TY  - BOOK
AU  - Knee,Jonathan A.
TI  - Class Clowns: How the Smartest Investors Lost Billions in Education 
T2  - Columbia Business School Publishing
SN  - 9780231179287
U1  - 338.4337 23
PY  - 2016///]
CY  - New York, NY : 
PB  - Columbia University Press, 
KW  - Education
KW  - Economic aspects
KW  - Case studies
KW  - Finance
KW  - Investments
KW  - BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Education
KW  - bisacsh
N1  - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Acknowledgments --; Introduction --; Chapter One The Wizard of Ed --; Chapter Two Rupert and the Chancellor: A Tragic Love Story --; Chapter Three Curious George Schools John Paulson --; Chapter four Michael Milken: Master of the Knowledge Universe --; Chapter Five What Makes a Good Education Business? --; Chapter Six Lessons from Clown School --; Notes --; Index; restricted access; Issued also in print
N2  - The past thirty years have seen dozens of otherwise successful investors try to improve education through the application of market principles. They have funneled billions of dollars into alternative schools, online education, and textbook publishing, and they have, with surprising regularity, lost their shirts.In Class Clowns, professor and investment banker Jonathan A. Knee dissects what drives investors' efforts to improve education and why they consistently fail. Knee takes readers inside four spectacular financial failures in education: Rupert Murdoch's billion-dollar effort to reshape elementary education through technology; the unhappy investors-including hedge fund titan John Paulson-who lost billions in textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin; the abandonment of Knowledge Universe, Michael Milken's twenty-year mission to revolutionize the global education industry; and a look at Chris Whittle, founder of EdisonLearning and a pioneer of large-scale transformational educational ventures, who continues to attract investment despite decades of financial and operational disappointment.Although deep belief in the curative powers of the market drove these initiatives, it was the investors' failure to appreciate market structure that doomed them. Knee asks: What makes a good education business? By contrasting rare successes, he finds a dozen broad lessons at the heart of these cautionary case studies. Class Clowns offers an important guide for public policy makers and guardrails for future investors, as well as an intelligent exposé for activists and teachers frustrated with the repeated underperformance of these attempts to shake up education
UR  - https://doi.org/10.7312/knee17928
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780231543330
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780231543330/original
ER  -