In Nigeria, smile at a small victory and try to do better

When I worked at Bridge International Academies, the largest elementary school network in the developing world, oops, do we have a lot of data? We have test data from five different countries, and each country has its own national curriculum and practice. (For example, Kenya has standardized tests not only in mathematics and English, but also in science, social studies, and Swahili.) We have information about teacher observation, parent satisfaction, peer tutoring, and even parent-teacher meetings data. Even for data nerds like me, this is a lot of material.

As the chief academic officer, part of my responsibility is to organize and understand all this quantitative information, with the ultimate goal of improving teaching and student outcomes. Bridge operates low-cost private schools similar to the Catholic schools in the inner city of the United States and public-private partnership schools similar to the transition schools in the Obama era. More than 800,000 students are enrolled in 2,026 schools in five countries. When I talk to friends who run a franchise management organization or school district in the United States, they always ask me the question about Bridge: "How do you use this data?"

I start my reply with a piece of advice: When you plan to evaluate a new education career, please contact top economists, who can measure your results through randomized controlled trials. This will provide you with reliable information about whether you are really helping your child achieve major achievements, and will help you avoid the human tendency to "believe what you want to believe" when viewing achievement data.

Then I threw a curve ball at them. I told my American friends that the fastest way to make large-scale improvements is not to rely solely on data processing, but to hire someone like Imisiayo Olu-Joseph or Imisi, as everyone at Bridge calls her. Her job in Bridge, Nigeria is to visit schools and observe the actions of teachers and students-not in a "trap" way, but in a way designed to honestly report what is happening and help teachers deal with obstacles and Question method: Observation aims to specifically improve the classroom.

My weird friends-you know who you are-often wave their hands dismissively. "Observations? Anecdotes? They are not reliable," they said. But people like Imsi, Bridge's field staff, are reliable yin and yang in digital calculators. Yes, there are risks in using human observation as an assessment tool, but the risks are not greater than relying on data alone.

I recently interviewed Imsi and asked her to describe a typical day as a field worker.

"I get up at 5 in the morning, just to be safe," she said. "T-shirt and jeans. Cabbage and egg sandwiches on the road. Umbrellas, laptops, phones, teachers' computers, backup power supplies, water bottles in the refrigerator. And rags. Lots of wet wipes, my face. It became dusty there. I don't want to Looks like a lunatic."

Imisi’s husband drove her from their home in Okota, Lagos State, Nigeria to the nearby town of Isolo. Then, she boarded a 16-seater minibus and headed to Ikotun, a city with a population of 1.8 million.

There, amidst the sound of horns, shouts, bus brakes, traffic police whistles, the smell of food stalls, and the noise of motorcycles everywhere, Imisi tried to "walk confidently, almost unlike a lady." She looked around, looking for a motorcycle taxi driver who "looks very careful". He asked me where I was going. I asked him where he was going-unless you know his preferred direction, you don't want to reveal your destination. I will pay for two people. I don't want the second rider to sit behind me. "

They negotiate, determine the fare, and then take off. "Sometimes thugs will try to stop the bicycle and charge a'toll fee'," Imisi told me.

The taxi arrived at a smaller bus stop, Igando. In the final stage of the journey, Imisi will rent a second bike and head to Dare Olayiwola's school.

When Imisi arrived, the school manager was "taking care of her parents". "I won't hit him up," she told me, "just say good morning, smile, and it's over. I want to stay in the shadows. I have been here for hours of observation."

What does Imisi observe today?

Most of these have to do with how to use scripted courses or teacher guides in the classroom: in 6th grade mathematics, the first example the teacher gives is not clear. The fifth-grade English class teacher tried to cover too much material, and the children were confused. The first-grade teacher was tripped up in the practice of scientific instruction.

In addition: there were few math textbooks for a class, so the teacher had to write examples on the blackboard; soon after that, more books were delivered to her. An on-site team observer rated the most recent parent-teacher night with a score of 7 (out of 10), while the earlier version had a score of 4 (out of 10). The school staff thought it was better this time because the teacher was led by personal anecdotes about the child instead of directly explaining the grades.

It is mainly "little things", but it adds up.

The school also conducted an experiment using a technology validated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to regroup students of different grades according to their skill levels. Imisi is paying close attention to how students feel about being with older or younger classmates. Does anyone look scared? Still ashamed?

