Amplify (company)

Amplify is a curriculum and assessment company launched in July 2012. Amplify Curriculum was built on the foundation of Wireless Generation, an educational company the original News Corp bought in 2010. Amplify products and services provide assessment and analytics for data-driven instruction and next-generation digital curriculum based on the Common Core State Standards.

News Corp sold Amplify in 2015 for an undisclosed sum to a management team supported by a group of private investors, including the Emerson Collective, a philanthropic organization founded by Laurene Powell Jobs.

History
Amplify was formed after the purchase of Wireless Generation, which was founded in 2000 by Larry Berger and Greg Gunn. The company sold its products and services to districts and states that used government funding for early reading and other programs. It also developed and maintained the New York City online warehouse of student data ARIS, and wrote the algorithm for the School of One, the New York City Department of Education's math help system. Larry Berger served as the CEO of Wireless Generation until the sale of the company in 2010. At the time of the sale, the users of Wireless Generation software included three million students and 200,000 educators.

In November 2010 a 90% stake in Wireless Generation was purchased by News Corp for $360 million. News Corp changed the name of its subsidiary in 2012 to Amplify. Following the acquisition, News Corp invested about half a billion dollars into the company in order to expand its offerings to devices and digital curriculum, designed to replace hard copy textbooks, and to decrease the price-point gap between traditional textbooks and tablet-based education.

In 2012, Amplify signed a contract with Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium to develop reporting tools for teacher assessment. In 2013, the two signed a contract to create a digital library of formative assessment professional learning tools designed for Common Core State Standards teachers. This took place before Amplify was purchased by News Corps. The library provided online access to teachers for formative test items and assessment tools. In March 2013, Amplify released the Amplify Tablet, a customized Asus Android tablet with a suite of subscription-based software, offering education-oriented features and apps designed for K-12 learning environments. In March 2014, the company released a new version of the Amplify Tablet designed by Intel. In 2015, Amplify announced it would cease marketing the tablet to new customers but would continue to service its existing customers.

Joel Klein, former chancellor for the New York City Department of Education and an executive vice-president with News Corp served as Amplify's CEO until 2015. During his time as CEO, Klein stated that the goal of Amplify is to encourage the integration of computer technology into the common educational environment, rather than a separate learning environment such as a laboratory.

In October 2015, News Corp sold Amplify to a management team supported by a group of private investors, including Emerson Collective. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Larry Berger became CEO.

In 2018, technology publication Fast Company reported that Amplify's revenue was $125 million and it was serving almost 4 million students. Its science program had been adopted by several large urban districts, including Chicago, New York, Denver, and Los Angeles, and had 950,000 users. Also that year, Amplify announced that it entered the digital supplemental market with two programs: Amplify Close Reading and Amplify Fractions. However, Amplify has since retired the fractions product.

In October 2021, Amplify raised $215 million in growth funding in a round led by Learn Capital and A-Street Ventures, in conjunction with Emerson Collective. In May 2023, Amplify announced it had raised a Series C funding round led by Cox Enterprises to further its K-12 product offerings.

Student assessment
Amplify provides assessment tools for K-12 schools. Tools are available for Math and ELA (English language arts), Pre-K to 8th Grade. As of 2013, Amplify provided data-hosting infrastructure for educational institutions, but this service is no longer available. Amplify's software uses data analysis to plan teaching tactics and track educational results. As of 2011, Wireless Generation offered the services of data coaches to teachers in Delaware, but this is no longer available from Amplify.

Amplify's mCLASS assessments are intended to demonstrate the progress and skills of students learning to read. According to the company, the assessments offer useful information about the reading proficiency of students which teachers can use to adjust instruction plans accordingly. Amplify mCLASS helps identify students facing dyslexia. In June 2021, the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) of North Carolina signed in a $14.5-million three-year contract with Amplify to use its mCLASS product. As of August 2022, mCLASS was administered to a total of around 1.6 million students in some 35 states.

English language arts
ELA curricula are based upon the Common Core State Standards. The Amplify Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) program teaches reading, writing, speaking, and listening to students in preschool through Grade 5. It works to strengthen students’ understanding of literature, American history, and the sciences. Amplify CKLA is based on the science of reading, which aims to explain how students actually learn to read. This curriculum enables students to connect their reading lessons to other core subjects and celebrates students' varied cultural backgrounds.

The Amplify ELA curriculum also includes educational games that can be played by students in and outside of class time, and a library of 300 pre-loaded books.

Amplify is partnering with the Core Knowledge Foundation to publish and distribute materials across the US for its Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) program and its Spanish counterpart Caminos, the literacy curriculum for preschool through Grade 5 which builds skills through domains in history and the sciences.

Science
Amplify's science curriculum is aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards, developed in partnership with the Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California, Berkeley. In each lesson, students take on the role of a scientist or engineer. The lessons focus on natural phenomena and the application of concepts to real-world problems.

Math
In May 2022, Amplify acquired the Desmos curriculum and the website teacher.desmos.com. Some 50 employees joined Amplify. Desmos Studio was spun off as a separate public benefit corporation focused on building free-to-use math tools, such as an online graphing calculator.