World Teacher

It was late summer 1985 and Michael Kremer, just out of Harvard, was visiting a rural part of Kenya.

Kremer had a place to stay but otherwise no ties in this isolated patch of the East African country. “I was called into the office of the head of the local government and told he wanted to talk to me,” says Kremer, an associate professor of economics at MIT. “I was a little nervous.”

As it turned out, the official was starting the area’s first-ever high school and wondered if Kremer would teach there. Though he’d planned only a short stay, Kremer said yes. The decision would have a profound influence on his life — not least because it led him to found WorldTeach, an international education agency.

The year he spent in Kenya had its challenges: The school had just three students at the outset, only one room, no electricity, and, like most buildings in the region, a tin roof. (The last, notes Kremer, meant that “when it rained, it was pretty hard to teach.”)

On the other hand, the students were attentive. “Because not everybody gets to go to secondary school,” Kremer notes, “the kids there are pretty diligent.” Moreover, when he started looking for someone to replace him, “I found a lot of interest in doing something like this.” So when he returned to Cambridge, he suggested to some friends that they launch an organization to place volunteer teachers in Kenya.

Grew up in Kansas

The reason they called their organization WorldTeach, says Kremer, is that “we thought we might be expanding to other countries, and we figured that ‘WorldTeach’ had a modern ring to it.” Today the organization, still Cambridge-based and now affiliated with the Harvard Institute for International Development, has a staff of 13 and roughly 250 volunteers in 10 countries from Ecuador to Lithuania to China.

There was a time in life when Kremer might not have seemed a likely bet to launch, at age 22, what has become a well-regarded international organization. Raised in Kansas, he was interested in foreign affairs as a youth but had no direct involvement with emerging nations and their problems.

At Harvard, though, he began to focus on such issues. One result was his first exposure to the developing world, and a lesson in the potential gaps between theoretical constructs based on numbers in reports and real-life situations.

“In my undergraduate thesis, I compared a rural employment program in India and a food-stamp program in Sri Lanka.” he says. “I spent a lot of time in offices and libraries in those countries, looking up data. Then I went to a village in Sri Lanka, and realized I hadn’t learned very much at all about what was really happening.”

Kremer, who headed WorldTeach for three years, says building it also held lessons for him. To launch the organization, he and his friends “did a poster on a Mac computer, got the addresses of placement offices at universities around the country, and sent the posters out.” But their success then brought into focus the practical problems of dispatching volunteers to emerging-country settings thousands of miles from their native land.

There was, for one example, the challenge of developing volunteer assignments in areas that lacked phone links. “You’d drive three hours to arrange a placement with the headmaster of a school, and the headmaster wouldn’t be there, and you’d have to drive three hours back.” There was also the occasional need to help volunteers get emergency medical attention in circumstances where expert help was long hours away.

Despite the pitfalls, Kremer loved the experience. “It was exciting,” he says. “We were making things up as we went along.”

“Genius” award

Kremer entered Harvard’s graduate program in economics after his third year at WorldTeach. He came to MIT in 1992, and joined the faculty the following year.

Kremer has been steadily building his reputation since. Professor Olivier Blanchard, a colleague and sometime collaborator, says one reason Kremer is making a mark is his creativity. “He can make you think about things in new ways,” says Blanchard, adding wryly, “sometimes even when you don’t want to.”

Kremer’s work, along with his WorldTeach role, recently earned him a MacArthur Foundation Award. These prizes, informally known as “genius awards,” go to individuals with unusual promise of contributing to their fields and society at large.

The faculty member’s research topics have ranged from how and why AIDS spreads to the best ways to reduce the poaching of endangered animals and plants. But Kremer, who recently agreed to chair WorldTeach’s board, has also explored issues that first surfaced when he taught overseas.

Thus, he has analyzed how having textbooks affects the progress of pupils in the area of Kenya where he taught. He’s also studying the impact of adding a second teacher in village schools in India, and exploring a Colombian program that distributes vouchers for secondary schools by lottery.

A major goal is to find out what really works. “It’s almost a platitude that investment in education is important for economic development,” notes Kremer, “but there’s a lot of work to be done on the best ways to invest.”

by Richard Anthony

On Topic: education+teaching, faculty