Kenya: Can Education Be Standardized?

Background:  The last several decades have seen large increases in the number of students attending and completing primary school in Sub-Saharan Africa, but learning poverty remains high. Taking advantage of a lottery to give more than 10,000 scholarships to schools operated by the for-profit Bridge International Academies, researchers test the impacts of an approach to standardize and codify multiple components of the education system: pedagogy, school construction, and management.

Context

Bridge International Academies, founded in 2009, attracted support from Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, DFID, and the International Finance Corporation, and at one point had tens of thousands of students enrolled in hundreds of schools in multiple countries, including Kenya.  Proponents argued that Bridge offers an opportunity to expand access to quality education by employing technology and standardizing school quality: tablets delivered detailed and highly scripted lesson plans to teachers; school heads also regularly rated teachers’ performance in a structured way; other aspects of education like financial management and school construction were also standardized across schools and outside the discretion of school management. Critics argued that Bridge’s teachers were less qualified than teachers in free public schools; that the chain of schools did not follow the Kenyan curriculum or use government-approved textbooks; that its facilities did not meet government standards; that its labor practices led to high teacher turnover; and that it was not cost-effective, among other things. An evaluation by Innovations for Poverty Action and the Center for Global Development examined a program under which Liberia contracted out management of public schools to several operators, including Bridge, but it was not designed to examine Bridge specifically and the context was very different than that in Kenya, where most of Bridge pupils are currently enrolled.

Intervention/Evaluation

In October 2015, United We Reach, a non-governmental organization working on education, announced that they would fund 12,000 scholarships for pupils to attend Bridge International Academies schools in Kenya. SIEF-supported researchers designed an evaluation around this scholarship program.

Families were able to apply for a scholarship between November and December of 2015 and a total of 29,150 students applied to the program. The scholarship covered tuition costs for the 2016 and 2017 school years at any of the 405 Bridge schools in Kenya. During the application process, data was collected on where applicants were planning to study to ensure that researchers would be comparing students who likely would go to Bridge because they received the scholarship with students who likely would go to a government school if they did not receive the scholarship. Applicants were then randomly assigned to either receive a scholarship or not. Baseline data collected when students applied includes, among other things, household information about income, assets, and literacy of the caregiver, as well scores on a battery of tests. The endline survey took place after two years to measure impacts on learning in English, Swahili, and mathematics through exams designed to test elements of the Kenyan national curriculum.

• Impacts suggest very large effects of attending Bridge schools in Kenya on learning, among both students attending preprimary education and those attending primary grades. Test score gains over and above the control group were equivalent to 1.48 years of learning among the preprimary sample and 0.89 years of learning in the primary sample, which are some of the largest effects observed in the international education literature. 
• This evaluation cannot be used to make any conclusions about the relative effectiveness of private schools. The highly codified and standardized aspects of the Bridge model, however, are promising components to test in public schools to see if the same learning gains can be realized in other contexts.