Imisi looks at a class of 20 students. Every child can attend class except one. The teacher was frustrated and raised his voice. Here, Imsi stepped out of the shadows and shaped a patient approach. "I have seen that girl succeed in another class," Imisi told me. "The teacher only needs scaffolding, not from point 1 to point 10."

Back at the Bridge International Academies offices in Nairobi, Hyderabad, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, the directors gobbled them up, smiled at the tiny triumph—they seemed to have solved the problem—and worked hard to resolve the many obstacles that still existed.

Ground landscape

Every CEO, every general, and every person in charge of the school needs to know: What is happening on the front lines?

When senior officials visit classrooms or schools, people will notice Big Cheese and change their behavior. When an official asks for information, the answer is usually what the interviewee thinks the official wants to hear, not a description of the actual situation. This phenomenon is not unique to schools. For example, this is the main theme of David Halberstam's "The Best and Brightest" about the Vietnam War when Kennedy and LBJ could not hear the true story.

In the Western world, K-12 departments usually solve this problem in two ways.

In the UK, there are "inspectors". They arrived in the classroom with a long list and good intentions, and then dispersed. "Does the teacher have high expectations?" The inspector looked up at Ms. Smith from his notebook. Ms. Smith visits a student. The child does not know the answer. Ms. Smith moved on quickly. The inspector etched a red mark to indicate low expectations. The report was eventually handed over to school leaders who often scolded teachers. (Of course, sometimes the inspector will misunderstand the scene. "If I insist on asking that particular child in front of his peers," Ms. Smith might say, "Experience tells me that he will get angry. If the inspector waits, he You will see that I helped this particular boy after school. This is our agreement.")

Another outstanding K-12 effort to understand the real situation in the classroom is teacher assessment, which is common in the United States. This method pushes the principal off the office chair, appears in class and watches, and then writes down the feedback. Although the original intention was good, this policy effort did not proceed as planned. The principal does not want conflicts. Observation takes time. The principal is not good at the business at hand. The Gates Foundation’s effective teaching program measures found that using a simple survey conducted by Harvard University economist Ron Ferguson, students’ ratings of teachers were two to three times more accurate than principals. The principal’s assessment has almost no correlation with the student’s learning outcomes, which is dangerous.

Sometimes principals just verify their own teaching style. Other times, they fill out scorecards reluctantly. These scorecards tend to focus on the behavior of the teacher rather than the learning of the student. This is a common failure in education, rating inputs rather than outputs. It's as if you judge a baseball batter based on the beauty of the swing-does it look beautiful? -Instead of base percentage or batting score. This is misleading and irrelevant. I remember a teacher at the Boston Charter School was known for his terrible "aesthetics." He seems to never try, ignoring all observation standards. He was just sitting there while his students were reading. However, his children have made great progress in the English test.

Imisi will not test any theory. Her classroom observation method differs from traditional methods in four main aspects.

First, Bridge did not send her to verify that the headquarters hopes were true hypotheses, but instead sent her there to reject the hypotheses. She assumes that the course fails, students often daydream, and the rhythm deviates from the goal. In the United States, many classroom observers in public schools describe feeling stressed when things are going well. Imisi and her colleagues were pushed in the other direction: there are many things that need to be solved; please go find them.

Secondly, Bridge Brass doesn't just want Imsi to fill in a title-they also want her overall judgment, her overall view of things. On a scale of 1 to 10, to what extent is a class, a teaching method, or a technical tool successful for students and teachers? In contrast, American officials rarely ask overall questions. These observations are forced to fall into pre-existing categories.

For Imisi, it is good, and even desirable, to focus on the little things that are humble. For example, at the beginning of the lesson at 2:54, the teacher's instruction to divide the children into small groups is confusing, so they just stare at each other. A set of three math problems would have taken five minutes, but even the fastest child would need 12 minutes. This messed up the schedule for the entire class, and the teacher did not take the test.

(Time is everything. As early as 1992, my first job was as a handyman for a Broadway theater producer. I remember one rehearsal-I think the show is "Human Figure"-in which Jerry Jerry Zaks directed Nathan Lane. They were fixing a line that failed in the preview. "Pause after you say five seconds, not two seconds," Zaks told Lane. That's it. The next night, the laughter began to revolve around the four-second mark, and then killed. In the United States, we like to argue about strict sublime issues, and usually it is the pace that determines the course or destroys the course.)

