Bridge International Academies

Bridge International Academies ('Bridge') is a for-profit private network of schools [4] [5] and (self-defined as) a "social enterprise" [6][7][8][9] which began in Kenya in 2007.[10] Bridge aims to ensure more children have increased access to a quality education. To achieve this they support government schools and also run community schools.[11][12]

Bridge International Academies
TypeFor-profit education [1] [2]
GenreLow cost private schools
Founded2008[3]
FounderDr Shannon May, Jay Kimmelman, Phil Frei
HeadquartersNairobi,
Kenya
Area served
India, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, Uganda
Websitehttp://www.bridgeinternationalacademies.com/

Bridge believes in ongoing teacher training and support, advanced lesson plans and the use of wireless technology to deliver education. They have been a participant in the United Nations Global Compact[13] since September 2017.

Bridge runs or supports nearly 2,000 (mainly public/government) schools and has educated a million children in the last decade. It's aiming to educate 10,000,000 pupils by 2025. It currently operates schools in India,[14] Kenya,[15] Liberia,[16] Nigeria[17] and Uganda.[18] It is headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya with additional offices in Kampala, Lagos, Monrovia, Vijayawada, London, Boston, and Washington, DC.

Through the use of technology it streamlines school administration, delivers lessons plan to teachers, facilitates classroom management and tracks the progress of both teachers and students in real time.[19] It has notable investor support from Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.[20]

History

Bridge International Academies was founded by friends Shannon May, Jay Kimmelman and Phil Frei, who met at a 5 year reunion Harvard University to solve for some of the most intractable problems in education and development, including: underprepared teachers, rampant teacher absenteeism, ill-equipped classrooms, and fraudulent administrative practices. [21]

In 2007, Bridge’s headquarters opened in Nairobi, Kenya in 2008. The first academy launched in 2009 in Mukuru kwa Njenga, an east-Nairobi slum that is home to over 100,000 people. From 2009 to 2015, Bridge expanded across Kenya, bringing its innovative approach to education to thousands more children every year.

In 2015, Bridge continued growth in Kenya and expanded internationally, into Uganda and Nigeria.

Bridge opened a London, UK office and was awarded one of six World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) Awards for innovation in education.[22]

In 2016, Bridge opened six schools in Andhra Pradesh, India in a partnership with the Government of Andhra Pradesh to use disused school buildings to create Bridge schools.[23]

Bridge was also chosen as one of the first partners by the Liberian Ministry for Education’s Partnership School for Liberia[24] (PSL) program. The programme is a public-private partnership.[24] The programme was re-named the Liberian Education Advancement Programme (LEAP) and is now in its fourth year and has now expanded across the country. The programme was evaluated using a randomized controlled trial. [25] [26]

Bridge won the Global Shared Value award for an “outstanding record in re-conceiving education for a new market” in Kenya over 2016.[27]

Costs for bridge schools net losses and revenues are estimated and are not released by the firm, with losses in 2016 estimated $12m a year and with a total revenue of $16m / year.

In 2017, the number of Bridge academies in Lagos, Nigeria increased. Bridge Liberia expanded to south-east Liberia. The internal M&E report revealed learning gains for Liberian pupils,[28][29] after four months. The RCT evaluation of the first year of PSL showed learning gains in Bridge-PSL schools, but while most providers in the public-private partnership kept students in oversubscribed schools and retained existing teachers, Bridge did not. Bridge removed pupils after taking control of schools with large class sizes, and removed 74% of incumbent teachers from their schools.[30] The third year of KCPE results were published with Bridge pupils outperforming their peers by 10 percentage points.

Governor of Edo State, Godwin Obaseki addresses a crowd of 7,000 graduating government qualified teachers at the Samuel Ogbemudia Stadium, Benin City for launch of the Edo Basic Education Sector Transformation (EdoBEST) initiative on October 10, 2018.

