The prior thirty years have visible dozens of in a different way profitable traders attempt to increase schooling in the course of the software of industry rules. they've got funneled billions of greenbacks into substitute faculties, on-line schooling, and textbook publishing. they've got, with fabulous regularity, misplaced their shirts.

In classification Clowns, professor and funding banker Jonathan A. Knee dissects what drives traders’ efforts to enhance schooling and why they continuously fail. Knee takes readers within 4 dazzling monetary disasters in schooling: Rupert Murdoch’s billion-dollar attempt to reshape common schooling via expertise; the sad investors—including hedge fund titan John Paulson—who misplaced billions in textbook writer Houghton Mifflin; the abandonment of data Universe, Michael Milken’s twenty-year venture to revolutionize the worldwide schooling undefined; and the tale of Chris Whittle, founding father of EdisonLearning and a pioneer of large-scale transformational academic ventures, who maintains to draw funding regardless of many years of monetary and operational disappointment.

Although deep trust within the healing powers of the industry drove those tasks, it used to be the traders’ failure to understand industry constitution that doomed them. Knee asks: What makes an outstanding schooling enterprise? by way of contrasting infrequent successes, Knee unearths a dozen extensive classes on the middle of those cautionary case reports. Class Clowns deals a tremendous consultant for public coverage makers and defend rails for destiny traders, in addition to an clever exposé for activists and academics pissed off with the repeated disappointments to shake up education.