Third, Imsi's "goals" are different. School districts often use inspections as a way of criticizing teachers. Imisi is not inspecting teachers; she is collectively criticizing senior officials—the directors of training, instructional design, technology, and operations. They don’t allow "blame the implementation", which is a common phrase in education reform. It essentially says, "I think I created a magical technical tool or course or tutoring, but my God, our teacher just put it It's messed up." That can't fly. These tools, training and courses are intended for use by ordinary and typical teachers. If they are not using these resources well, or if they refuse to use them, it is "on you", a senior official of Bridge. Do better. As Yoda said, "No attempt."

Imisi provides mandatory and humble help to senior officials in the team. She is merciless. She might give a class 3 points (out of 10 points). This stings the hard-study course supervisor. But maybe, over time, with a quick-failure mentality, the director will try to improve the course and get 4 points and 5 points, maybe finally 6 out of 10 points. Imisi admits that children are "getting" it, and these courses are more or less effective, but they are far from masterpieces.

This is in sharp contrast to some of the course efforts I have observed or participated in in the United States. For example, at a charter school in the Midwest, I saw a class I described as 3 out of 10. The school has just adopted a new common core curriculum, so the low score is understandable. When I shared this with a friend of the course company, she blamed the teacher. ("Yes, we often see teachers have low expectations; this is sad," is the response.)

Fourth, the relationship between the headquarters and the bridge field staff is dynamic; information flows in both directions. According to Amisie's report, someone at the headquarters might ask her: tomorrow, can you zoom in on this nuance, shoot a video of that detail, and ask the teachers their views on this possible new direction?

Data nerds love Moneyball. In the 2011 film, Brad Pitt played Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A team. In the fall of 2001, the team had just lost to the Yankees in the playoffs. Bean had to rebuild his lineup because he was facing three superstars who were about to lose. Compared with the financial powerhouse Yankees and Red Sox, his salary budget is insignificant. How to win? Bean himself is also a former player, he began to refuse to accept the wisdom of senior scouts, and even refused to accept his own professional knowledge.

He learned that cognitive biases can lead to misunderstandings. Chad Bradford looks like a bad pitcher because he doesn't shoot high. But he is actually very good at getting the batter out. He is valuable in terms of winning, but so far, no one has realized this, so his salary is not high. Bean picked him up at a cheap price.

Bean met a talented Yale University economics graduate, played by sweaty Jonah Hill in a polyester navy blue suit, and hired him to lead the baseball team's data analysis revolution. Cold numbers have replaced popular human opinions, and newer, more important numbers have replaced outdated numbers.

The older generations resisted Bean's new method. The chief scout withdrew. The manager accused Bean of sabotage. But the data will eventually win. (Team A lost in the 2002 Divisional Series, but they won 20 consecutive games in the regular season, setting a record for the American League.)

Data analysis quickly swept professional sports: Theo Epstein and the Boston Red Sox, Stephen Curry and the Golden State Warriors, Bryson DeChambeau and his data-driven path to professional golf excellence. Data doesn't completely conquer sports, but they keep pace with human judgment and experience—sometimes with a slightly higher weight, sometimes with a lower weight.

In the field of education reform in the United States, George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy can be said to usher in the era of money ball in 2001, where "no child is left behind". If you consider the students’ starting point, some seemingly bad schools are actually good. Teachers help their students learn more than similar children in other schools. If you carefully observe the performance of "subgroups"-poor children, ethnic minority children, and children with special education, some seemingly good schools are not like that.

Ed-reform analysis quickly became popular. The ancients resisted. But in this battle, the data was lost. "Data-driven teaching", a common core curriculum for data validation, data-driven leadership, school transformation and teacher preparation: in general, they have not worked. Yes, there are valuable exceptions. Some charter schools, perhaps DC public schools for some time, have achieved data-driven success. These outliers should be the vanguard of the Oakland A team. If you build a better mousetrap, it should be copied.

This did not happen in any meaningful way in public schools in the United States. In terms of academics, poor children are more or less the same as they were 20 years ago.

Some critics believe that "data-driven reform" is not the A or the Red Sox; this is the 2017 Houston Astros. This is cheating. So of course the situation has not improved.

