Joel Klein, former Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education and current executive vice president at News Corp, has announced ambitious expansion plans for “Amplify,” the company’s education division. Klein, who also heads Amplify, sees the division becoming aggressive in the sector by releasing products meant to appeal to the current crop of students and their insatiable hunger for everything tech-related.

Over the course of a presentation made during the UBS Global Media and Communication Conference, Klein outlined plans to release an open-source tablet that will run the company’s optimized educational software. The included applications will not only be Common Core Standards-compliant, but will also include an extensive analytics component that will aid teachers, schools and districts in feeding increasingly popular and extremely data hungry academic assessment systems.

Klein’s point is that U.S. K-12 education is a “broken model,” with shockingly low graduation rates, “we spend a lot on education and do not see the results.” To change all this, Klein said, “the private sector’ has to be involved and that “technology will forever change how we teach students.” Klein said, “kids use media and technology of all kinds but they’re told they have to turn them all off when they get to school.”

According to estimates unveiled during the presentation, Klein views the education market as lucrative, with over $700 billion up for grabs. Seventeen billion of that is available in the K-12 market in which Amplify expects to compete most aggressively.

To take a chunk of that market, the division is prepared to invest heavily in development. So far, the costs of the product design is pushing $180 million – a large number considering that the unit is reporting about $100 million in yearly revenues. Amplify has already contracted to provide its software and hardware services to over 200 school districts around the country.

Amplify is focused on changing American education with a program focused on Amplify Insight, teaching software tied to a prototype Amplify tablet device designed to collect and mine “big data,” in other words, use data analysis to drive teaching. He also pointed to Amplify Learning, customizable “gamefied” educational content—the digital textbook in a new form—tied to national core curriculum standards and designed to appeal to young people’s love of digital technology and multimedia.

Klein hopes that products sold by Amplify will not just transform the way kids are taught, but will completely overthrow the current 9-3 school day paradigm. When academic materials are available around the clock online, and instructors are easily reachable via forums, social media and email, learning doesn’t need to stop when kids leave the class or even the school building.

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The show was stolen by the events surrounding media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s speech. Murdoch, the chairman of News Corp. and summit keynote speaker explained his view on how technology could help transform the nation’s public education system.

The presence of the controversial  businessman provoked protest. Members from the Occupy Wall Street movement heckled Murdoch during his speech, accusing the media mogul of trying to profit from public education, writes Terence Chea at the Associated Press.

“Equality in education, not privatization!” one woman shouted as security guards escorted her out of the ballroom of the Palace Hotel.

“Corporations own all the media in the world. Why should they not own all the education as well?” activist Joe Hill yelled sarcastically.

“Upward mobility in America is in jeopardy unless we fix our public schools,” the billionaire told the Washington D.C. audience shortly before the launch of News Corp.’s Education Division.

Murdoch argued that digitizing America’s classrooms and viewing K-through-12 as a business marketplace will better serve underperforming students.

“Let’s be clear: Technology is never going to replace teachers,” Murdoch stated.

News Corp.’s Education Division won a major contract last year when Wireless Generation landed a no-bid $27 million deal to track student performance throughout New York state, writes Zaitchik.

However, the recent phone hacking scandal that disgraced News International meant that many contracts were annulled, including this one. Zaitchik suggests that this decision by the New York State Comptroller sets a worrying precedent for News Corp. Their foray into education would have to be tread lightly as business ethics and reputation is of pivotal importance in the industry.

Murdoch’s words, that can be seen in full here, were met with some enthusiasm.

James Guthrie of the George W. Bush Institute argued that sweeping education reform would add “trillions to the economy” and future federal budgets, but he wouldn’t want to see that money invested in more teachers.

“We’re too labor intensive, we have more teachers than agriculture workers… We need to inject technology forcefully into the equation,” he stressed.

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