Apologies if this is tiresome, but I feel obligated to respond to a recent thread by @mulagostarr, head of a philanthropic foundation that funds many people I respect, publicly asserting my work with @marome1 is “unfair” and “misleading”.
This is false. Expulsions in year 1 were well documented in the media and RCT. But the RCT also found Bridge *further* harmed enrollment and dropout by year 3. It's an ongoing problem.
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Let’s focus on the numbers, not adjectives. The ITT effect (0.19sd) is the same after one and three years. That means kids could read an additional 4 words per minute on average, and 5-8 additional words among the best operators.
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Bridge openly declared its ambition to take over all 2,700 schools in Liberia. See their own slide deck. When we complained about using the RCT *baseline* to justify expansion, Kevin criticized us publicly.
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The RCT lasted 3 years. The Liberian govt demanded data in year 1 to hold private operators accountable for their management of public schools. Kevin had other priorities.
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Costs have fallen (see chart), which is great. Even so, average spending remains >$120/pupil (plus teacher salaries), so the program more than triples current spending on public schools. Meanwhile, Liberia can’t make payroll.
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100% true, as we've noted. Nevertheless, we were dismayed to see the RCT results on test scores used as cover for MtM’s founder Katie Meyler after the fact.
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Not for lack of trying. Despite the conflict of interest, Mulago didn't recuse itself on the board of IPA (@poverty_action) who ran the RCT with us, and @socfinuk and @bridgeintlacads wrote to our bosses and funders to impede us.
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cgdev.org/sites/default/…
And replication data is here:
dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?…
/end