Some reformers believe that they have been defeated by pure political power, and no matter how convincing the data is to illustrate a particular success, power is always moving the target and is not allowed to spread the idea of ​​winning. Many observers believe that many people who manage the school system value voting rather than improving student performance.

I have a different view, or maybe another view: In the United States, the analytical work in education reform is not that good. Add up the numbers. . . Um. It lacks something.

Bridge International Academies is a reverse penalty. In the K-12 world, data is ubiquitous, but they are mostly misunderstood and misunderstood, misplaced and misused. Bridge’s unnamed field staff provided human judgment. Putting it together with big data is the secret. I believe that that is what we have been missing.

We need a new kind of human judgment in school—not old-fashioned intuitive judgment, as smart elders claim, “I have experience. This is what I believe and feel.” We need trustworthy and neutral observers, who are certainly wise, but simply and consistently describe what is happening, rather than instilling their pet beliefs and willing to criticize and evaluate their own narratives. These observers are not expected to solve the problem on their own-this may inspire them to see what they want to see. On the contrary, these observers can continuously fine-tune the information provided by big data, which in turn can guide further observations.

But I am surpassing myself. Let me describe Bridge’s two whole beef patties, lettuce, cheese, kimchi, and onions on a sesame bag. Then we will return to the special sauce.

I worked at Bridge International Academies from 2013 to 2016. I am still involved as a consultant. Although there are many imperfections in bridge, including my own mistakes in particular, I believe that overall this organization is a good thing, and even a great thing. My wife and I have a close relationship with four Bridge alumni-Natasha, Grace, Josephine and Jeff, all of whom are now scholarship students in American universities. In fact, when I drove to Bowdoin College to pick up Geof and send him to Boston Logan Airport tomorrow, I was dictating these words so that he could return to Nairobi for the first time in two years. It was a great joy to see these four children thrive; they seized the opportunity that was given. This makes me very hopeful that there is a way to unlock all the potential potential of Bridge’s 800,000 children and hundreds of millions of children in developing countries. Not doing this is an epic waste.

Bridge is similar to a charter management organization combined with a turnover organization. At its low-cost private school, parents pay about $100 a year in tuition. (Such schools provide services to hundreds of millions of children around the world. See "Private Schools for Poor", special topic, Fall 2005.) It also cooperates with "transition" public schools in which the government signs a contract with Bridge's parent company, NewGlobe , Used for teaching materials, training and professional knowledge. These schools are not called bridge colleges, but they participate in the same academic team.

Bridge has operations in Kenya, India, Nigeria, Liberia and Uganda, and its scale surpasses the 10 largest charter management organizations in the United States combined. It is a for-profit company with a public welfare mission and has received support from many "double bottom line" investors, including Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

Bridge is presented in the form of an ed-reform ink test.

If education reforms make you think of attrition, expulsion, colonization, exam-oriented education, privatization, and teacher abuse, you may not like Bridge.

If you tend to like various types of regulations, choices, and "parental powers" in the American context, you might be inclined to Bridge.

My purpose here is not to convince you whether Bridge is good or bad. My purpose is to tell data enthusiasts that we are seriously underinvesting in observation related fields, and therefore, there is no great help to the school that we might produce.

If you only know about American education, here are some points of view.

Until recently, the UN’s education in the developing world believed that there were not enough children in school.

Recently, the consensus is turning to a different problem: learning outcomes have been poor and seem to be getting worse.

In addition to the thorny issue of getting children to school, there is also the challenge of getting teachers to show up and persuade them to stop using corporal punishment. Development economist Lant Pritchett wrote when referring to Indian schools that even if teachers do show up, they may not bother to do their jobs.

Pritchett wrote: "On any given school day, less than half of the teachers are present and involved in teaching. This pattern of teacher behavior is recorded repeatedly, but it still exists." More importantly, Pritchett pointed out that A survey of Indian families “found that about one-fifth of children reported being'beaten or pinched' at school—just last month.” The study also found that “the possibility of children from poor families being beaten in public schools Twice as many children from wealthy families."

Entrepreneurs Jay Kimmelman and Shannon May met these challenges by opening the first bridge college in Kenya in 2009. Compared with nearby competing schools, their low-cost private schools have a high teacher attendance rate. They fired teachers who used corporal punishment (although some parents liked it).

Pritchett also wrote about an Indian study in which observers visited classrooms to look for "any of the six'child-friendly' teaching practices", such as "students asking teachers questions" or "teachers smiling/big Laugh/joking".

