, it is fair to say that the future looks very encouraging from a neutral standpoint.
Argument 3: Bridge’s claim of being better than government schools – Most things done by the company so far have been put under serious scrutiny and the situation might not change anytime soon. For that reason, wouldn’t be wise for the arguing parties such as the joint civil society, to commission their own studies already!
Argument 4: Bridge undermining Public Education – It has been widely known that competition breeds success and only when a particular system gets challenged, does it really focus on improvement. With that in mind, how is what Bridge does undermining the public system? I feel like this is not an argument at all, because all parties are interested in the same thing, education for all. Instead of waiting for change, be the change by helping bridge a gap.
Argument 5: Liberia’s move – This is up in the air with all other governments’ actions and bids to fix problems in their states. Isn’t subcontracting of education similar to issuance of tenders for national and multinational companies to bid for projects within a particular state e.g. road/railway construction. If a multinational company gets awarded the tender, who eventually wins? Isn’t it both parties, since the country gets the needed product/service at the right quality and the contractor gets paid. How can education be any different?
BY Joel Bimba
ON April 9, 2016 04:55 AM
This is not going to work correctly because the government of Libeira lacks the capacity to regulate the system.Thus,it makes so easy for things to get corrupted. Why didn’t the partnership start with some of the private school systems in Liberia that are doing better. By doing this, we keep the money in our economy. I don’t think the system is so messy to the extend that Liberians themselves can nor handle it. There are private schools in Liberia that are doing well. Why not partner with those and grant them the technical support? You don’t address the problem when you bring in foreign company. What is the research that can prove that Liberia is similar to other countries where Bridge may have succeeded if we are bringing them in on the basis of success in those countries? How independent are the findings about Bridge’s success? Corporate giants are experts in public relations and it is hard to trust them. We had many agreements signed and most end up nor being implemented correctly due to corruption aND lack of capacity. Does MOE has the capacity to monitor this deal?
BY David M.Seward
ON April 9, 2016 06:18 AM
Big joke in Monrovia about ourselves MOE again
BY C. Patrick Burrowes
ON April 9, 2016 11:11 PM
As an investor in Bridge Academies, I expect Kevin Starr to support the company’s take over of Liberian elementary schools. After all, this deal would result in rapid returns on his investments. Too bad, he resorts to playing loose with the facts while smearing critics. He begins by mislabeling Bridge as an “African” company. He would be hard pressed to name a single African investor in the exclusive white male Silicon Valley backers of this venture. If Africans and others are crying foul, it’s because we seen these “well-intentioned” schemes play out to our detriment time and time again. And when it all comes crashing down, Kevin and all the other we-know-better-than-Africans-what’s-best-for-them set will be nowhere around to pick up the pieces. If the school-in-box route-teaching method employed by Bridge Academies is so great, why not sell it in the U. S. first? Truth is, the company is a bottom feeder, preying on the weakest of the weak. It avoids countries where educational and teaching standards are enforced. Far from encouraging competition (as Kevin suggested), the company secured its take-over of Liberian school through a no-bid process from a government noted for high levels of corruption, even by African standards. The author claims this deal isn’t going to make anyone a ton of money, as if Bridge Academies is a non-profit. Far from it, the company’s own pitch to investors highlights the obscene profits to be made in this “market,” meaning its automaton schools for producing uncritical worker bees. Kevin is dismissive of “tribal” rights and adopts a breezing tone that’s completely inappropriate given the gravity of what’s at stake. Bridge Academies and its know-it-all fat cats are not only endangering the future of Liberia. They are also putting at risk the principle of universal public education, which has benefited their societies for hundreds of years. All on a whim and with the cockiness of a high-roller at a craps table. I wonder if he would be so cavalier about radical policy changes that affected the education of his kids?
BY Rapporteur
ON April 10, 2016 07:50 AM
“you can tell me what the UN actually does.” 207 people died in service to the UN in the last 4 years and UNMIL paid dearly (still does) to bring the peace and security to Liberia that makes your investment possible in the first place. Show some respect to the ecosystem that makes your bravado possible. Also, look at the legacy BIA left in East Africa (http://globalinitiative-escr.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/May-2015-Join-statement-reaction-to-WB-statement-on-Bridge-14.05.2015.pdf). And stop acting like BIA won’t turn a profit in Liberia. You don’t think modern citizens know the worth of data? How much do you pay to use Twitter? Nothing? oh. SSIR, you promote content that literally scoffs at the idea of all nations coming together and empowering someone to pay attention to the right to education? Weak. Sauce.
