Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.

In the United States, private school is generally a privilege of the rich. But in poorer nations, particularly in Africa and South Asia, families of all social classes send their children to private school. The private schools within reach of the poor, however — usually a single classroom a woman runs in her house — are not a big improvement. But two school systems — Bridge International Academies in Kenya and BRAC in Bangladesh — are offering something different: they are making decent education accessible to the world’s poorest on a giant scale.

Both BRAC and Bridge are large and getting larger. BRAC has more than 1.25 million children in its schools in Bangladesh and six other countries, and it is expanding. Bridge is smaller, with 50,000 children, but it is only four years old, and it is opening a new school in Kenya every 2.5 days and is moving into other countries. BRAC puts its schools mainly in remote rural villages, Bridge in urban slums. They both serve the poor — and serve them relatively well. But that is about all they have in common.



The two school systems have diametrically opposing philosophies, methods and business models. Anyone familiar with the debate in the United States about American education would recognize these polar opposites. Bridge is a for-profit company which draws income solely from school fees; to be profitable it must keep class size at 50 or larger. One of its investors is Pearson, the media and education company whose tests have proven so controversial in New York. Bridge relies on standardization and technology. At 11 a.m. for example, every single second-grade teacher in every Bridge academy will be teaching the exact same lesson, supplied with a word-for-word script from Bridge headquarters delivered by Nook e-reader.

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I will write more about Bridge schools in my next column in two weeks. This week I want to explore the BRAC model — one that gives teachers almost complete autonomy, looks for small classrooms, combines various ages in one class, is Montessori-like in its methods, pays little attention to standardized tests and emphasizes soft skills.

BRAC used to be an acronym for Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, but now the letters stand alone. It was founded in 1972 to provide relief after Bangladesh’s war of liberation. Although you’ve probably never heard of it, BRAC is the largest nongovernmental organization in the world, with some 100,000 employees, and it services reach 110 million people. “Small is beautiful, but big is necessary,” Mushtaque Chowdhury, the vice chair of BRAC, often says.

BRAC does everything: health, microfinance, agriculture, water. BRAC gets some of its budget from donations, largely from rich-country development agencies like Britain’s DFID or AusAid. But most of its money comes from its businesses. Dairy farmers needed milk chilling stations, so BRAC built them; BRAC dairy now has 22 percent of Bangladesh’s milk market. BRAC’s programs needed Internet connections; BRACnet is now one of the country’s largest Internet service providers. In Bangladesh, BRAC is large enough and comprehensive enough to be akin to a parallel government.

And since 1985, it has run schools — the largest secular nongovernmental educational system in the world. (See here for a rather treacly BRAC video about its schools). It has more than 700,000 students in primary schools in Bangladesh and also runs networks of schools in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Philippines, Uganda, South Sudan and Sierra Leone — some 40,000 schools in total. And BRAC schools host a parade of visitors who go back to their countries and adapt what they saw — BRAC doesn’t even keep count of these schools it inspired.

In 1984, 40 percent of Bangladesh’s primary-school-age children were not in school. Girls, particularly — of girls who did start first grade, only 2 percent of them were still in school by fifth grade.

Many students were kept at home to work. School interferes with seasonal harvesting, an activity of both girls and boys. But girls’ labor — fetching water, taking care of younger siblings — was a daily necessity. Parents weighed the value of that labor against what girls were getting from school. In most cases, school offered little — classes of 50 or 60 students, teachers who showed up only occasionally, scant materials.

In addition, most villages did not have a school — children had to walk to other villages, and many parents did not consider the walk to be safe, especially for girls. Parents also were wary of male teachers — sometimes with good reason.

Other groups of children were often kept home: disabled children, ethnic minorities who were the object of discrimination, and children whose parents had never gone to school themselves.

BRAC decided to get those children into school. “The government put in about $30 per student per year,” said Maria May, program manager of BRAC’s social innovation lab. “So BRAC said, O.K., let’s find a model that delivers better results for that $30 per year.”

