The West African nation of Liberia has had many struggles in its long efforts to rebuild, first from its devastating civil war in the 1990s and early 2000s and, now, from Ebola. And one of the hardest struggles has been education.
In 2013, after all 25,000 high school students sitting state university entrance exams failed, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf admitted that the education system was“a mess” and called for a complete overhaul.
Now it seems Sirleaf’s government has decided that rather than overhauling the education system themselves, they’re going to pay someone else to do it for them. Under a pilot program called “Partnership Schools for Liberia,” the Liberian government will outsource some of its primary and early childhood educational system to private companies over the next five years.
One huge contract has gone to a private company called Bridge International Academies — reportedly to the tune of $65 million. And it’s causing some real controversy.
The United Nations’ Special Rapporteur for the right to education, Kishore Singh, hasdenounced the plan as “completely unacceptable” and “a blatant violation of Liberia’s international obligations under the right to education.” A coalition of teachers unions and civil society groups in Liberia issued an open letter announcing their opposition. Education International, an international federation of unions, has warned that “privatisation vultures” involved in the plan “pose [a] serious threat to Liberia’s public education system.”
Their concern is that by hiring a private, for-profit company — whose primary goal is to make money, not serve the people (or so the argument goes) — the government of Liberia is abandoning its responsibility to its people and potentially jeopardizing the quality and equal access of the education system.
Defenders of the plan argue that the government of Liberia faced an impossible choice. It could continue to provide substandard education, or it could acknowledge its own limitations and deficiencies and turn to outside experts for help meeting a challenge that was beyond its abilities.
So who’s right? After speaking to development and education experts, it’s clear that some criticisms of the plan have real merit, and that this program comes with trade-offs we would find unacceptable in, say, an American education system.
But perhaps the more meaningful question is also the more uncomfortable one: In a country that has one of the world’s lowest GDPs per capita and where basic state functions are still struggling, could the problems with Liberia’s program be a necessary trade-off?
Liberia’s challenge
In March 2015, the government of Liberia announced its plan for public-private partnerships to improve its education system. It ended up with Bridge International Academies.The for-profit company, which formed in 2008, operates more than 400 relatively low-cost primary and pre-primary schools in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria. The company says its goal is “to bring some of the world’s greatest instruction and pedagogical thinking into every classroom in every village and slum in the world.”
Instead of paying more educated, experienced, qualified teachers, the company hires inexperienced people from the local communities (reportedly paying around $90 a month). It gives them a few weeks of training and handheld tablet computers loaded with pre-scripted lessons designed by the company’s education experts. It then sends them into the classrooms to deliver the scripted content to the students.
And when they say scripted lessons, they mean scripted. We’re not talking a general outline of a lesson plan with a few bullet points here. “Step into any classroom at Bridge and the chances are that the teacher will be uttering exactly the same words that are being uttered in every single Bridge school,” writes the Independent’s Catrina Stewart.
“A handbook instructs the teacher to look up from the e-book every five seconds, to wait eight seconds for children to answer, and instead of asking the teacher to explain a mathematical concept, the lesson plan takes them through it step by step,” Stewartwrites.
Bridge claims that this scripted curriculum model gives poor children “access to the types of teachers they would never be able to afford.”
In underfunded education systems like those of Kenya and Liberia, teacher absenteeism can be an enormous problem. The company says it addresses this by using technology to track teacher absenteeism and performance in real time.
Bridge’s “academy in a box” model has attracted investment from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation, which invested $10 million each. Bill Gates and the UK government’s Department for International Development are also investors.
The company’s arrangement in Liberia is a new model for it. Rather than coming in and setting up its own private, for-profit schools, Bridge will be applying its teaching model to 50 existing schools in the Liberian education system for the 2016-’17 school year.
Bridge will take the teachers currently teaching in those 50 schools, send them through the Bridge training process, equip them with tablets and a scripted curriculum based on the Liberian national curriculum, and send them back into the same schools, where they will be constantly monitored and assessed.
According to Bridge, the Liberian government has promised that all teachers currently employed will remain on the civil service payroll — in other words, no teachers are going to be fired when Bridge comes in.
However, teachers who don’t perform well according to Bridge assessments may be removed from their classrooms and given other civil service jobs in the government. Maybe you can start to see why this plan so alarms Liberia’s teachers unions, among others.
Liberia’s minister of education, George K. Werner, downplayed the degree to which this would be a shift, saying, “The schools will remain within the public sector, owned, financed, regulated and quality assured by government, with support from external donors.”
But it’s not hard to see why this plan has caused some controversy.
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