In 2018, Bridge pupils took part in Ugandan primary school exams for the first time and 100% of Bridge pupils passed. Bridge was selected as a technical delivery partner for the Nigerian education initiative EdoBEST that aims to transform education in Edo State.[31] Partnership Schools for Liberia was renamed Liberian Education Advancement Program (LEAP).

In 2020, for the third year, pupils who sat the Ugandan Primary Leaving Examination (PLE) outperformed the nationwide average.[32]

Approach

Bridge's approach uses a central team in each country to prepare content and monitor student progress. Bridge equips its teachers with a tablet onto which they download daily lesson plans and teacher guides up to two weeks in advance.[19]

The teachers guides set out the content and structure for each lesson.

A typical lesson consists of three parts:[33]

  1. A teacher demonstrates a concept or solves an equation;
  2. Next, the teacher guides students through the solving of a similar problem; for the majority of the lessons, students then work independently, applying and practicing what they’ve learned; and,
  3. The teacher then circulates around the classroom checking for understanding, assigning new questions for excelling children, and giving individual attention to struggling children.

Co-curricular activities

In addition to classroom lessons, the Bridge curriculum also includes extra-curricular activities such as sports, art, martial arts, music, and debate.[34]

Structure

Bridge is managed through a centralised system in each country, lowering the administrative costs for operating individual schools. Each Bridge school has only one administrative staff member, known as an Academy Manager, headteacher or Principal, who manages the school through a smartphone loaded with a custom-developed application that connects managers to a central cloud-based server.[35]

Using the custom application, Bridge can track student admissions and billing – in community schools – in real-time and serves as a financial management tool for the overall academy, including fee payments, expense management, and payroll.[36]

The rate of teacher absenteeism for Bridge schools is documented at less than 1%, whereas in Kenyan public schools according to World Bank research, absenteeism in the classroom is 47.3%.[37]

Monitoring and evaluation

Bridge uses technology and roving quality assurance teams to track learning outcomes.

The teacher guides monitor attendance, timing of lesson delivery, and pupil comprehension, which is uploaded daily onto the central server.[37]

The central academic team can then review outcomes to iterate lessons in real time, or identify needs for further teacher training.

The academic team additionally identifies new methods or resources they believe can aid learning and gathers data on results.[38]

Bridge uses this data on learning to not only improve its model, but also to contribute to wider pedagogy.

Learning gains

Observational evidence suggests that the longer pupils had been in a Bridge academy, the better they perform in their Kenyan KCPE exams:[39]

  • 5+ years at Bridge: Average Score of 293 and Pass Rate of 74.4%
  • 4+ years at Bridge: Average Score of 286 and Pass Rate of 74%
  • 3+ years at Bridge: Average Score of 274 and Pass Rate of 66.4%
  • 2+ years at Bridge: Average Score of 261 and Pass Rate of 58.3%

In July 2017, an internal M&E report, revealed learning gains achieved at Bridge Partnership Schools for Liberia (PSL) in just four months.[40]

The report reveals that in four months, students in Bridge PSL public schools could:

  • Read 7 more words a minute and answer 6% more questions correctly about the story they just read;
  • In maths, they solved 2.6 more addition problems & 2.2 more subtraction problems in a minute;
  • 17% of Bridge PSL public school second graders met reading fluency benchmark for the first time, compared to only 4% of second graders at traditional public schools;
  • 15% of Bridge PSL public schools students met reading comprehension benchmarks for the first time, compared to 4% of students at traditional public schools;
  • In reading, Bridge PSL public school students outperformed traditional public school students in reading by 0.77 standard deviations; and,
  • In maths Bridge PSL public school students outperformed traditional public school students by 0.18 standard deviations: that’s 50% more learning in 4 months.

Bridge PSL public school students made more progress toward achieving national literacy benchmarks.

