In 2016, Liberia embarked on a radical educational experiment. At a stroke, the government outsourced 93 primary schools, covering 8.6 per cent of state pupils, to eight private organisations.
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“I wouldn’t say these results were a failure, but they were disappointing,” says Justin Sandefur, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, which led the assessment. “And instead of growing, what learning gains there were plateaued,” he adds, referring to findings that the effects of outsourcing, both on educational attainment and teacher absenteeism, faded over time. Some of the operators disagreed with both the findings and the critical tone of the assessment, which, they said, significantly underestimated the difficulties of working in Liberia. Paul Skidmore, founder of Rising Academies, which performed among the best overall, says allowances had to be made for working in a country that was emerging from a civil war and where some teachers were functionally illiterate.
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Aggregate results disguised significant divergence. Three of the operators — BRAC, Omega Schools and Stella Maris — had no statistical effect on learning outcomes, with Stella Maris never actually taking control of its four assigned schools (although operators disputed the RCT findings, saying it underestimated their impact on learning). If those three are excluded, the other five operators improved maths and literacy scores by a statistically significant 0.4 standard deviations. Operators say they did even better than that. In particular, Bridge (now better known as NewGlobe) has disputed the methodology, which it argues underestimates the impact of students actually attending its schools. Under the RCT methodology, all children on the school roster the year before the study began, including those who dropped out or went on to other schools, were counted as though they were taught at the outsourced schools. Sandefur says this “intention to treat” analysis was standard academic practice because it ensured operators could not manipulate the data by, say, weeding out underperformers.