Uganda is shutting down schools funded by Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates

I have a theory:

As corporations become monopolies (or become part of stable oligopolies); management becomes complacent and loses its focus on raw competence; they start to promote employees based on social connections (and popularity with peers) instead of skill - So then, actually competent employees become disillusioned with management, lose faith in the system and they get lazy.

I think the workplace has become too social. Managers these days are terrible. I've worked with/for many managers as a contractor (maybe 10 in total) and out of all of them, I think there was only maybe 1 or 2 who were actually competent.

I think if companies just promoted based on age, they'd do a better job overall. It's depressing to see brilliant, experienced people in their late 30s still working as low-ranking employees (under the direction of some inexperienced 20-something).

Some big companies are indistinguishable from communism - People there are lazy because they know that good work doesn't get rewarded; it's the customers who end up paying through lost quality of goods and services.

When people block their ads (proudly I might ad), and refuse to pay, they don't have the money to do any actual reporting. Add on to that the fact that just repeating a tweet and speculating on it attracts the crowds who don't block ads, and you get what we have now.

The masses only want a headline, and the rest won't pay for anything else anyway.

Fake news has influenced the US presidential election. We know that the british government recently shut down Russia Todays UK offices for spreading propaganda.

Information is a very powerful tool. And school is one of the places where children can be largely influenced by what they learn.

I am not saying its 100% true but I think there may be some element of "western" ideals embedded in the school literature that makes the Ugandan government react.

So again, we have to look from both sides here to understand the issue entirely.

Having a few anecdotage colour quotes from parents or students saying "I like it here" adds very little.

If you really want to know what's happening, you would have to

A) Poll a large distributed sample of students/parents

B) construct objective and meaningful metrics by which the private/public schools can be compared

Both A and B are extremely expensive, and do you really think western news readers like you and me would pay back CNN for such a major investment?

What makes you think a student would be able to quantify how qualified a school is? Might as well ask a random movie-goer about cinema fire code violations.

As far as I can tell, this organisation set up schools in a country, didn't share the curriculum with the education board and has unqualified teachers instructing students. This sort of thing should be frowned upon anywhere in the world, regardless of how 'high-tech' the schools are or who the financiers are.

The story was not detailed, but not biased in any way.

CNN is a mouthpiece for NGOs/Bureaucrats/Lobbyists?

Really? Which 'bureaucrats'? Which 'lobbyists'?

The reporting was reasonable.

Maybe in 10 to 15 years it turns out that all graduates amounted to nothing because the education was not good enough and they had no future anyway. But by then thousands of very poor families would have been paying large sums of money for years to put their children through this useless school system.

Lots of potential for harm.

For example, "adding that privatization of education goes against human rights principles" seems to be entirely unsubstantiated to me. If private schools can offer a superior education at a lower cost than public schools, what human rights have been violated? Arguably it's against human rights to ban such schools when they're educating students.

This is definitely not the issue.

A) The schools are 'not or profit' - they don't make money.

B) It's absurd to suggest a company would try to 'make money' by targeting literally the poorest people in the world, that have no money. $6 a month. Thin margins. Do the math. You think a big American corp is interest in that?

The 'real story' is that the Ugandan government is severely neglecting their own population, and that the schools are embarrassing them and showing their incompetence.

So the corrupt government wants to shut it down.

The real answer is, of course, to fix the "substandard public schools", but that would require addressing the underlying poverty, which one side doesn't want to do and the other refuses to acknowledge exists (unless it's needed to shame teachers for strikes/walkouts).

When I'm reading a story like this, there are some immediate questions that come to mind:

1) what are the alternatives these students have and how accessible are they?

2) what are the students educational outcomes vs students who are using the alternative?

3) it seems the organization runs schools in other parts of Africa, so how are they received there?

I could go on...

The whole thing is a scheme to bilk money from the West. That's the only reason they allowed the schools in the first place, and they're going to keep kicking them around, ensuring that no real education can take place, and score millions in "licensing" fees.

Also, I don't understand why "for profit" is considered bad. You are not taking away the free public option but rather increasing their choice set by providing a private option. Parents can choose and that is generally considered to be welfare enhancing.

I'd love for CNN to do some real investigative journalism for a change and actually visit a few schools.

The schools are dam good, and that's why parents are willing to pay a little bit to send their kids there.

The problem is that the program exposes the failure of the Ugandan government in terms of their ability to get decent schools to all their citizens.

It's embarrassing for them, and that's why they are shutting it down.

This is Africa.

Even people who generally do the wrong thing can do the right thing sometimes - and Gates in particular has demonstrated this. Sure, contributing to reducing malaria deaths means more potential windows users, but it's a bit of a tenuous link.

Isn't it something they learnt from the developed countries? Never mind patent trolls