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.

During the summer the Class Clown Academy opens for twelve days to let class clowns brush up on their skills. The Class Clown Academy is a special place that keeps our educational system afloat, a unique institution that requires a steady supply of dedicated jokers-people who aren't afraid to propel a classroom of students out of their seats and onto the floor, howling with laughter. Could that be you? Would you like to be part of the next generation of class clowns? Are you dead serious about being ridiculously funny? Can you laugh hard enough to blow milk out of your nose? Build a paper airplane in under ten seconds? Do them both at the same time! In this book you'll get a first hand peek at what it takes to gain the school credits necessary to be an official class clown. Meet the students and the teachers, complete an application for the Class Clown Academy!

Original and ambitious poetry that makes readers pay attention to the current conversation about the nature of lyric and human relationships in the 21st century.

Leonardo can't stop being the class clown despite his teacher's protestations.

A must-have guide for actors both young and old.

What's up with Jackson Wolfgang, Shiverwood Academy's class clown and out-of-control werewolf? He can't sit still and howls during tests. He is supposed to be student of the week, but he feels more like the disaster of the year. It's not until he's sent to the principal's office that he learns how his behavior is linked to the phases of the moon. Aligned to Common Core standards and correlated to state standards. Spellbound is an imprint of Magic Wagon, a division of ABDO.

The first day at a new school is always the hardest, right? No, not always as George finds out the hard way. On the second day at…Sugarman Elementary School, he is suddenly seized by uncontrollable burps, burps so loud they practically break the sound barrier, burps that make him do wild and crazy stuff and land him in trouble with a capital T. One thing is for sure: these are not normal burps, they are magic burps—and they must be stopped! But how?