Creating Working Schools in Liberia

What obligation does a state have to educate its children? West Africa’s Liberia was founded by freed American slaves in the 1840s. In recent years, two long wars and an Ebola epidemic all but destroyed the country, not least its school system. Two years ago, not one of 25,000 high school graduates passed the country’s college entrance exam. Now, as correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports, Liberian educators are trying to rebuild their schools by experimenting with a new system: part private, run by a for-profit American company, and part public. There are uniforms, computers for teachers with built-in lesson plans, and a longer school day. But these moves have all drawn controversy, and critics of Liberia’s partnership with so-called “school in a box” programs, especially the teachers’ union, say teachers need smaller classes and more money to discourage rampant absenteeism.
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