Bloomberg News reports that Rupert Murdoch’s effort to cash in on education is “riddled with failures.”
The education division at Murdoch’s News Corporation is called Amplify; its CEO is Joel Klein. Its biggest contract is in Greensboro, North Carolina. Amplify recalled its first batch of 15,000 tablets in 2013 when chargers melted and screens cracked.
“By the end of June, Murdoch’s News Corp. will have invested more than $1 billion in Amplify, its division that makes the tablets, sells an online curriculum and offers testing services. Amplify, which never set a timetable for turning a profit, has yet to do so. It reported a $193 million loss last year, and its annual revenue represented only about 1 percent of News Corp.’s sales of $8.6 billion.”
“The education effort has been riddled with technology failures, fragile equipment, a disconnect between tablet marketers and content developers, and an underestimation of how difficult it would be to win market share from entrenched rivals such as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Co. in the kindergarten to high school education market.
“After all of these years of investment, it would really behoove them to show some wins,” said Tim Nollen, an analyst at Macquarie Capital USA in New York who has a “neutral” rating on News Corp. shares. “So far, I haven’t seen any……..”
“Amplify’s experience shows how even the most deep-pocketed new players find it challenging to change the way children are taught. Billionaires such as Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates and real estate and insurance investor Eli Broad have expressed frustration their philanthropy hasn’t done more to improve student achievement. Murdoch is discovering his own challenges as he seeks to make a profit from overhauling education — as have other education entrepreneurs before him.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
KARMA
Amplify is home to failed education reformers like Joel Klien, Christofer Cerf and Peter Gorman. Amplify provides golden parachute rewards for BROADIE reformers once their disrupt, destroy and devalue work in public education systems wears thin on the general public.
Cerf ran away from the NJ DOE and said all is fine just before the mayhem went public. Gorman ran from NC and was replaced by another BROADIE who was also run out of town.
In Montclair NJ, BROADIE Penny MacCormack recently abruptly resigned amid dropping real estate values and mayhem in the previously highly regarded public schools there. Perhaps she too can recieve a low show, no value job at Amplify: she has the resume – Broadie, no educational accomplishments, widespread public resistance to her policies, fiscal mismanagement and a record of distain for teachers. Seems like a perfect fit for the FOX news sister company Amplify!
Old man Eli must be very proud of his spawn!
This says it all “Murdoch is discovering his own challenges as he seeks to make a profit from overhauling education” – their unwavering laserly focus on PROFIT is the dirty rotten common core. They tirelessly seek to devour the market share in education and get their ROI. They care about nothing else.
I despise the words laserly, tirelessly and reimagining when they come to these children’s advocates, who are advocating for nothing but their bank accounts. I know these words were not used above, but I was reading some comments about Moskowitz elsewhere today and it is so easy to find the paid trolls posing as parents.
I don’t know that Moskowitz has to pay her trolls. When parents are required to put in volunteer time and go to “rallies” for more charter schools and that sort of thing, I think she gets her trolls for free – part of the requirement of keeping your kid in her school.
Eva’s free day labor from her parents is Wall St’s latest fad- volunteers! Volunteerism is the new feel-good name for free labor. Check out WaPo’s latest agitprop about volunteers boosting reading scores.
From the article: “Paid reading specialists have been tutoring children in school for decades, but experts say that their roles have shifted over time, and specialists are now as likely to spend time coaching classroom teachers as working one-on-one with children.”
Experts say, blah blah blah. Kids don’t need university prepared, paid reading teachers when anyone who has a few hours a week will give up their time for a poor chil and teach them to read… Notice in the article they promote Americorp to pick up the tutoring. TFA is funded under the umbrella of Americorp- maybe TFA is revising their model?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/can-volunteers-help-kids-read-more-proficiently-new-research-says-yes/2015/03/28/7141c57c-c4ec-11e4-ad5c-3b8ce89f1b89_story.html
when will these reformers realize that if it was so easy to fix education, it would have been done already? oh, but they just know better than the rest of us, don’t cha know? meanwhile, they keep getting the money… while public schools get less…
Fixing public education was never the goal. The “reformers” are interested in privatizing and monetizing public education.
B.I.N.G.O. …. and Duncan was his name-o.
Why would a public school district contract with a public school basher? There’s plenty of devices and programs out there. Why go with a provider who objects to the schools very existence?
Public schools should use their huge market power. I think they can do much, much better than Rupert Murdoch and his merry band of privatizers. They’re in the driver’s seat. I want public schools to be hard bargainers on behalf of the public and public school children. Ignore the hype and the tech sales pitches by politicians/CEO’s and get us a GREAT deal.
They have enormous clout. They have to use it and stop acting as if these companies are doing us all a favor. They’re not. We’re doing them a favor by letting them in front of our kids. They need our kids much more than our kids need them.
Purely a guess here; I’m working from memory. (!) But if I recall correctly, one of Amplify’s officials is Pete Gorman, former Charlotte-Mecklenburg superintendent. The superintendent in Guilford County (Greensboro) is a former CMS executive. Leaving aside the question of why a public school system would work with a public school basher, I’m guessing the original link was a personal connection.
Thanks.
