Billionaire Sponsored Edtech Sales Pitch by Thomas Ultican
Laurene Powell Jobs and Amplify Education are hosting a “Virtual Summit” which is what they’re calling this May’s sales event. Jobs is very confident that her billions qualify her to shape education policy. In her drive to privatize public education, she has accumulated and created several pro-edtech and anti-teacher organizations. She also provides leadership and money to other billionaire driven organizations promoting education technology while simultaneously denigrating public schools.
When Laurene’s husband, Steve Jobs, died in 2011 she inherited the rest of the billions the couple had derived from the company Steve founded, Apple Inc. Since then, her fortune has grown to more than $30 billion. Fundamentally, Jobs only qualification for shaping national education policy derives from her marrying the right guy.
In 2016, Powell Jobs’ sent Hillary Clinton four uninformed education policy positions:
“Re-design entire K-12 system – we know how to do it, but it comes down to political will.
“Think about Charters as our R&D … must allow public schools to have leaders that can pick their team and be held accountable.
“Need to increase IQ in the teaching sector: Teach for America; they are a different human capital pipeline.
“Need to use technology to transform – technology allows teachers and children to focus on content mastery versus seat time; …”
Some Laurene Powell Jobs Connections Mapped in LittleSis
The LittleSis map above has a hyperlink to the original in the caption. Shown here is a minimal display of Jobs’ connections within the movement to privatize and monetize public education. However, every line and name is hyperlinked on the original map to a large trove of information in the LittleSis data base.
The point of the map is that Jobs is the owner of Amplify through her non-profit organization, Emerson Collective.
The Amplify “Virtual Summit”
The May sales event was promoted in the Education Week Advertiser with the title “Reading Reimagined: Uncovering the Science Behind Personalized Learning.” All but one of the presenters at the daylong affair is an Amplify employee. They will emphasize three points:
“The Science of Reading in personalized learning.”
“What to look for in a personalized learning program.”
“How to leverage COVID-19 relief stimulus funding to combat instructional loss.”
Russ Walsh is a professional educator and blogger. Recently (4/26/2021), He began an article about the science of reading with,
“Call me crazy, but when I learned I had cancer a few years ago, I did not immediately consult a journalist. Instead I chose to see an oncologist. When COVID broke out, I threw in my lot with Dr. Fauci and other infectious disease scientists, instead of a former reality TV star who suggested I inject bleach. And so, when I want advice on reading instruction, I avoid the journalists, the parent lobbying groups, the reading program sales reps, and the agenda driven pseudo-education organizations, and I look to the experts.”
The professionals Russ pointed to were Peter Johnston and Deborah Scanlon of the University at Albany who have debunked the Science of Reading (SOR) in a new report. Russ quotes them as stating,
“There is no one right way to teach reading. Student’s difficulties are unique to the individual students. Better to assume that the instruction we are providing is not meeting the student’s needs and adjust accordingly, than to focus on one instructional approach.”
Professor Paul Thomas of Furman University has also been out spoken in his scorn for the science of reading ideology.
In a previous post, I defined the nebulous term personalized learning:
‘“Personalized Learning” is a euphemistic term that indicates lessons delivered on a digital device. These lessons are often organized with a playlist and come with a claim of using artificial intelligence to tailor the lessons to the recipient. The scheme is related to competency base education (CBE).”
For five decades, the CBE scheme, operating under several different names, has posited that drilling small skills for mastery is the best way to teach. It has not worked yet.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development said in a 2015 report that heavy users of computers in the classroom “do a lot worse in most learning outcomes.”
Wireless Generation to Amplify
Greg Gunn a former associate of the Carlyle Group who had earned a Masters of Electrical Engineering from MIT joined with Larry Berger to found Wireless Generation. Berger was a graduate of Yale University with a BA and had been a White House fellow working on Educational Technology at NASA during the Clinton administration.
In 2010, News Corporation paid $360 million dollars to acquire Wireless Generation and renamed it Amplify Education, Inc.
By August of 2015, after spectacular failures in North Carolina, News Corporation announced it was exiting the education business. The corporation took a $371 million dollar right off to get out of the digital curriculum business. The next month, News Corporation announced it had sold Amplify to members of its staff. In the deal orchestrated by Joel Klein, he would remain as a board member and Larry Berger would assume leadership of the company.
It was soon learned that the real buyer of Amplify was Laurene Powell Jobs. Larry Berger is still leading the company.