I’ve written several posts about the inBloom data fiasco — inBloom is the company that’s basically trying to collect, store and share student data and is supported by the Gates Foundation.
I thought I’d put together a quick Best list:
Where inBloom Wilted is from Ed Surge.
Irate Parents Fight to Keep Information on Their Kids Private is the headline of an article about an effort to create a national student data base with inBloom.
Here’s a quote from it:
“But the main issue is this: No one consulted parents as to whether they wanted their child’s data collected or stored this way, just as no one asked them if they wanted their children to be tested to the degree they are,” Naison [Mark Naison, a professor at Fordham University]said.
Deciding Who Sees Students’ Data is a fairly lengthy article in The New York Times about the inBloom data collection system.
Here’s an excerpt:
Yet, for all of inBloom’s neutral-sounding intentions, industry analysts say it has stirred some parents’ fears about the potential for mass-scale surveillance of students. Parents like Rachael Stickland, a mother of two Jeffco students, say that schools are amassing increasing amounts of information about K-12 students with little proof that it will foster their critical thinking or improve their graduation rates.
“It’s a new experiment in centralizing massive metadata on children to share with vendors,” she said, “and then the vendors will profit by marketing their learning products, their apps, their curriculum materials, their video games, back to our kids.”
Your child’s data is stored in the cloud is a new article at CNN about the inBloom data collection system.
Here’s an excerpt from CNN’s article:
Streichenberger says inBloom is providing the “plumbing” to fix school districts’ currently disjointed systems. School districts control the data, though they may share that information with third-parties if they choose.
That promise has offered little comfort to many parents in school districts that use inBloom. Some parents in those districts feel that there’s not enough transparency around the data platform, what data will be stored, and who will have access to it. InBloom says it’s up to the states to determine what data is stored and whether parents have access.
Sprowal says parents were not adequately notified before her son’s school district started loading data on to the platform.
“I think if there was full disclosure, transparency, if they included us in the process, as they were developing it … it would have been fine,” she said. “It would have … put some constraints on it.”
inBloom lost its only remaining customer when New York State withdrew from it.
Here’s an excerpt from The Wall Street Journal:
New York has reversed course to use an Atlanta-based company to store student data for parents and officials to use to track student progress, after the plan triggered privacy concerns and a legal challenge….
“We will not store any student data with inBloom, and we have directed inBloom to securely delete all the non-identifiable data that has been stored,” a statement Wednesday from state Education Department spokesman Dennis Tomkins said.
InBloom was founded in 2013 with $100 million in grant money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corp. The technology drew early interest from several states, but New York was the only one fully involved.
The Hechinger Report has since written a thorough obituary of inBloom, The fate of big data after inBloom.
I’ve chronicled the ongoing fiasco of the Gates Foundation-founded-and-financed inBloom student data-vacuuming service called inBloom.
As usual, these guys never bothered asking parents and teachers what they thought before they initiated their bright idea and, now that they announced its dissolution, they’re blaming everybody but themselves and their funders.
You can read all about it at these two articles:
InBloom Student Data Repository to Close is from The New York Times.
inBloom to Shut Down Amid Growing Data-Privacy Concerns is from Education Week.
I’m adding this list to A Collection Of “The Best…” Lists On Parent Engagement.