Dive Brief:
- Facing annual losses over the past two fiscal years, Amplify is shaking things up with “One Amplify," an internal reorganization that aims to bring together its five divisions.
- Tablets, assessments, curricula, professional development, games, and consulting services are some of the products the company currently offers, the company is working to bring more of these under the same umbrealla. For example, a winter memo from Amplify CEO Joel Klein pondered the unification of curriculum and assessment tools.
- Cross-division working groups and C-level downsizing are also among moves the company has taken to streamline.
Dive Insight:
According to EdSurge, the News Corp-owned company once "listed 12 'C-level' executives and three presidents across five divisions." It has cut that number to 7 execs and no presidents.
Many of the troubles surrounding Amplify were highlighted in Bloomberg's recent profile of the company, where NewsCorp's $1 billion investment in Amplify was dissected at great lengths. It also looked at hiccups in the initial rollouts of various Amplify products, such as its tablets, in school districts like North Carolina's Guilford County School, where a deal to lease Amplify tablets (at $160 per tablet) briefly saw the school drop the program before the issues were resolved. That article also received a response from Amplify's Klein, who argued it was "riddled with factual errors, inconsistencies and incorrect analysis."