BY Sannah Ziama
ON April 10, 2016 11:51 AM
I’m still confused by the statement ‘Bridge is an African education company’. What is African education? I would like to see bridge apply that education model in the USA and become an ‘American education company’. And here is why.
My direct classroom interactions with students minted by the pre-college public education system here and with some of the teachers who teach them equips me with plenty of knowledge of how broken that system is. That segment of the education system in the USA is virtually as decrepit and failed as Liberia’s when compared taking into consideration the standard of living in both countries. Many US students leave high school with no ability to perform simple arithmetic operations, and some still go to slimy mold-infested classrooms to be taught by teachers who are vexed with the lack of public support for their schools.
The ‘high impact’ investments by those who are professedly ‘helping the public system deliver’ in poor communities in Africa should be applied in the USA where the need for them equally exists. Deliver those non-privatization ‘public-private partnership’ models and their ‘innovative’ solutions to, for example, Chicago and Michigan and help those states resuscitate the education quality, or lack of it, in their poor neighborhoods.
That’s my brilliant suggestion for solving America’s failed pre-college education problems. And I’m not even the Director of a ‘high impact’ investment foundation yet.
BY Eric Hancock
ON April 11, 2016 08:09 AM
“Bridge is an African education company…”? The married founders - CEO and Strategy Officer of Bridge - are 39 year old software and sociology grads from Harvard and Stanford, He sold his assessment management software to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and she did a PhD on China.
Africans? Educators?
BY Eric Hancock
ON April 11, 2016 08:11 AM
Oh, sorry, and she was born in Mesa, AZ. He refuses to note his in any bio. But he worked in San Francisco to found his software co.
BY ESM Kaabwe
ON April 12, 2016 08:43 AM
Thank you C. Patrick Burrowes and Eric Hancock for your comments which clearly settle the matter. Actually, Bridge failed in the US (California). This is why the funders need to recover some of the $500,000 start up funding they put up working with a publishing company (they know which). No government with proper democracy would outsource education to a private firm. You do not expedient on education because the learners are people on whose errors you cannot undo at some future time.
The display of ignorance by the supporters about how education works is sad. If anyone cared to find out, Kenya has always had a private education system until 2003 when free education was introduced to fulfil an election promise. The government there had always only provided teachers for the public system leaving governance and management to lay boards just like in the US. This is not working in the whole country because it is a new way of providing education. It is an obligation and not a desire for good education to take place in Kibera or Gorogosho. This should not be confused with the need to do good. Here in Africa, education is a resource that should be distributed ethically and correctly because it still empowers learners to escape poverty. The Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings identified the access to education as one of the grievances that led to the conflict and many refugees were refusing to return to Liberia until there was schooling for their children. The new government in 2006 pledged to provide free primary education. It is incredible to see that the very president who pledged to do that is reneging on that promise. Who controls private schools? What business person does anything for free? It is insulting to think that just because some officials are corrupt, everyone has lost the capacity to think as well.
For those of us who toiled on the ground in Liberia (for five years)trying to help Liberia’s education system recover using funds from the international community - yes a big chunk of it through the UN are horrified to read that there are people actually defending the outsourcing of a public education system to a private for profit firm. Liberia’s inequalities perpetuated through the testing of children in order to enrol for grade one will intensify and make the rural areas unable to afford schooling. In a country where even the law justified different laws for the urban (read Monrovia)and the hinterland this is a return to the past more inequitable society.
Good functioning school systems are resilient, evidence the system in Zimbabwe where everything else collapsed leaving schools producing the top most students even when competing at other levels with South Africa.
BY Emily Nielsen Jones
ON April 12, 2016 10:08 AM
“Um, that’s called impact investing, and it’s generally considered a very good thing.” Great article, Kevin! Let’s hope that this movement of blended social/financial impact really does prove arguments like this wrong and that social enterprises like this really can make at least a modest profit that make them truly “investments”. On another note, I might steal this quote, of course. “It’s easy—and often lazy—to be ideological, to slip into the warm tribal bath of “rights” and villains and idealized notions of what’s supposed to be.”