Other outcomes

In Liberia, the experimental evaluation of the PSL program reveals that Bridge has a positive effect on students' learning. However, Bridge has a negative effect on pupil-level enrollment. In the first year this was due to mass un-enrollment of students in schools where enrollment was high and class sizes were large before Bridge arrived. After three years, students originally enrolled in partnership schools managed by Bridge were less likely to be enrolled in any school at all.[41]

Awards and acclaim

Bridge, as well as its founders, have received notable recognition through the winning of business awards and inclusion in internationally recognised reports and case studies.[42] Speaking to Quartz magazine in September 2019, explaining his 'ultimate recipe' for achieving global literacy, Bill Gates is quoted as saying: "the model of Bridge is promising, it’s far too small."[43]

Dr Shannon May was listed by the World Economic Forum at one of their 15 Women Changing the World.[54] In 2018, she was awarded a CEO Today, Business Women of the Year Award.[55]

In 2015, Jay Kimmelman was listed on the Goldman Sachs 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs.[56] In 2018, he was awarded an ACQ5 Gamechanger of the Year Award (Education; Africa).[53]

Criticism

Bridge has received criticism from different sources, including teaching unions and education rights groups. Education groups have pushed back on Bridge as using a model that stifles creativity, innovation, and goes against educational research in developed countries.[57][58] Critics have been accused of putting 'ideology before education'.[59]

After the president of the World Bank Jim Yong Kim praised Bridge Schools in 2015, there was a large push-back from organisations in Kenya and Uganda, disagreeing with his statement. They expressed deep concern over the global financial institution’s investment in a chain of private primary schools targeting poor families in Kenya and Uganda and called on the institution to support free universal education instead. [60]

Others have argued that their model, focused on guided instruction, actually enhances creativity similar to the way musicians use sheet music or actors have scripts.[61]

The company has come under criticism from aid agencies and civil rights groups, including ActionAid and Education for All, for being detrimental to the plan of offering a “universal, free and compulsory basic education” to all children.[62] Education International (EI), a global group of teachers’ unions, has criticised Bridge for its for-profit model being “morally wrong.” [63]

Global Justice Now has criticised Bridge by suggesting that “the cost per student at just $6 dollars a month” is misleading. It states that 'the suggestion that $6 is an acceptable amount of money for poor households to pay reveals a profound lack of understanding of the reality of the lives of the poorest”. Global Justice Now calculated that for half their populations, the $6 per month per child it would cost to send [64] three primary school age children to a Bridge Academy, is equal to at least a quarter of their monthly income. Many families already struggle to provide three meals a day to their children. It has also claimed that the real total cost of sending one child to a Bridge school is between $9 and $13 a month, and up to $20 when including school meals. [65]

Funding and investors

Bridge has received funding from a number of investors,[66] including:

