This tablet was always intended to go into schools, and that is why it was supposed to have been built with a layer of Gorilla Glass over the screen. This was in the contract that GCS signed, and it was also mentioned prominently in the early news coverage of this tablet. According to the school district, none of the Amplify tablets that they bought had that protective layer, which might help explain why so many tablets broke.
Or to put it another way, the absence of Gorilla Glass is a sign that someone cut corners on the build quality for this production run. Given that there were also complaints about misfitted cases and defective power supplies, I am not terribly surprised.
As I reported when the Amplify tablet debuted in March of this year, this tablet is NewsCorp’s “solution” to the “problem” of education: