Uwituze

Posted: July 26th, 2013 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 2 Comments »

We’ve got our hands full.  The job is to help a mass of poor kids in grade 6, succeed on a high-stakes exam at unprecedented scale, that they’ll take in two years.

But I just can’t help but wonder…

What happens after Class 8?

Murky.  High KCPE score can allow you to attend high school.  But there are challenges both with admission and $, even if you do score well.  And even then, you’ll be with kids from a different social class.

I’ve seen that story before.  Kids who attended good charter middle schools, improved enough to earn scholarships to prep schools, and then struggled, in part because they didn’t feel they belonged.

And then what?  University?  Even fewer get to attend.  There’s no FAFSA here.  No easily available loan.

My friend Dai Ellis and his posse have been working on this puzzle.  Nice story in Scientific American about them:

Jeffrey Bartholet writes:

For a student like Uwituze, who was an infant during the slaughter by Hutus of some 800,000 Tutsis and their Hutu sympathizers in 1994, this was an extraordinary opportunity. Her family fled during the genocide: first to Burundi, then to Tanzania, then to Kenya. “We lost our money, our house, everything,” she says. Schooling was all that Uwituze really had after years on the run.

She returned to Rwanda at the age of 14 and graduated from secondary school last November. The annual tuition at Rwandan public universities is about $1,500 a year for a substandard education, which is more than Uwituze’s family can afford. Her mother is jobless, and Uwituze has three younger siblings who look to her for support.

When she was turned down by an organization that helps aspiring Rwandan students get scholarships at American universities, an official from that group suggested she join Kepler. She became one of 15 students invited to attend the prepilot course to test the MOOC format. She then applied to be accepted into a larger class, which will be enrolled in a full MOOC curriculum in the fall.

Kepler received 2,696 applications for just 50 slots in the fall program. Six hundred students were invited to take an exam in April, of which 200, including Uwituze, made it to a final round of cuts.

Read the whole thing.  As well as the whole special issue on Learning in the Digital Age.

Hurry up, Kepler team.  The Bridge Academies have a pretty large crop of 12-year-olds in Class 6.  You got six years to get huge.