Blog 4: Good Schools for the World's Poorest Neighborhoods

                I found the very first line of this particular article very interesting. The first line read like this, “Have you ever thought about bringing great education to the world’s poorest neighborhoods?”.  It is something to think about and very alarming that it has to be questioned whether that needs to be done or not. Bridge International Academies and Pearson are expanding and investing in the growth of bringing great education into the world’s poorest neighborhoods. A spokesman from Pearson noted that when he took a visit to the “slums” of Kenya a few years ago he was shocked to see that most of the children attended private schools. This means that the students were paying to get an education. It was also stated that “slums” in Africa and Asia are trying to fix the problem of accessing education by creating low cost private schools.

                Jay Kimmelman, leader of Bridge International Academies, created what is known as “Academy in a Box”. It powers data, technology and scale to keep the quality up while also keeping the prices down. There are also steps that are given to the school managers that assist them in setting up their schools in about five months and managing their schools in order to have successful outcomes.  Bridge schools are about five dollars a month. They enroll about 1,000 students and it uses an automated payment system in which cell phones are used. In the last month there are 51 new schools and doubling the enrollment total in thirty days. It was stated that they were currently opening one new school every three calendar days. Altogether there are 134 Bridge schools and over 50,000 students enrolled. Their goal ten years from now is to have Bridge schools in about twelve countries.

                Pearson’s former CEO, Marjorie Scardino was very impressed with the Bridge schools and therefore she launched an Affordable Learning Fund. She then invested in schools known as Omega schools. It was a 20 school chain in Ghana. Because this is such a big thing that is happening, the Affordable Learning Fund is considering investments in Latin America and Southeast Asia.

                The schools that are being made available because of networks like Bride and Omega are expanding the access to quality primary education. It was stated that the revolution of affordable schools will soon be expanded to secondary schools. It is believed to be a revolution that will change history.  I found this article to be very interesting and it was great to read about people who want to make education affordable and of good quality for everyone. I feel that all should have the opportunity to access high quality education. 

 http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/on_innovation/2013/02/good_schools_for_the_worlds_poorest_neighborhoods.html

Jennifer Aiken

2/20/2013 5:45pm