Power, corruption and lies
The big picture about big data & big EDU
An anonymously leaked document provides the big picture about big edu and big data. Private student, parent & teacher data to be monetised for marketing & surveillance purposes.
Bridge International Academies, the for-profit edubusiness bankrolled by the World Bank, DFID, Pearson and venture philanthropists, Bill Gates & Mark Zuckerberg, having failed to conquer Africa now have their sights set on India.
As revealed in my earlier article BIA plan to scale their business to 10 million children within 10 years by deploying a very narrow version of standardised education, delivered by technicians reading lessons from a script, to children in some of the worlds most vulnerable nations.
The inconvenient truth behind their plan is that the efficacy of their approach, despite already scaling to more than 500 schools on the African continent since 2008, is unproven. What evidence they do have for efficacy is the equivalent of what British diplomats might call a “dodgy dossier”. Their published white papers intended to demonstrate efficacy are nothing more than a “sexed up” marketing report that “has such considerable weaknesses that its claims need to be treated with scepticism”.
These are the words of renowned statistician Professor Harvey Goldstein who took the trouble of studying BIA’s reports when august organisations like Harvard and Stanford simply parroted them without questioning the source or flawed methodology. Likewise, organisations like the World Bank, Pearson et al have invested so heavily without due diligence that they are surely too embarrassed to admit that they’ve been duped and continue to invest seeking a return on their money, at any cost.
BIA and their investors have identified poverty as a market opportunity as Power, corruption and lies – Friction Burns – Medium:
