NYC Public School Parents: My twitter interchange with Murdoch about Amplify's losses, and a NYC parent responds to Amplify's sales pitch

NYC Public School Parents: My twitter interchange with Murdoch about Amplify's losses, and a NYC parent responds to Amplify's sales pitch:

My twitter interchange with Murdoch about Amplify's losses, and a NYC parent responds to Amplify's sales pitch

by Leonie Haimson

There is bad news from Amplify, the NewsCorp subsidiary owned by Rupert Murdoch and run by Joel Klein. NPR ran a good story about the company earlier in the year.  It appears that Klein is running the business into the ground, just as he did our schools when he was Chancellor at the Department of Education. 

According to one press account, Amplify lost $80 million this year alone, despite the substantial funding  (at least $44 million) it received from the Gates Foundation to build the data mining operation called inBloom Inc.   Actually, according to a presentation Joel Klein gave in December about NewsCorp's bid to capture a largershare of what he described as the $673 billion US education market, through online learning, Amplify's tablets and the new Common Core standards, Klein predicted a loss of $180 million in FY 2013, which he called"disciplined investment."

On a recent earnings call, NewsCorp COO Chase Carey discussed the split that will happen this summer between the profitable parts of the company, like the cable channels and the movie studio, and the weaker