Education Week - August 26, 2015 - 13

AMPLIFY'S TWISTS AND TURNS
animations, and heavy use of educational games.
During an earnings call shortly
before the launch, News Corp. CEO
Robert J. Thompson expressed confidence that the new product, which
he described as "the most important
part of the Amplify suite," would
take off.
"We'll be more than competitive come the time for [contract]

With such a huge
number of companies
coming into the
education market,
it's really going to
be difficult to be
successful quickly."
KAREN BILLINGS
Vice President, Education Division
Software & Information Industry
Association

tenders," Thompson told analysts,
specifically mentioning upcoming
statewide materials adoptions in
California, Idaho, Oklahoma, and
West Virginia.
But that year's instructional-materials selling season was already

have made it "easier and easier" to
take information that has ostensibly
been "de-identified" and link it back
to individual students, he said.
In addition, Reidenberg said,
"customized profiles" of individual
students constructed on the basis
of their interactions with technology may not include a student's
name or address, but are still being
used to make critical decisions
about what and how students are
taught.
Most troubling, he maintained,
is that neither parents nor advocacy groups appear to have standing to challenge the ways in which
FERPA is being interpreted, applied, and regulated by the U.S.
Department of Education. When
the Electronic Privacy Information
Center tried to sue the department
over controversial regulations it issued in 2011, the courts dismissed
the case, saying the organization
lacked legal standing.
Some of that situation could be
poised to change. In recent months,
bills have been introduced in Congress that would either rewrite
FERPA or create entirely new federal privacy laws aimed at protecting student information.

Setting District Standards
In the meantime, school districts
are left to grapple with the issue.
Bob Moore, an education technology consultant who leads privacy
initiatives for the Consortium for
School Networking, said there's a

well underway, putting Amplify at
a huge disadvantage. Poor sales
left the company under pressure
to win contracts for its curriculum
during the winter and spring of
2015.
During the most recent instructional-materials sales cycle, the curriculum flopped again.
News Corp. Chief Financial Officer Bedi Singh was left to break the
news during the company's Aug. 12
earnings call.
"The recent selling season for the
new school year for our digital ELA
curriculum overall has been disappointing, and the marketplace for
digital curriculum has been much
slower to develop than we initially
expected," Singh said. "We are in the
advanced stages of reviewing strategic alternatives for Amplify."

Disruption Lessons
It's not unusual for large companies with limited experience in
the education market to make such
big missteps, said Karen Billings,
the vice president of the education
division of the Software & Information Industry Association, a Washington-based trade group.
Selling to schools is difficult because the process is so decentralized and bureaucratic, Billings
said. And because districts' central
offices are often divided into distinct silos, there are no guarantees
that success selling one line of
products and services will translate to other offerings. Companies
also often underestimate just how

wide variety of understanding and
action on de-identification of student data and other privacy issues
among districts.
"Some are more sophisticated," he
said. "Others aren't sure what their
role is in doing this or how important it is."
The 52,500-student Howard
County, Md., district has taken the
issue seriously. It created the position of coordinator of data privacy,
and it strictly controls how information is released.
Those controls, said Teddy Hartman, the data-privacy coordinator,
include suppressing data on groups
containing fewer than 10 students;
encouraging some vendors to use
school or classroom accounts instead of individual student accounts when possible; minimizing
the amount of student data vendors
have access to in order to make
their digital tools work; and making
vendors sign data-privacy contracts
that are stricter than the forum's
privacy-protection pledge.
The district uses FERPA as the
"foundation, not the ceiling," Hartman said. "It's a baseline. We certainly strive to be more protective
around data."
In addition, he said, any new digital tools-including programs, apps,
and software being considered for
use-must go through a stringent
process that includes privacy concerns from the start.
"Privacy has to be thought of upfront as you're designing programs,
not as an afterthought," he said.

big a deal it is for a school district
to shift from one product line to
another.
The result, Billings said, is that
supplanting the big educational
publishers is easier said than done.
"To disrupt them, you have to
really understand what they do,"
she said. "And what they do well is
take care of [school] customers and
transition them on a time frame
that they are accustomed to."
That reality, combined with the
rapid proliferation of smaller edtech companies selling niche instructional materials targeted to
specific grade spans, subject areas,
and even skills, left Amplify out in
the cold.
Perhaps a buyer for the company
will soon be found, as News Corp.
officials suggested this month. The
obvious candidates would include
the big publishers Amplify failed to
displace, or possibly a large technology company hoping it can succeed
in the education market where News
Corp. did not.
Whoever it may be, Billings said,
the biggest lesson to be gleaned
from Amplify's failures is the importance of patience.
"With such a huge number of companies coming into the education
market, it's really going to be difficult
to be successful quickly," she said.
"I think Amplify's expectation was
that it could sell a lot more products
a lot more quickly than it did."
Staff Writer Michele Molnar and
research library intern Maya RiserKositsky contributed to this article.

