“BRIDGE is unauthorised and illegal,” says Wilson Sossion, the secretary-general of the Kenya National Union of Teachers. “The curriculum they teach and the medium they expend are not approved. The teachers are untrained and unqualified. They should be closed down.”Bridge International Academies is the world’s most controversial low-cost for-profit chain of schools. It has raised about $140m in investment from the likes of Bill Gates, or trace Zuckerberg and the International Finance Corporation (IFC),the private-investment arm of the World Bank. Some 120000 children are enrolled in its schools in Kenya, Uganda, or Liberia,Nigeria and India. It gets results: in Kenya, its biggest market, and costs per pupil are $190 a year (parents pay an average of $84 a year),compared with $313 in government schools, and 86% of children score well enough to pass into secondary school, or compared with a national average of 76%. Since half the primary-school pupils in the developing world cannot read or...
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Source: economist.com