MiSchool is a web app developed by CERP Labs to help school administrators and teachers manage a range of manual tasks such as attendance, enrollment, fee collection, and grade performance. This reduces the risk of information loss and inaccurate data, whilst increasing the capacity of school administrators and teachers for other non-repetitive tasks.
The use of technology in increasing teachers’ efficiency, identifying student learning gaps, and providing more targeted learning plans for students are clear benefits that MiSchool is delivering. Instead of manually grading each quiz and test, teachers can spend valuable hours in actual teaching that can enhance learning. Instead of providing general lectures to all students, teachers can teach at the right level (TaRL) for each student.
However, as much as we hope for technology to be the silver bullet to all education issues, there are shortcomings in the use of technology. The abuse of technology that I am referring to is the reliance of technology in solving problems that we fail to diagnose the correct root causes of. The technology solutions offered by MiSchool can only improve student outcomes if teachers’ inefficiency and mismatch between lesson plans and learning level are the root causes for poor student performance. If the root cause for poor student performance is teacher absenteeism instead, the provision of technology is unlikely to improve student outcomes.
The diagnostic approach to policy thinking is one of the central ideas taught in DEV-101: Economic Development Theory and Evidence of the MPA/ID program at the Harvard Kennedy School. Hence, I believe the work done by both CERP and CERP Labs are equally important where the research completed by CERP is crucial to inform us of the underlying root causes for policy problems at a local level, while CERP Labs builds the necessary technology tools to address those root causes. This is why MiSchool is a culmination of 15 years of research work with iterative feedback from end users, the low-cost private schools served by MiSchool.
