For-profit school company is changing lives in Liberia

BUCHANAN, LIBERIA — Imagine an elementary school where students show up, but teachers don’t. Where 100 students squeeze into a classroom but don’t get any books. Where teachers are sometimes illiterate and periodically abuse students. Where families pay under the table to get a “free” education, yet students don’t learn to read.

That’s public education in many poor countries.

This country, Liberia, is leading an important experiment in helping kids learn in poor countries — and it’s undermined by misguided Americans, including some of my fellow liberals.

“The status quo has failed,” George Werner, Liberia’s education minister, told me. “Teachers don’t show up, even though they’re paid by the government. There are no books. Training is very weak. School infrastructure is not safe.

“We have to do something radical,” he added.

So Liberia is handing over some public schools to Bridge International Academies, a private company backed by Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, to see if it can do better.

So far, it seems it can — much better. An interim study just completed shows Bridge schools easily outperforming government-run schools in Liberia, and a randomized trial is expected to confirm that finding.

The idea of turning over public schools to a forprofit company sparks outrage in some quarters. There’s particular hostility to Bridge, because it runs hundreds of schools in poor countries.

“Bridge’s for-profit educational model is robbing students of a good education,” Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the National Education Association, the largest U.S. teachers union, declared last fall.

I’ve followed Bridge for years, my wife and I wrote about it in our last book, and the concerns are misplaced. Bridge has always lost money, so no one is monetizing children. In fact, it’s a startup that tackles a social problem in ways similar to a nonprofit, but with for-profit status that makes it more sustainable and scalable.

Americans wonder why 60 million elementary school-age children worldwide don’t go to school. It’s no wonder if you have to pay under-the-table school fees and know that years of “education” will get your children nothing.

In contrast, the Bridge schools I visited were functional. School begins on time, at 7:30 a.m., and continues until 3:30 instead of letting out around noon, as at many government-run schools.

“Since Bridge arrived here, the difference is so great,” explained Prince Yien, the PTA chairman in one school I visited.

Ruth Yarkpawolo, 9, a third-grader, told me that the biggest difference since Bridge took over is that the teacher is present.

My travels have left me deeply skeptical that government schools in many countries can be easily cured of corruption, patronage and wretched governance, and in the meantime we fail a generation of children.

In the United States, criticisms of forprofit schools are wellgrounded, for successive studies have found that vouchers for U.S. for-profit schools hurt children at least initially.

The situation in countries like Liberia is different, and when poor countries recognize that their education systems are broken and try to do the right thing for children, it doesn’t help to export the United States’ toxic education wars.