BY Freda
ON April 13, 2016 06:15 PM
” a careful experiment in a small country” this is all it’s about for Kevin Starr and Bridge. Go ahead carry on your experiment.
BY Mary
ON April 15, 2016 10:18 AM
No reason to think a for profit company has any other motive than to maximize profit. https://dianeravitch.net/2016/04/15/c-patrick-burrowes-liberia-does-not-need-for-profit-schools/
BY Charles E. King
ON April 25, 2016 11:04 PM
Greetings:
I have been saying and asking a simple question throughout my many comments about this venture. Why did the Government of Liberia not contact educational experts like the present president of the Tubman University in Liberia, one of the former Ministry of Education experts Ms. Christine Tolbert-Norman, who has also written books for the Liberian school system, the present president of the University of Liberia, Dr. James Tarpeh, and those TRUE and TESTED and WELL documented Liberian education experts to weigh in on this kind of a venture for Liberia. I continue to ask these questions but unfortunately no one else has picked the call up. I guess it is because as an investigator I am trained to look to the experts in the various fields before I form an opinion. I would like to see our known Liberian experts give their thoughts on this before I make my opinion known. Not that my opinion would matter, but at least by me calling upon others to ask some of those that I have mentioned herein to kindly weigh in on this issue, we Liberians might help us come to a much better conclusion as to whether or not the GOL made a wise decision. Dr. Burrows has weighed in on this and perhaps he could consider asking those mentioned in my comments here to kindly give us their professional opinion. Kind Regards
BY David Owens
ON May 23, 2016 02:45 AM
Never read such ideological drivel dressed up as “just give it a go!”. Untrained staff delivering prescribed courses. Yes it is cheap, yes it is better than nothing but it is not an education program but a cheap substitute. This is charity at its worst and paternalistic.
BY J. Sayegh
ON June 16, 2016 06:20 AM
So who will provide the chairs, the building, the transportation, the funds, the pencils that are now non existent in the schools? The Minister of education, a former clinical therapist for the mentally challenged, has no idea how to run an educational system. Other African countries are educating their children with no help from these outsources. Liberia has abdicated its responsibility. Sitting in a well lit, warm comfy home with a full stomach and sending curricula that is so far divorced from the reality on the ground is a disaster waiting to happen. I see the colonial mentality is again live and well . The poor students are left to this when the government officials have their kids in elite schools abroad. Shame on Liberia
BY Mike
ON July 29, 2017 03:35 PM
While I realize it is now commonplace here in the US to belittle those who you disagree with to give them disparaging nicknames, the “Mr. Rapporteur” name used throughout the piece is his job title. His name is Dr. Kishore Singh, and he is with the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights with the UN. He has a long career in international law, human rights, and education, the synopsis of which would take far longer than a surfing session with you. If you want to learn about what the UN-HCR does, you can read up on it here: http://www.ohchr.org/
When you respond to Dr. Singh’s remarks, you write “Whoa, Mr. Rapporteur. Take a breath. It’s a 50-school pilot. That’s two percent of the country’s schools.” This is misleading, and in fact contradicts your more recent post on this topic. In fact, the agreement *starts* with the 50 schools for the 2016-2017 school year. For the future, “The PPP, which will see the government contract out all primary schools within five years, will reportedly cost the government £65m in total.” That is why - in your less-than-fully paraphrased version of what Dr. Singh wrote - he said “Liberia is **on the brink** of committing a “gross violation” of its international obligation under the right to education with plans to outsource the running of publicly funded schools, a United Nations chief warned last week.” Where I added emphasis to the phrase “on the brink”. The researchers involved in the evaluation have posted an open letter from April 14 encouraging stakeholders to “be patient with the expansion plans” and they encourage the Minister to “stick to your public commitment that any significant scale up of PSL will await the results of the randomized evaluation.”
So to use your own advice from the above article, let me conclude by saying “Whoa Mr. Starr - take a breath, and wait for the results from the randomized evaluation”.