“When observing 1,700 classrooms across the country, researchers found that nearly 40% of schools have no child-friendly practices at all—no smiles, no problems, and no participation that can be interpreted as child-friendly,” Pritchett reports.

This is more complicated.

Over the years, the United States Agency for International Development and institutions in other countries have spent huge sums of money to train teachers in developing countries. However, careful empirical evaluation rarely finds that training alone can improve student performance.

Benjamin Piper cracked the code that changed the behavior of teachers. Piper is a long-term practitioner and scholar of Research Triangle Institute or RTI International. His projects funded by the United States Agency for International Development have triggered tremendous changes in basic education in some developing countries.

Piper realized that training alone could not change the teachers, because they were enrolled in the school themselves, where teachers were completely dependent on lectures and rote call and response pedagogy. Therefore, despite any professional development of Western benefactors, they are also strongly inclined to teach in this way.

Only scripted courses-which prevent teachers from teaching even children's default practices for a long time-seem to change the dynamics of the classroom. A scripted course or teacher’s guide is a compulsory tool used for free purposes, essentially forcing teachers to say something like: "Now I want to stop talking, you students want to..." Read, write, or talk to each other.

Once Piper has these teacher guides, he can conduct highly intensive training on how to succeed in this particular teaching method. Resources are also important: students need real books to hold and read (it is not easy to provide this book in many corners of the world).

These three things—scripted teaching, focused training, and basic resources—combined to form Piper’s Primary School Mathematics and Reading (PRIMR) program, which was later called Tusome ("Let's Read" in Kenya and Tanzania). Swali). The learning outcomes of these projects are impressive (see Figure 1).

The teacher's guide is an understandable sensitive point. The title of an Atlantic article on Bridge (not Piper) is "Is it okay for teachers to read scripted courses?" The author Terence F. Ross wrote that the uniformity of the courses "almost guarantees consistent results", but:

... By its nature, this approach hinders individuality and spontaneity. Energetic educators who are good at dynamic innovation and creating unique classroom experiences do not necessarily exist in the Bridge system. They avoided teachers who could follow instructions well. Bridge’s argument seems to stem from a utilitarian philosophy: According to Kenya’s bleak public school statistics, it is better to provide all children with a basic and reliable education than to expect talented teachers to appear.

The concept of teacher freedom has great value, but in non-bridge schools, teaching in a typical Kenyan school is not based on classroom interaction that stimulates imagination or critical thinking. Far away. The existing method in developing countries is rote memorization (teacher speaks, children sit, repeat occasionally, and occasionally copy from the blackboard).

Bridge used a Piper-like approach, deploying teacher guides, using these guides for training, and providing affordable textbooks in classrooms that were not normally available before.

Bridge also provides teachers with electronic tablets on which they can access scripted courses. Tablet computers, as a way to send data back to headquarters, have become a key part of this strategy.

Then there are special seasonings: Imsi and Olu Adio from Nigeria, Gabe Davis from Liberia, Faith Karanja from Kenya and other observers. Hidden numbers. It is these on-site officials who work together with big data to help Bridge find new ideas to try.

Bridge often fails (fast or slow), but reluctantly persists and accumulates small, consistent victories in courses and other areas, and gives up ideas that don't work. (For examples of ideas that Bridge has tried, see Table 1 and find out which ones work and which ones don’t.) Bridge’s external evidence shows that the learning gains are real and huge. I believe that future external evidence will support these claims, which may be jaw-dropping.

Imisi Olu-Joseph comes from a family of educators. She wants to be a doctor, but her own father who runs the school wants her to be a teacher. "I major in microbiology," she said. "That was the closest thing he allowed to medicine. I started teaching in one of his schools. This on-site team work is free for me. The motivation is to see little improvement, and from a visit to The next time I visit boys and girls who have made a significant leap."

Imisi has recently been promoted at Bridge. She now leads all field officials in school networks around the world. "I look for very smart people who can appreciate data and think deeply about complexity and how each thing affects another. Oh, I need to avoid people who are opinionated and have a strong preference for instructional design. That kind of people see What they arrive is what they want to see."

Mike Goldstein is an advisor to Bridge International and the founder of Match Education in Boston.

Was the test on which the experiment relied was conducted in English or Telugu?

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