Education Week - August 26, 2015 - 12

DIGITAL DIRECTIONS > Tracking news and ideas in educational technology
www.digitaldirections.org

Market Realities Pummel Ed. Company's Expectations
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

and analytics business of Wireless
Generation, the nonprofit company
that it acquired for $360 million, as
a vehicle for selling whole new product lines to schools. (Wireless Generation co-founder Larry Berger, who
moved into a top post with Amplify,
was a board member of Education
Week's nonprofit parent company
until last month.)
Then, News Corp. gambled that a
digital device designed specifically
for classrooms could compete for
market share inside schools with
popular consumer electronics, such
as Apple's iPad.
And ultimately, Amplify staked its
future on the mistaken belief that
it could dramatically disrupt the
K-12 instructional-materials market-a notoriously slow-to-change
field long dominated by a few major
players.
The irony of Amplify's rapid rise and
fall, Levin said, is that the company
was correct in asserting that public
schools in the United States are finally ready to shed the status quo and
embrace the digital revolution.
But the company miscalculated,
he said, in thinking that schools
would shift their dollars and loyalties overnight from the large compa-

nies they knew to a large company
they didn't.
"Schools weren't looking for a substitute," Levin said. "They were looking for more choice."

Grand Vision Collapses
When asked for comment about
Amplify's troubles, a spokesman for
the company said only that it was
"focused on the growth and success of our digital curriculum and
assessment products," and that it
looked forward to "partnering with
those who share our commitment to
reimagining the way teachers teach
and students learn."
Amplify's tablet business has been
discontinued.
That new reality is a far cry from
the vision that Joel A. Klein-the
hard-charging former New York
City chancellor hired in 2010 by
News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch to run the company's new education division-laid out to investors
at a June 2013 conference.
Then, Klein described Amplify's
strategy as a "three-part play" that
would "radically transform the
system."
Amplify Insight, Klein said, was
"all about analytics, data, and assessment." That was the work of Wireless

Generation, which had already established a strong presence in the K-12
market, with tens of millions of dollars' worth of contracts from districts,
states, and federally funded consortia
developing tests aligned with the new
Common Core State Standards.
Amplify Access was to be the
company's "platform play," through
a "tablet that we've optimized for
K-12," Klein said.
And Amplify Learning, a core
curriculum originally intended to
cover math, science, and English/
language arts for grades K-12, was
to be the company's "leapfrog play"
that would allow Amplify to surpass
its competitors.
Klein boasted that Amplify would
be able to quickly outmaneuver such
established education publishers as
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGrawHill, and Pearson because it would
not be tethered to "legacy" print products already in circulation.
By designing its materials to be
digital-first and tailoring them to
the common-core standards, Klein
told potential investors, Amplify was
going to "attack" what he described
as K-12 education's $17 billion instructional materials and technology markets.
From the very beginning, that vision ran smack into messy realities.

In September 2011, before News
Corp. had even rechristened its
prize acquisition, Wireless Generation lost a $27 million no-bid
contract with the New York state
education department. The state
comptroller raised concerns about
the scandal over illegal phone-hacking then engulfing a British newspaper owned by News Corp. and,
perhaps, bowed to pressure from
New York teachers' unions longhostile to Klein.
Then, in October 2013, Amplify's
first-and, as it turned out, only-
significant digital-tablet client
suspended use of the devices after
reporting high breakage rates and
related hardware problems.
The 73,000-student Guilford
County, N.C., district eventually got
its tablet-computing initiative back
on track, thanks in large part to
Amplify's willingness to absorb millions of dollars in losses to keep the
project alive.
By that point, however, the Amplify
brand had been tarnished, and the
landscape had shifted. Tablets of all
sorts had begun to lose K-12 market
share to Google's Chromebook.
In retrospect, said John Richards,
the president of Consulting Services
for Education Inc., which advises
education companies, attempting to

create its own hardware to compete
with consumer products was Amplify's first big mistake.
"There has never been a successful 'education machine,' in part because of the speed of improvements
in consumer electronics," Richards
said.
"It's best to leave the hardware to
the professionals."

