Rupert Murdoch's News Corp Looks To Exit The Education Business

Joel Klein, Amplify's CEO

Jim Urquhart / Reuters

Just four years after it stormed into the education world with talk of disrupting the industry's biggest players, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp is looking to sell its digital education business, the company disclosed in a quarterly earnings filing today.

News Corp said it has written down the value of Amplify, its education unit, by $371 million. The company is essentially discontinuing its tablet-making business and is "exploring strategic alternatives" for the rest of the education company, which consists of digital curriculum and assessment tools.

"We are very advanced in a strategic review of Amplify," News Corp CEO Robert Thompson said on an earnings call following the results.

Joel Klein, Amplify's CEO, had long billed the company as a disruptor of both entrenched education giants like Pearson and McGraw-Hill, and tech companies like Apple and Google, which have made significant inroads into education by selling devices like iPads and Chromebooks.

Amplify's product was a hybrid of the two: a rugged tablet built for classrooms, loaded with Amplify's digital curriculum software.

But even with the financial might of News Corp behind it, Amplify struggled to make inroads against any of its larger competitors. It saw a massive and costly setback early in its life, when dozens of tablets' screens broke and chargers overheated at a school district in North Carolina that was early to adopt the company's technology.

In an interview with BuzzFeed News in April of 2014, Klein had high hopes for the company's future. “Exhilaration is the dominant emotional force in me right now,” he said. “There’s a sense that we’re doing something very big and very exciting.”