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News Corp. Has a Tablet for Schools

March 6, 2013 by Leave a Comment

On Wednesday at the SXSWedu conference in Austin, Tex., Mr. Klein, the former chancellor of New York City schools and the current chief executive of Amplify, News Corporation’s fledgling education division, will take the stage for a surprising announcement. Amplify will not sell just its curriculum on existing tablets, but will also offer the Amplify Tablet, its own 10-inch Android tablet for K-12 schoolchildren.

In addition to tablets and curriculum, Amplify will also provide schools with infrastructure to store students’ data.

“When I left I was convinced of two things,” Mr. Klein said of his tenure as chancellor of New York schools. “If we didn’t see a dramatic technological change, we were not going to be able to move this country forward,” and “second of all, that the private sector had to get much, much more involved.”

An early look at the Amplify tablet revealed a sleek touch screen with material floating against a simple background. If a child’s attention wanders, a stern “eyes on teacher” prompt pops up. A quiz uses emoticons of smiley and sad faces so teachers can instantly gauge which students understand the lesson and which need help.

“We wanted to use the language of the Web,” said Stephen Smyth, president of Amplify Access, the division that produces the tablet, which is manufactured by Asus.

At first, the tablet will be targeted at middle-school children. It uses what educators call a “blended learning” model that mixes technology with old-fashioned teaching. Amplify designed the tablet so that schools can provide each student with one to take home each night.

Outside the classroom, children can use it to play games, like one in which Tom Sawyer battles the Brontë sisters.

“There’s a huge opportunity if you can get kids excited about educational games,” Mr. Klein said. “You can change the learning curve.”

In November, Amplify began testing its tablet in hundreds of public schools nationwide, and in December it explained the venture to investors. The introduction on Wednesday began a full-court press by Amplify’s sales force. A preloaded tablet, training and customer care (largely from former teachers) starts at $299, along with a two-year subscription for $99 a year. A higher-end Amplify Tablet Plus, for students who do not have wireless access at home, comes with a 4G data plan and costs $349.

Amplify estimates that many school districts could use grants from the Education Department’s Race to the Top program, which brings technology and personalized learning to schools.

“We understand technology and we understand education,” Mr. Klein said. “A lot of people who understand technology don’t understand education.”

In the eight years Mr. Klein served as chancellor of New York schools, he pushed educators to adopt new technology, often drawing accolades and controversy along the way. He remains a prominent voice in education reform, and Amplify carries with it both his friendships and clashes with educators.

“Joel was always talking about how to eliminate teachers and make it about a child in front of a computer screen,” said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers.

(“Did textbooks lead to larger classrooms and fewer teachers? No,” Mr. Klein says.)

Now that he is in the private sector, some of Mr. Klein’s advocacy work presents a conflict, said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. Last year Mr. Klein wrote, with Condoleezza Rice, a Council on Foreign Relations report that called the state of United States schools a “grave national security threat.” He contributed $25,000 to a coalition that supported specific candidates for the Los Angeles Board of Education elections held on Tuesday. (A News Corporation subsidiary also contributed to candidates.)

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/business/media/news-corp-has-a-tablet-for-schools.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Former Schools Chief Emerges as Murdoch’s Unlikely Ally

July 24, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Joel I. Klein, the former New York City schools chancellor, was in a tricky position. Three weeks ago, Rupert Murdoch asked Mr. Klein, now his trusted deputy, to oversee an investigation into the phone hacking scandal that has deeply wounded the News Corporation and its chairman, something Mr. Klein was eager to avoid.

“I am trying to get as far away from this as I can,” he lamented to a friend.

He has not succeeded. Mr. Klein, who joined the News Corporation as a senior vice president in January, is not only responsible for the investigation that could uncover what company managers knew about the hacking, but he also has become one of Mr. Murdoch’s closest and most visible advisers throughout the crisis.

His seemingly contradictory roles — de facto chief of internal affairs officer and ascendant executive with Mr. Murdoch’s ear — are raising questions about how robust and objective the internal inquiry can be. When Mr. Murdoch summoned a team of top deputies and outside consultants to London to help him manage the fallout from the hacking, Mr. Klein was one of the first to arrive, moving into a temporary office 20 feet from the chairman’s.

When Mr. Murdoch and his closest advisers debated whether to accept the resignation of Rebekah Brooks, a newspaper executive at the center of the controversy, Mr. Klein pushed for her exit. When Mr. Murdoch wrote a statement to deliver to Parliament last week, Mr. Klein weighed in on the drafts.

And while the world watched Mr. Murdoch and his son James testify, Mr. Klein sat directly behind them for three hours, occasionally cleaning his rimless glasses with his tie as he looked on in support.

Mr. Klein’s dizzying journey, in under a year, from one of the nation’s foremost education reformers to the corporate consigliere for a media titan whose politics are far to the right of his own, has surprised and unsettled many friends and colleagues, who fear that he will be unable to extricate himself from a scandal that shows no sign of abating or, they say, ending well. “This was nothing he could have ever expected,” said Barbara Walters, a longtime friend of Mr. Klein’s.

But in many ways, interviews suggest, his emergence as a dominant figure within the News Corporation is consistent with a biography that combines high-minded legal and social aims — antitrust law and education — with a driving, sometimes overwhelming competitive fire.

“He has a take-no-prisoners attitude,” said Randi Weingarten, who battled Mr. Klein when she was head of the New York City teachers union. “He is a litigator. He is about winning.”