I wonder when kids themselves will rebel against being poked and prodded and observed every second of every day. It seems like there has to be some space where they can have a private thought or action when they’re doing their work at school.
Can you imagine learning to write where every keystroke, every draft, was analyzed for Progress Toward College and Career Ready? It exhausts me and I’m not 9 years old. It feels oppressive.
This is the US Department of Education. For some crazy reason they think the state role is to promote product:
“Online learning systems have the ability to capture learner behaviors and can operate on the data to provide a variety of stakeholders with feedback to improve teaching, learning, and educational decision making.”
Gosh, nothing could possibly go wrong there! I hope there’s no profit motive involved here and everyone involved is a Good Person! 🙂
http://tech.ed.gov/learning-analytics/
The tail (teachers, standards, tests, technology, policies) will never wag the dog (children, parenting, culture) in any significant way. That’s why we see so many flat-lines. Minor gains here and there. The torturing of data to make it confess. Political smoke and mirrors. Silver bullets and snake oil promises.
Thanks for letting us know of this great epic fail!
Surprise…no one wants crappy tracking devices that blow up and burn your children sold by a man who hacked into the cell phone of a missing murdered 13 year old.
Linda: thank you for remembering.
😎
Murdoch doesn’t want the whole 1 trillion in education dollars. He just wants a few percentage points of 1 trillion. After all, 1% of 1 trillion is $10 billion. 5% of 1 trillion is $5 billion. .1% of 1 trillion is $1 billion. Anyway you look at it just a fraction of a percent makes Rupert Murdoch and Michael Bloomberg lots of cash. Eventually those loses will turn into huge capital gains.
“charters melted” Yes, some sort of Wizard of Oz ending would be nice.
Change is difficult. Teachers who are in the business of creating change know this best. We told these players so. They thought it simple, since managing corporations is. You get to fire the people who do not learn in a corporation. Public school teachers can not do that. It seems these particular reformers had their analogies all wrong.
Whoo-Whee
I have a relative who works for an adaptive learning company.
Most of what they claim to be able to do is massively oversold, and a lot of the “thought leaders” in the business are way too much like the technology moguls of the 1990s who thought adding “.com” to everything was a sure route to 300 to 1 PE ratios.
Lots of potential. Too little patience.
Professor Duncan: Predicts College and Career Readiness!
Crowned Heads of Wall Street in Awe of his Crystal Ball.
“Professor Duncan never guesses, he knows!”
Just as there is a Dow Jones Industrial Stock Index and a Standard and Poor’s 500 Stock Index, perhaps observers of so-called education reform should create the Chris Cerf Ed Deform Index.
Starting with his stint at Edision Schools, which rapidly went from Miraculous Savior of Public Education to a penny stock, and then moving on to NYC, where he and Joel Klein cooked the test scores to aid Bloomberg’s hostile takeover of the public schools, Cerf is a one-man wrecking crew for schools and institutional failure.
Then, New Jersey, where the Booker/Christie/Anderson attack on public schools is thrashing in failure, and finally to Rupert Murdoch’s – he of hacking the phones of murdered children – dismally performing Amplify, Cerf is a one-man marker for corporate greed and institutional incompetence. It seems that wherever he lands, bad things happen; that a huge component of class antagonism follows along wherever he goes seems to make this gross incompetent more attractive in the eyes of the grabby and ignorant plutocrats who fund so-called reform.
When he gets hired at the Gates, Broad or Walton Foundations, we’ll know that so-called education reform is on its last legs.
It’s clear as day that murdoch cares not for education, (neither does gates for that matter) and they are only pushing an agenda that serves non-righteous purposes (purposes which are still being met even when they apparently lose money) for when a school, teacher and student misses even one chance to truly educate and truly be educated by a “glitch in the system” or “recalls in technology” or “server crashes” etc these poor, selfish, ignorant, self-tormented, love-less behemoths and their agendas are fulfilled. They can’t just come out and say “hey, we’re gonna control education institutions, teaching and content!” they can’t just come out and say “we don’t want a powerful, creative, free and independent thinking, self-reliant citizenry” but rather they couch their ideas and actions in pc terms (“frustrated that their philanthropy hasn’t done more to improve student achievement”) and philanthropy, and philanthropy is EXACTLY, exactly the opposite of what they are doing.
Technology in education? I say teachers do it better, we at TAJA TT® say teachers do it better. ESPECIALLY 2 teachers in one classroom do it better than tech.
But for a teacher to be a powerful educator they need creative license vis a vis curriculum, content and assessment in their classroom AND they need to understand the psychological makeup of the kids and transmit their content accordingly. If the teacher does not have these, they will be unable to foster empowered students and they will increasingly become like robots, regurgitating information programmed in by whoever/whatever controls the curriculum/content.
It gets clearer then to see where the trend/agenda is going. Robots in edu. Murdoch lost money yes, but he played his part. It’s out there, tech’s on the way in a big way.
For devoted deeply responsible artists of teaching(teachers) check out T1 and T2 at http://tajatajataja.com/
For those with their eyes on tech in edu, check out T3 at http://tajatajataja.com/
wishing you all Peace, Harmony and Prosperity
Alan W Abrams