Elsewhere, districts are struggling
with how to keep student data safe.
A detailed Louisiana privacy law
that went into effect during the
last school year bars schools from
collecting more than two pieces of
personally identifiable information
about students without parental
consent, among other requirements.
Despite guidance from state education officials, districts there have
struggled to comply with the law.
But Sheryl Abshire, the chief technology officer for the 32,600-student Calcasieu Parish schools in
Lake Charles, La., said the new
law is pushing districts to confront
the issues.
Among other strategies, Abshire
said, she had to make every vendor
working with her district sign a contract addendum with extensive requirements on student-data privacy.
She said most vendors she's worked
with seem fairly sophisticated about
de-identifying student data and addressing other privacy issues.
Because of the state law, Louisiana districts may be ahead of others
in the country, Abshire said.
But she also said that fears about
possible misuse of student data
shouldn't prevent districts from
using technology extensively to improve teaching and learning.
"We must be responsible around
data, but also responsible around
student learning," she said. "We
shortchange students and our community if we step back and say,
'This is too complicated, so we're not
going to do it.' "

November 2010

October 2013

Outgoing New York City Schools
Chancellor Joel Klein is named an
executive vice president of News Corp.
to oversee the media company's entry
into the education marketplace. Two
weeks later, News Corp. announces
the purchase of 90 percent of Wireless
Generation, an ed-tech company with
about 400 employees, for $360 million.

The Guilford County district, the
site of the first and only large-scale
implementation of Amplify tablets,
suspends the rollout of the 1-to-1
computing initiative because of
hardware problems.

May 2011
Wireless Generation signs a threeyear, $4.5 million contract extension
with the New York City school system
to continue offering assessment and
data software.

June 2011
* News Corp. hires Peter Gorman, a
former superintendent of the CharlotteMecklenburg, N.C., schools, to be part
of its education leadership team.
* Media reports surface indicating that
Wireless Generation has been awarded
a $27 million, no-bid contract from the
New York state education department
to develop assessment software as
part of a federal Race to the Top grant.

August 2011
The New York state comptroller's
office rejects the $27 million contract,
citing "ongoing investigations and
continuing revelations" about a British
phone-hacking scandal involving a
News Corp. newspaper.

July 2012
News Corp. unveils Amplify, a new
brand for its education business. The
division, with 830 employees, will
focus on three areas: assessment
and data analysis; a tablet-based
digital learning platform to customize
content, assessments, and course
materials for individual students; and
an English/language arts, math, and
science curricula.

March 2013
At the South by Southwest education
conference, Amplify releases its tablet
customized for schools and preloaded
with curriculum, supplemented
resources, and controls and data tools
for teachers.

April 2013
Amplify Learning, a division that
creates digital curricula, announces
it has signed an exclusive license
agreement with the Core Knowledge
Foundation for 20-year rights to
the Core Knowledge Language Arts
program for grades for K-3.

May 2013
Guilford County, N.C., school district
officials sign a contract with Amplify
to provide more than 20,000 tablets to
middle school students and teachers,
The Greensboro News & Record reports.

January 2014
Guilford County puts its
implementation of Amplify tablets on
hold until 2014-15.

February 2014
* New Jersey Commissioner of
Education Chris Cerf says he will step
down to become chief executive at
Amplify Insight, a division that sells a
digital product to diagnose a student's
reading and math deficiencies and
recommend interventions.
* Guilford County school officials
announce plans to restart work with
Amplify, extending their partnership
for middle school students one year, to
2017-18, to make up for the program's
suspension.

March 2014
At SXSWedu, Joel Klein announces
Amplify's digital English/ language
arts curriculum for middle school.

September 2014
Amplify makes its first pass at the
consumer market with "Twelve a
Dozen," a math-focused game it wants
parents to buy for their children.

January 2015
Guilford County school officials report
that the re-started 1-to-1 computing
initiative with Amplify is going better
than it had a year before.

February 2015
Stephen Smyth, who heads Amplify's
tablet unit, leaves the company,
according to Bloomberg Business.

March 2015
Amplify unbundles 30 educational
games from its digital curriculum,
offering them for individual sale to
schools and districts.

June 2015
News Corp. has stopped ordering
new tablets from its manufacturer,
Bloomberg Business reports.

August 2015
News Corp. announces that Amplify
is for sale, after the education
business reported a $371 million
write-down. News Corp.'s stock rises
about 8 percent the day after the
announcement.
SOURCES: Education Week;
News Corp.; media reports

September 2013
Amplify now has 652 employees,
according to an article in The New York
Times.

EDUCATION WEEK | August 26, 2015 | www.edweek.org | 13

http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - August 26, 2015

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