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Founded by Shannon May and Jay Kimmelman in 2007, Bridge International Academies aims to bring affordable, high-quality private school education to some of the poorest students in the world. The company addresses a grim reality in many developing countries: nearly 600 million kids in the world are either out of school, or in school but not learning. In many countries, teachers lack proper training and materials. Worse, many teachers often don’t show up. According to the World Bank, during random spot-checks across seven African countries, 20% of teachers were absent, and another 20% were in the school but not in the classroom.
Bridge’s solution to the problem is well-suited to these tech-enabled times: Optimize education by standardizing and automating some of it. Every week, teachers at Bridge’s 599 schools download highly-scripted lesson plans designed by experts in Cambridge, Massachusetts, along with in-country teams. During the day, in any given country, teachers in the same grade are delivering the same lesson. Bridge collects data that allows it to compare the efficiency of teachers in one school to another, or measure the performance of students across different classes, schools, and countries.
The results are promising. Teachers show up; kids have learning materials; teachers get detailed lesson plans and plenty of feedback; and data-based evidence informs class design.
Not everyone is dazzled by Bridge’s approach or results, however. And it’s become something of a lightening rod for controversy over issues as varied as whether trying to make a profit from teaching the world’s most marginalized children is ethically fraught, to intense debate over its teaching methods.
Read the full article about Bridge International Academies' aim to educate the world's poorest kids by Jenny Anderson at qz.com.