It is a sign of how delicate Mr. Klein’s position inside the News Corporation has become that he was initially against the idea of an internal review. In April, after London’s Metropolitan Police arrested three News of the World journalists on suspicion of hacking, some executives pushed for an investigation that would have the full backing of the company’s board and senior management, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions taking place at the time.

Mr. Murdoch opposed the idea outright. Standing firmly in his corner was Mr. Klein.

“There was a clear message,” said one of the people who knew of Mr. Klein’s role and requested anonymity to divulge private conversations. “Stay out. And let Joel handle it.”

Top lawyers and experts in corporate governance said the News Corporation should have hired outside legal counsel to oversee the inquiry, as dozens of companies like the American International Group and Fannie Mae have done in the past, rather than rely on an insider.

“That is not standard practice,” said Charles M. Elson, an expert on corporate governance at the University of Delaware. “You cannot be seen as objective if you are inside.”

The News Corporation says the investigative body will have true independence and the power to compel employees to cooperate. The company points to the appointment of Lord Anthony Grabiner, a prominent British lawyer who also sat behind the Murdochs during their testimony before lawmakers last week, as the body’s independent chairman. Lord Grabiner will report to Mr. Klein. Mr. Klein, in turn, will report to Viet Dinh, an independent director on the News Corporation board.

Mr. Klein declined to be interviewed for this article.

“We’ve been given a free hand,” said Lord Grabiner, who added that he and Mr. Klein never would have agreed to take on the job if they felt the committee was a sham.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=a5e8aedcf466570c5aa4bffb5ed0d85b

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Dow Jones Chief, Who Led Tabloid, Quits Over Hacking

July 16, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Les Hinton, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal since 2007, who oversaw Mr. Murdoch’s British newspaper subsidiary when voice mail hacking by journalists was rampant, and Rebekah Brooks, who has run the British papers since 2009 and become the target of unrelenting public outrage, both resigned in the latest blow to the News Corporation and its besieged chairman.

Mr. Hinton and Ms. Brooks were two of Mr. Murdoch’s closest and most loyal deputies. He was said to be loath to lose either of them, and became convinced that they had to leave only over the last several days, as executives and outside advisers flew in to help manage the crisis from their gleaming granite and glass offices in Wapping, East London.

In arriving at the final decision, Mr. Murdoch was joined by his two sons, James and Lachlan, and Joel I. Klein, a senior News Corporation executive and former New York City Schools chancellor.

The resignations came on a day when Mr. Murdoch made a series of public mea culpas. He wrote a letter to be published in all British newspapers over the weekend acknowledging that the company did not address its problems soon enough. “We are sorry,” it begins.

He also visited the family of a murdered 13-year-old girl, Milly Dowler, whose voice mail was hacked by reporters at The News of the World while she was still listed as missing. According to the Dowler family’s lawyer, Mark Lewis, Mr. Murdoch held his head in his hands and apologized for the actions of his employees, who deleted phone messages after the girl’s mailbox had been filled so they could collect more messages from concerned family members.

Mr. Lewis said that Mr. Murdoch apologized “many times,” and that he was “very humbled, he was very shaken and he was very sincere.”

Whether these actions will do anything to quiet the backlash against the News Corporation is unclear. Mr. Murdoch, Ms. Brooks and James Murdoch, the company’s deputy chief operating officer and Rupert’s younger son, are set to testify next week before Parliament, where they will face questions from politicians who have become suddenly unafraid to publicly condemn the man whose favor they once saw as a key to political victory.

Mr. Murdoch has become an increasingly isolated figure, not only in Britain but within his own company. The departure in recent years of top executives who often provided a counterweight to his famous irascibility and stubbornness has left him surrounded by fewer people who can effectively question his decisions. He initially rejected Ms. Brooks’s offer to resign from News International, his British subsidiary, despite advice to accept it from senior News Corporation executives, said people briefed on the company’s discussions.

Ms. Brooks, who was editor of The News of the World when the abuses began in 2002, repeatedly told the Murdochs that she knew nothing of the hacking and that she would be exonerated when all the facts came out.

In her farewell message, Ms. Brooks acknowledged that she had become a distraction. “The reputation of the company we love so much, as well as the press freedoms we value so highly, are all at risk,” she wrote. “As chief executive of the company, I feel a deep sense of responsibility for the people we have hurt and I want to reiterate how sorry I am for what we now know to have taken place.”

On Friday, former staff members at The News of the World questioned why Ms. Brooks did not resign earlier. “Our paper was sacrificed to save her career, and now she’s gone as well,” one former employee said, requesting anonymity because he did not want to jeopardize his position in severance negotiations following the newspaper’s closing. “Who knows why they’ve chosen to do it now, as she’ll have to appear before the select committee anyway.”

Until Friday, Mr. Hinton had been largely an offstage figure in the scandal. But questions grew about what he knew about the improper practices going on at the newspapers under his watch, even though he has testified twice before Parliament saying that he believed the hacking was limited to one rogue journalist.

Letting Mr. Hinton go was an especially fraught decision for Mr. Murdoch. The two had worked together for 52 years, since Mr. Hinton joined Mr. Murdoch’s first paper, The News of Adelaide in South Australia, when he was 15. Moreover, Mr. Hinton ran The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Murdoch’s most cherished American newspaper.

In a note to his employees, Mr. Hinton said Friday was “a deeply, deeply sad day for me.”

John F. Burns reported from London, and Jeremy W. Peters from New York. Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris, and Ravi Somaiya from London.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=e3a6dccab8e830cad56e8cd8dc1be839

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