References
  1. https://www.right-to-education.org/resource/bridge-vs-reality-study-bridge-international-academies-profit-schooling-kenya
  2. https://www.right-to-education.org/sites/right-to-education.org/files/resource-attachments/GI_KNUT_Bridge_V_Reality_Dec_2016_EN.pdf
  3. "History". 21 January 2013.
  4. https://www.right-to-education.org/resource/bridge-vs-reality-study-bridge-international-academies-profit-schooling-kenya
  5. https://www.right-to-education.org/sites/right-to-education.org/files/resource-attachments/GI_KNUT_Bridge_V_Reality_Dec_2016_EN.pdf
  6. "Bridge International Academies: Rapidly Scaling Education for Kenya's Poorest Children – Technology and Operations Management". digital.hbs.edu. Retrieved 2019-11-13.
  7. "Bridge International Academies". WISE. Retrieved 2019-11-13.
  8. "Inclusive business case study" (PDF). International Finance Committee.
  9. "BIA - portfolio company of LGT Impact Ventures". LGT Group. Retrieved 2019-11-13.
  10. Bridge International Academies (2017-06-26), A Proven Approach, retrieved 2017-07-11
  11. "These Nigerian schools are teaching more in a term than they used to in a year. Here's how". World Economic Forum. June 24, 2019. Retrieved Oct 9, 2019.
  12. "FIP 94: Scaling Partnerships with Government, Shannon May of Bridge International Academies | | Finding Impact". findingimpact.com. Retrieved 2019-10-09.
  13. "Bridge International Academies | UN Global Compact". www.unglobalcompact.org. Retrieved 2018-10-23.
  14. "India". Bridge International Academies. 2017-10-23.
  15. "Kenya". Bridge International Academies. Retrieved 2017-10-23.
  16. "Liberia". Bridge International Academies. Retrieved 2017-10-23.
  17. "Nigeria". Bridge International Academies. Retrieved 2017-10-23.
  18. "Uganda". Bridge International Academies. Retrieved 2017-10-23.
  19. "BRIDGE INTERNATIONAL ACADEMIES DELIVERING QUALITY EDUCATION AT A LOW COST IN KENYA, NIGERIA, AND UGANDA" (PDF). Brookings Institution. July 2016. Retrieved July 11, 2017.
  20. "Emerging markets should welcome low-cost private schools". The Economist. Retrieved 2017-07-11.
  21. "Kenya". Bridge International Academies. Retrieved 2020-05-26.
  22. "Bridge International Academies". www.wise-qatar.org. Retrieved 2017-07-11.
  23. "BIA Volunteers to Make Andhra Knowledge Hub". The New Indian Express. Retrieved 2017-07-11.
  24. "Partnership Schools for Liberia – Ministry of Education". moe.gov.lr. Retrieved 2017-07-11.
  25. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20181478
  26. https://www.cgdev.org/publication/beyond-short-term-learning-gains-impact-outsourcing-schools-liberia-after-three-years
  27. "Bridge International Academies - 2016 Global Shared Value Award Winner". globalactionplatform.org. Retrieved 2017-07-11.
  28. "Learning gains in Liberia". Bridge International Academies. Retrieved 29 November 2018.
  29. "Learning in Liberia: Mid-Year Gains in Literacy and Numeracy" (PDF). Bridge International Academies.
  30. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20181478
  31. "Celebrating the launch of EdoBEST and public sector reform". Bridge International Academies.
  32. "History". Bridge International Academies. Retrieved 2019-02-21.
  33. Cella, Katie (Mar 21, 2019). "Helping children to think for themselves". Medium. Retrieved Oct 9, 2019.
  34. Bridge International Academies (2017-07-10), Co-curricular activities at Bridge, retrieved 2017-07-11
  35. "Bridge International Academies: Scripted schooling for $6 a month is". The Independent. 2015-07-28. Retrieved 2017-07-11.
  36. "Bridge International Academies", Wikipedia, 2020-05-05, retrieved 2020-05-15
  37. "Bridge International Academies gets high marks for ambition but its business model is still unproven". The Economist. Retrieved 2017-07-11.
  38. "Tools". Bridge International Academies. 2013-01-21. Archived from the original on 2017-07-06. Retrieved 2017-07-11.
  39. "Academic". Bridge International Academies. 2013-01-21. Archived from the original on 2017-07-12. Retrieved 2017-07-11.
  40. "Exciting learning gains evidenced by Bridge at Partnership Schools for Liberia (PSL)". Bridge International Academies. 2017-07-03. Archived from the original on 2017-07-13. Retrieved 2017-07-11.
  41. https://www.cgdev.org/publication/beyond-short-term-learning-gains-impact-outsourcing-schools-liberia-after-three-years
  42. "Case studies". Bridge International Academies. Retrieved 2019-10-09.
