Tom Ultican left a STEM career to teach high school physics and advanced mathematics in California. Since his retirement, he has become a crack investigator of scams in education.
His latest deep-dive into dirty deals, unsurprisingly is in Texas, where state officials are quietly steering major contracts to a Laurene Powell Jobs company called Amplify.
Amplify is a tech company that delivers instruction online. It was created by a tech company in Brooklyn to meet the needs of the New York City public schools when Michael Bloomberg was mayor and non-educator Joel Klein was chancellor of the schools. When Klein resigned, he persuaded Rupert Murdoch to buy Amplify for $500 million, and he became CEO.
Amplify developed software for its curriculum, and it sold both its own tablets and software. Launched with a bang, it soon imploded due to problems (the tablets sometimes spontaneously combusted), and sales never took off. Murdoch decided to sell it and write off a loss of $371 million.
Now we know that billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs owns Amplify, and the company is very cozy with the Texas Education Agency. Amplify is back with its plans to digitize and standardize instruction.
Tom Ultican begins:
In March, the Texas house of representative’s education committee introduced House Bill 1605. Chairman Brad Buckley from Killeen was lead sponsor and 25 other members are listed as co-sponsors including one Democrat. The actual author of the bill and who if anyone paid for it to be written is not known. The legislation creates two major changes. It transfers purchasing power from the state education board to State Commissioner of Education Mike Morath and it opens the door for Laurene Powell Jobs’ Amplify to control instructional materials for the Foundation School Program.
The Texas Education Agency (TEA) explains,
“The primary source of state funding for Texas school districts is the Foundation School Program (FSP). This program ensures that all school districts, regardless of property wealth, receive ‘substantially equal access to similar revenue per student at similar tax effort.’”
Foundation curriculum includes the list of the big four subjects mapped out by the TEA curriculum division.
English Language Arts and Reading
Mathematics
Science
Social Studies
The material is to be delivered using open education resources (OER). This means the content deliverance via interactive electronic screens. Districts will have the right not to use the curriculum however the structure of HB 1605 bribes them to employ it.
Under this new legislation, the state of Texas is contracting with Amplify to write the curriculum according to TEA guidelines. Amplify will also provide daily lesson plans for all teachers. The idea is to educate all Texas children using digital devices and scripted lesson plans while teachers are tasked with monitoring student progress.
Senate bill 2565 is the companion legislation. The language of neither HB 1605 nor SB 2565 mention Amplify. However, during the senate education committee public comments period on SB 2565 it was revealed that TEA had already given Amplify a $50,000,000 pandemic contract. When witnesses referenced Amplify as the purported contractor, senators did not push back and the only company the Senators spoke about themselves was Amplify. So it is clear that it will be Amplify and some people in the know believe Commissioner Morath has already made a deal with the company.
Please open the link and read on. Amplify is not only risen from the ashes, but it’s on the road to profiting by the creation of a teacher-proof curriculum.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So , we know if it’s happening in Texas strung out Brooklyn Then it’s happening in Newark New Jersey. !!!!!
This is INSANE, never mind the fact that Amplify will provide daily lesson plans teachers ONLY monitor. DUH…
“Under this new legislation, the state of Texas is contracting with Amplify to write the curriculum according to TEA guidelines. Amplify will also provide daily lesson plans for all teachers. The idea is to educate all Texas children using digital devices and scripted lesson plans while teachers are tasked with monitoring student progress.”
This approach to learning will “BLOW-UP” in their faces as students languish.
And who will get blamed? I bet the teachers and students, not Amplify will get blamed.
My grandson attends middle school at an El Paso County public school. Much of the curriculum is already delivered by canned cyber programs. He has no books, and all assignments are collected at a digital portal. It is a tedious, rote, uninspired way to ‘educate.’
That saves the cost of teachers.
This type of instruction is a ‘bait and switch’ for the children of the poor and working class. It will provide cheap, subpar training instead of thought provoking, comprehensive education. If communities do not reject this treatment, the certified teachers will surely be eliminated and replaced by $12 per hour digital clerks soon after.
Powell Jobs simply is looking for a way to privatize public education from the inside out. Of course, she can also make lots of $$ by selling students’ data and violating their privacy. This has always been the objective of the 1%. Where is the proof that this approach is helpful to students? There is lots of evidence that shows that cyber education gets poor academic results. It also has negative impact on developing eyes and brains of children. Adolescents that spend too much time in front of screens are more likely to become depressed. Has anyone in Texas read this research? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6632122/
Powell Jobs is a two bit used car salesman selling lemons. When you buy a lemon, eventually you have to take the hit, stop throwing money down the sinkhole to fix it, and go with something that works. Buying lemons is expensive.
Amplify has an excellent science curriculum created and field tested by The Learning Design Group at UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science. It is highly rated and meets all three strands of the NGSS standards. I hate to see Amplify go to something like iReady as the main curriculum for students and educators. I have taught in California public schools for 30 years and worrry about my young colleagues. I am involved in politics in my rural community and now at the state level and I am ready to spend my retirement years advocating and fighting to save public education against things like what Texas is doing.
iReady is junk, indeed. But you know who has a better science curriculum than Amplify? You’re a teacher. You do!
Tom, I think it’s time to start incorporating impact finance into your analysis. It’s one thing to follow the money, it’s another to understand the meaning behind it. The plan is to use digital media across all educational models to create digital twins of children, teachers (including AI chatbot mentors), and educational systems. The data generated will be fed into machine learning through platforms like Ocean Protocol in an attempt to advance the Singularity. The next phase is the creation of a global a biohybrid social computer. The meta-data acquired from interacting with modular media content will be used for profit, but ALSO to value children as data commodities and refine their gamified archetypes for future use in the ant computer. This is the first of a four or maybe five part series. Check out the slides. There’s more than you’re covering here. As a tech guy you should be able to step up your game. https://wrenchinthegears.com/2023/04/14/texas-open-education-resources-personalized-programming-for-extended-reality-and-social-impact-markets/
Zombie ed-reform. No new ideas. Recycle failures, double-down and expand.
It blows my mind when these boondoggles fail they pop up somewhere else. The superintendent in Charlotte left to become Klein’s second in command at Amplify. He was a good man that got caught up in the high tech con. Of course Texas, along with other Republican led states, is willing to waste so much of the tax payers money. So I think Democrats should turn Reagan’s proclamation about government on its head: Corporations are the problem.