In 1985, BRAC opened 22 one-room primary schools, admitting children who dropped out of primary school or had reached the starting age limit of 8. BRAC actually spends $20 per student per year. School buildings are rudimentary, with bamboo walls and corrugated tin roofs. All BRAC’s programs rely on workers hired locally at very low salaries, and so this became the way to find teachers as well. BRAC hires a woman from each village to teach, pays her a stipend and gives her two weeks of training before she starts, and ongoing training every month — 140 days in total over 4 years. A supervisor will stop in once or twice a week to watch a lesson and talk to parents in the village, asking if they have any complaints or comments.

Early on, said May, parents had to pay a small amount to send their child to a BRAC school. “At that point, this was a way to have local accountability for the teacher — parents would be very angry if she didn’t show up. But it didn’t work very well. There were very poor families.” Now BRAC schools are free, with textbooks, storybooks, slates, notebooks and educational materials such as math toys all included. (Public schools, by contrast, while supposedly free, charge parents numerous fees.)

BRAC designed its school system to address all the reasons children didn’t attend schools. Teachers are female. The schools aggressively recruit girls, who make up two-thirds of the student body. Ethnic minorities study in their own language for the first few years; disabled children receive free surgery and medical devices. Each village has a school; “the school goes to the children; the children don’t come to the school,” said Safiqul Islam, BRAC’s director of education. The teacher starts first grade with a group of 30 or so children of different ages and stays with the group all the way through primary school, covering the 5-year curriculum in 4 years. The children then go into government secondary schools, and the teacher starts over with a new group.

To allow children to do chores, the school day is short — three to four hours each day. But there are few days off, so children actually spend more time in class than in public schools. The village sets the schedule, so that children are home for harvesting.

Teaching in BRAC schools is very different from the rote memorization that characterizes the public schools in Bangladesh (and most poor countries). BRAC schools use some rote learning, but also lots of singing, dancing, drawing, games, individual attention, group study and Montessori-style work with educational toys.

In the first three years in a BRAC school, moreover, children spend a lot of time not on core subjects, but things BRAC deems important: confidence building, working with others, gender rights, nutrition, hygiene. In core subjects, children take monthly tests, but they are usually not told of the results — they are informal tests designed to help the teacher understand the students’ skills and weaknesses. And the national exams? “We do not bother with them,” said Islam. In the students’ final year they focus for three months on Bangladesh’s national exams. “We try to tell the student, ‘you know enough — just answer the questions,’” he said.

To outsiders, this model seems unlikely to succeed: surely disadvantaged children need more qualified teachers, not village women who might or might not have finished high school. But BRAC is good at getting high-quality work from local people who lack formal qualifications, and Islam said that it was no different with teachers. “There are a lot of educated women in the villages who do not have employment,” he said. “When they get it, it is seriously empowering.” One objective measure is that BRAC teachers show up for class — their absentee rate is less than 5 percent.

Related More From Fixes Read previous contributions to this series.

An evaluation (pdf) of BRAC students’ scores on government tests found that teachers’ levels of education did not affect their students’ performance — but experience did; the longer the teacher has been teaching, the higher the students’ test scores.

BRAC students, in fact, do better than their public-school counterparts. “It is well known that in terms of infrastructure of the schools, and academic qualification and salary of the teachers the government schools are much ahead of the BRAC nonformal schools,” the evaluation said (p 51). “But BRAC nonformal schools surpassed their government counterparts in continuous teacher training, supervision of schools and classroom teaching quality. Class size is also much smaller in BRAC system. Studies show that due to the above, teaching-learning provision in BRAC nonformal schools is much better than the government schools.”

BRAC students are more likely to complete fifth grade — in 2004, 94 percent did, as opposed to 67 percent of public school students. (The BRAC number is now about 99 percent.) On government tests, BRAC students do about 10 percent better than public school students — impressive, given that their population is the most marginalized.

But doing better than government schools is not a very high standard. A study (pdf) in 2006 said that BRAC has improved rural learning, but “has not yet achieved the quality to which [BRAC] aspires.” Test results indicate the “low quality of learning.”

Still, BRAC students otherwise would likely have no education at all. School quality is an issue everywhere. As governments are putting more and more children in school, they are now turning to the more difficult question: how do you make their time there worthwhile? In difficult circumstances, BRAC makes a huge difference in children’s lives. In two weeks, I will show how Bridge International Academy, the anti-BRAC, does the same.

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Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and the author, most recently, of “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World” and the World War II spy story e-book “D for Deception.”