Can Education be Standardized? Evidence from Kenya Guthrie Gray-Lobe∗
Anthony Keats† Owen Ozier
Michael Kremer‡
Isaac Mbiti§
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Working Paper This version: June 6, 2022
We examine the impact of enrolling in schools that employ a highly-standardized approach to education, using random variation from a large nationwide scholarship program. Bridge International Academies not only delivers highly detailed lesson guides to teachers using tablet computers, it also standardizes systems for daily teacher monitoring and feedback, school construction, and financial management. At the time of the study, Bridge operated over 400 private schools serving more than 100,000 pupils. It hired teachers with less formal education and experience than public school teachers, paid them less, and had more working hours per week. Enrolling at Bridge for two years increased test scores by 0.89 additional equivalent years of schooling (EYS) for primary school pupils and by 1.48 EYS for pre-primary pupils. These effects are in the 99th percentile of effects found for at-scale programs studied in a recent survey. Enrolling at Bridge reduced both dispersion in test scores and grade repetition. Test score results do not seem to be driven by rote memorization or by income effects of the scholarship.
The evaluation received support from the World Bank Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund (SIEF), the World Bank Knowledge for Change Program (KCP), the World Bank Research Support Budget (RSB), the World Bank Education Global Practice (GEDDR), JPAL Post-Primary Education Initiative, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Omidyar Network’s education initiative, which spun out to become Imaginable Futures in 2020. The scholarship program was funded by UnitedWeReach. We are grateful to Amrita Ahuja, Isaiah Andrews, Joost de Laat, Joshua Dean, David Evans, Ivan Fernandez-Val, Eric Hanushek, Susannah Hares, Peter Hickman, Andrew Ho, Alaka Holla, Seema Jayachandran, Heeyon Kim, Dev Patel, Ben Piper, Mauricio Romero, Juan Saavedra, and Justin Sandefur for helpful comments. We are grateful to William Blackmon, Maria Bucciarelli, Celeste Carano, Peter Hawes, Mridul Joshi, Naomi Kimani, Carol Nekesa and Ben Wekesa for excellent research assistance. We acknowledge the hard work and dedication of our field teams, and the support of Asman Suleiman and the IPA-Kenya management team. This study was conducted with permissions from the National Commission for Science, Technology, and Innovation (NACOSTI). Additional approvals from relevant County commissioners/County Education officers were obtained. Institutional Review Board (IRB)/Ethics approval was received from Maseno University and IPA. The scholarship evaluation was registered with the American Economic Association’s registry for randomized controlled trials (AEARCTR-0005382). The registration includes a Preliminary Analysis and Plan For Subsequent Analysis (PAPSA) document that was developed while partially blinded to the data. We thank Joel Ferguson and the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) for conducting a code replication of the tables in the paper. The World Bank International Finance Corporation (IFC), Bill Gates, and the Omidyar Network invested in Bridge. Some authors of this study are conducting other research with Bridge. ∗ University of Chicago, email: graylobe@uchicago.edu † Wesleyan University, email: akeats@wesleyan.edu ‡ University of Chicago, email: kremermr@uchicago.edu § University of Virginia, email: imbiti@virginia.edu ¶ Williams College, email: owen.ozier@williams.edu