Curriculum Falls Flat
Amplify's biggest bet, though, was
on its curriculum.
During that same 2013 talk to
investors, Klein referred to the
company's $180 million investment
that year, which had shown up as
operating losses on News Corp.'s
books. Klein said to expect more of
the same the following year.
"While it's obviously significant,
I think it's absolutely essential," he
said of the gobs of money the company was pouring into product development. "This is not a market you're
going to disrupt ... unless you're willing to put in the resources."
At the South by Southwest education conference in March 2014,
Amplify unveiled its middle-grades
English/language arts curriculum-
replete with dramatic readings by
famous actors, graphic-novel-style

Schools Urged to Put a Higher Priority
On 'De-Identifying' Student Data
By Benjamin Herold &
Michelle R. Davis
School districts and the companies that work with them need to
put a greater emphasis on ensuring that the massive amounts of
student data collected every year
are cleared of identifying information before records are shared or
released to outside organizations.
While many districts and vendors are contemplating how to keep
student information confidential,
the "de-identification" of sensitive
student data is not always technically simple to do, and a lack of
resources means some districts are
ill-equipped for the task, said Jules
Polonetsky, the executive director of
the Future of Privacy Forum.
"De-identification isn't easy," Polonetsky said. "It's really hard when
you're dealing with an open system
like schools, where parents, volunteers, and teachers need access to
student data for collaboration, but
at the same time we want the best
standards of privacy control."
To shed light on the legal and
technical gray area involving the
sharing and use of student data, the
forum released a paper this month
on the de-identification of sensitive
student information.

Ideally, that process involves purging student records of any information directly linked to an individual
student, as well as removing or
obscuring any indirect information
that could allow others to figure out
who a student is, before the records
are shared with a third party.
But that is easier said than done
in an era in which students generate significant amounts of digital
information, data brokers use public and private sources to amass
extensive profiles of individuals,
and researchers and vendors use
increasingly advanced statistical
and mathematical techniques in the
course of everyday business.

Room for Interpretation
Personally identifiable information
generally includes a student's name
and address, the names of family
members, and such individual identifiers as a Social Security number
or student ID. Examples of indirect
identifiers might include a student's
date and place of birth, race, religion,
weight, financial information, and
mother's maiden name.
At the federal level, the handling
of such information is governed
primarily by the federal Family
Educational Rights and Privacy

12 | EDUCATION WEEK | August 26, 2015 | www.edweek.org

Act. FERPA, as the law is commonly
known, "prohibits the disclosure of
education records containing personally identifiable student data without parent or eligible student consent," according to the forum's paper.
But that leaves open considerable
room for interpretation-and disagreement.
The forum, which is closely aligned
with industry and is the prime
mover behind a voluntary pledge on
protection of student-data privacy
that more than 160 companies have
signed, believes that "appropriately
de-identified" student information is
not covered by FERPA.
"Properly de-identified student
data thus may be shared without
limitation under FERPA (although
other federal and state privacy laws
may apply)," the group writes. "Furthermore, 'de-identified' information
from education records is not subject
to any destruction requirements because, by definition, it is not 'personally identifiable information.' "
But Fordham University law professor and privacy expert Joel Reidenberg, also an academic adviser to
the forum, pointed out what he views
as problems with that approach and
the ways in which it highlights "holes
in FERPA's scope of coverage."
Technical and statistical advances

PROTECTING PERSONAL INFORMATION
"De-identification" of student data is the process of purging or
altering identifiable information from student records before it is
shared with organizations outside the school district. Personally
identifiable information generally includes a student's name and
address, the names of family members, and personal identifiers, such
as Social Security number or student ID. Indirect identifiers might
include the student's date and place of birth, race, religion, weight,
financial information, or mother's maiden name.
Three key techniques for de-identifying student data include:
* BLURRING: Reducing the precision of disclosed data to minimize
individual identification. This may involve grouping data into broader
categories so unique cases are not highlighted. For example, student
information might be placed in a "minority" category rather than
individual categories, such as African-American or Hispanic.
* PERTURBATION: Making small changes to data to prevent individual
identification from unique or rare population groups. Some data can
be swapped among individuals for analyses in which certain factors
don't matter. For instance, if birthplace is irrelevant, one student's
birthplace can be switched with another's.
* SUPPRESSION: Removing some forms of data, such as race or place
of birth, altogether to prevent individual identification, particularly
within small groups.
SOURCE: Future of Privacy Forum

http://www.digitaldirections.org http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - August 26, 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - August 26, 2015