Bridge International Academies: Seeing like a state, calculating like a business

• In Event: Seeing like the state, calculating like a business: PPP revisited. Part II Public education and the adoption of business logic

Proposal

New global corporate actors increasingly see the provision of education in the global South as an untapped, emergent market. As more and more functions of the state are effectively outsourced to the private sector, including various aspects of education provision, state capacity and the will to deliver has steadily declined. As a result, generally accepted claims of poor state quality and deficiencies have increasingly opened-up ‘market opportunities’ for transnational corporations to fill the ‘governance gap’ in education (see Ball, 2012; Bhanji, 2008). Bridge International Academies (BIA) is one of the largest and fastest-growing education companies in the world that aims to tap into two distinct ‘market opportunities’ in the global education industry: ‘one previously undiscovered, and the other previously nonexistent’ according to BIA. The first relates to the 800 million primary and nursery aged pupils living on less than US$2 per day around the world in communities lacking access to quality education, which according to BIA, represents a US$64 billion parent paid market for low-cost private schooling. The second market opportunity identified by BIA involves a US$179 billion publically-funded charter school market in low-income countries. Yet, the operations of BIA involve adaptive political strategies (for gaining footholds in certain countries, i.e. seeing like a state) and maladaptive instructional standardizations (for minimizing cost, i.e. calculating like a business), which are the focus of this paper.
This paper interrogates the methods and techniques of BIA by comparing its edu-business activities in Liberia and Uganda. In Liberia, BIA has been contracted by the Liberian government to operate publically-funded charter schools, representing a public-private partnership known as the Liberian Partnership for Schools. In contrast, in Uganda, BIA has rapidly established a large-scale chain of private for-profit schools meant to serve pupils living in poverty, while failing to abide by the legal requirements and standards governing basic education in Uganda as if operating in a state of exception or colonial territory. Although the company operates differently (politically and legalistically) from one country to the next, BIA has developed an ‘Academy-in-a-Box’ model based on strict standardizations that are copied and duplicated uniformly across diverse educational contexts. BIA’s academy-in-a-box model leverages technology and data, including internet-enabled tablet e-readers (referred to as ‘teacher-computers’) and smartphones, to standardize and automate all instructional (i.e. curricular and pedagogical) and non-instructional (i.e. managerial) activities involved in the delivery of mass education in order to drive down costs, scale-up services rapidly, and increase rates of profitably. Hence, this paper examines the ways in which BIA sees like a state, and calculates like a business, as well as the consequences of this approach for teachers and learners.

Author

• Curtis Riep, Doctoral Student at University of Alberta