  43. Merelli, Annalisa. "Bill Gates shares the ultimate recipe for achieving global literacy". Quartz. Retrieved 2019-10-09.
  44. "African Leadership Network: Winners For The 2012 Africa Awards For Entrepreneurship Announced!". The African Leadership and Progress Network. 2013-02-27. Retrieved 2017-07-11.
  45. "The Social Entrepreneurs of the Year 2014 | Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship". www.schwabfound.org. Retrieved 2017-07-11.
  46. "Ahead of their time: Rebels, leaders and innovators". CNBC. Retrieved 2017-08-17.
  47. "Innovation Awards & Summit 2015 | The Economist Events". events.economist.com. Retrieved 2017-07-11.
  48. "Focus on OPIC Impact Award Winner: Bridge International Academies (Development Impact) | OPIC : Overseas Private Investment Corporation". www.opic.gov. Retrieved 2017-07-11.
  49. "The World's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies of 2015 in Education". Fast Company. 2015-02-09. Retrieved 2017-07-11.
  50. McGivney, Jenny Perlman Robinson, Rebecca Winthrop, and Eileen (2016-04-13). "Millions learning: Scaling up quality education in developing countries". Brookings. Retrieved 2017-07-11.
  51. "Tyton Announces Global Growth50". Tyton Partners. June 19, 2018.
  52. "African Business Employer of Choice". African Business.
  53. "ACQ5 Global Awards 2018". ACQ5.
  54. "15 women changing the world in 2015". World Economic Forum. Retrieved 2017-08-17.
  55. "CEO Today Magazine". CEO Today. Archived from the original on 2018-11-07.
  56. "Goldman Sachs | Builders and Innovators Summit 2015". Goldman Sachs. Retrieved 2017-08-17.
  57. "'Academies-in-a-Box' Are Thriving—But Are They the Best Way to School the World's Poor?". Cal Alumni Association. 2014-04-15. Retrieved 2017-08-17.
  58. Ross, Terrance F. "Is It Ever Okay to Make Teachers Read Scripted Lessons?". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2017-08-17.
  59. "Why do British charities want to shut down private schools in Africa?". The Spectator. 2018-04-21. Retrieved 2019-10-09.
  60. (PDF) http://globalinitiative-escr.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/May-2015-Join-statement-reaction-to-WB-statement-on-Bridge-14.05.2015.pdf. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  61. "What Do a Musician, Actor, and Teacher All Have in Common? Guided Instruction". Education Next. 2018-07-10. Retrieved 2019-02-19.
  62. "Low Cost Private School Firm Bridge International Keen On Liberia Despite Opposition". www.afkinsider.com/. Retrieved 2016-06-02.
  63. "Bridge International Academies gets high marks for ambition but its business model is still unproven". The Economist. 2017-01-28. ISSN 0013-0613. Retrieved 2017-02-05.
  64. http://globalinitiative-escr.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/May-2015-Join-statement-reaction-to-WB-statement-on-Bridge-14.05.2015.pdf
  65. https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/news/2015/may/14/over-100-organisations-slam-world-bank-support-uk-aid-funded-private-education. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  66. "Investors". Bridge International Academies. 2013-01-21. Archived from the original on 2017-09-24. Retrieved 2017-07-11.
  67. "2015 Gates Annual Letter". www.gatesnotes.com. Retrieved 2017-08-17.
  68. "CDC supports expansion of Bridge International Academies with US$6 million investment | CDC Group". www.cdcgroup.com. Archived from the original on 2017-08-17. Retrieved 2017-08-17.
  69. "Bridge International Academies | Khosla Ventures". www.khoslaventures.com. Retrieved 2017-08-17.
  70. "Portfolio - Learn Capital". learncapital.com. Retrieved 2017-08-17.
  71. "Bridge International Academies | NEA | New Enterprise Associates". www.nea.com. Retrieved 2017-08-17.
  72. "Bridge International Academies - Omidyar Network". www.omidyar.com. Archived from the original on 2015-03-25. Retrieved 2016-07-14.
  73. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2016-08-10. Retrieved 2016-07-14.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  74. "Portfolio — PanAfrican Investment Co., LLC". picinvest.com. Retrieved 2017-08-17.
  75. "Bridge International | Rethink Education". Rethink Education. Retrieved 2017-08-17.
  76. "Bridge International Academies - Pershing Square Foundation". Pershing Square Foundation. Retrieved 2017-07-11.
  77. "LGT - impact investing with a financial and social return". www.lgt.com. Retrieved 2017-08-17.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.