Murdoch Firm Snags $94K For Principal Training

New Haven principals are learning how to use a new Web tool to analyze how teachers spend their time, thanks to Rupert Murdoch and Joel Klein.

The training follows a school-board vote last month to approve a $94,000 contract with Amplify Education, Inc., to “provide consulting services, software license, and technical assistance training” to the New Haven public schools. The contract, which runs from March 24, 2014 to June 30, 2014, is being paid for with part of a million-dollar grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for teacher-to-teacher professional development.

Click here to read the contract.

The contract raised eyebrows recently in the teachers union because of the people associated with the company: Amplify is owned by billionaire Murdoch’s News Corp. and run by former New York Schools Chancellor Klein. The pair, and the Amplify venture in particular, have become flashpoints in national school reform debates. Murdoch has been both lauded for increasing access to technology—and painted as a villain who profits off the backs of schoolkids.

Teachers union President Dave Cicarella (pictured) said he has asked his vice-presidents to look into the company’s associations.

“We just want to check it out,” Cicarella said. ​“Just as I don’t want to do business with Achievement First [charter school network], I don’t want to be doing business with Joel Klein, either.”

Superintendent Garth Harries, who served as a top adviser to Klein before joining New Haven schools in 2009, replied that the deal was approved by a panel of teachers and administrators; is being paid for by an outside grant; and is a small contract for a limited purpose — not an invasion of city schools by Murdoch and Klein.

Justin Boucher (pictured), a teacher who is administering New Haven’s Gates grant, said the contract has a narrow focus: To help principals at nine schools analyze school schedules to find more time for teacher-to-teacher collaboration. He said Amplify is training principals on how to use the Web-based tool to analyze teachers’ schedules. Amplify will not make recommendations on how to change those schedules, he said.

Boucher said that through a license to Amplify’s Web tool, school administrators will be able to plug in school schedules and answer questions like: How many students are in a class? How much time does each teacher spend teaching, prepping, and doing other duties?

That’s ​“largely information that we already have, but not information that’s easy to aggregate,” Boucher explained. With Amplify’s technology, principals and their staff can take a birds-eye view of their schedules. According to the grant, the analysis has one specific purpose, Boucher said: To find time during the school day for newly appointed ​“teacher facilitators” to meet with their peers and conduct teacher-to-teacher training.

Amplify ​“won’t suggest anything” in terms of how to change the schedules, Boucher said. ​“They’ll train” principals, but the company’s contract explicitly states that the company won’t be making any suggestions, Boucher said.

So far, nine schools have signed up to pilot the new technology: Barnard, Hill Central, Truman, Fair Haven, Nathan Hale, Columbus Family Academy, Sound School, New Haven Academy, and Hyde Leadership Academy. Principals at that school will be trained in upcoming weeks, Boucher said.

With the Amplify technology, principals may also be able to set to work on another goal: To figure out what to do with an extra half-hour per day of teacher time that will be set aside for teacher collaboration starting next school year.

The new teachers contract, which takes effect July 1, adds 15 minutes to teachers’ workday and allows schools to assign teachers duties during another 15-minute period teachers had before school, effectively creating a new half-hour block of time per day. The contract leaves it up to staff in individual schools to vote on how to use that time.

Schools have a wide range of options: They could have teachers show up early every day; stay late every Monday; or even start the school year as many as 15 days early. Teachers in each school are supposed to vote on a new schedule; if they can’t come to agreement, the school will follow a ​“default option” set by the school district.

The Amplify contract has provoked some fear that Klein and Murdoch’s company will set the terms of that ​“default option.”

Amplify has nothing to do with the default option, Harries said. He said the default option will be determined in collaboration with the teachers and administrators unions, as per the New Haven Federation of Teachers contract.

That union-management relationship represents a departure Harries has taken from his former boss, Klein. As Klein’s chief executive for portfolio development, Harries oversaw the closure of hundreds of ​“failing” schools in New York. In New Haven, he designed a version of school change that hard-line reformers consider ​“soft” because it centers around collaboration, not conflict, with the teachers union.

So far, the unions have yet to settle on a default option, Harries said. He said he hopes schools will come up with their own plans so they don’t reach the point of a default option.

“I want schools to own it,” he said.