In this post, New York City activist Leonie Haimson explains what inBloom is, how the U.S. Department of Education weakened privacy protections in 2009 and 2011, and why parents should demand the right to withhold their child’s confidential data from inBloom.
The creators of inBloom talk about its benefits in creating customized learning tools, but Haimson warns that the real goal is to turn student data over to for-profit vendors that will target children for marketing their stuff.
An investigative journalist is needed to figure out why Arne Duncan’s Department of Education weakened FERPA, the federal law protecting student privacy, at the same time that Race to the Top offered incentives for states to build data warehouses, and along comes inBloom to open up student data for use by vendors. It is all too neat a package.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There is no such thing as an investigative journalist in education. Luckily, we have you and Leonie covering this important story. Now we all have to do our part to post, share, and talk about it so that public outrage can shut down this inBloom project.
The neat packages was entirely spelled out in the technology that the Department of Education published shortly after Duncan came into office. This was the plan from Day 1. They have very much kept to their script on this.
Obama/Duncan’s MEIN KAMPF!?
What a sneaky, low-down, conniving, cheating, unethical……..betrayal of our parents and children. Teachers guaranteed parents that their data was protected and confidential unless they gave permission to release it. They did know that the state gathered info, but never in a million years did they envision that holier-than-thou Bill Gates would suck up their confidential data and sell it to vendors, pretending to do something helpful to assist teachers. Liar, liar pants on fire. I have never heard a teacher expressing the need for a national clearing house for individual teaching support – IEP bank of objectives for GenEd kids? PLEASE…
This has $$$$$ and more $$$$$$ written all over it!
I would be more than interested in any secret recordings of these secret planning meetings with Obama/Duncan/Gates/Carnegie/Rhee/Walton/Murdock/…… as they planned the systematic dismanteling of public education. I hope that someone someday will pull the plug on their actions. Shouldn’t good win over evil?
CX: The plan (what Diane calls “all too neat a package”) was entirely spelled out in the technology blueprint that the Department of Education published shortly after Duncan came into office. The DOE has very much kept to its script on this. It’s amazing to me (and scary) how precisely, how very much according to plan, the DOE has executed phase 1 of its Orwellian vision.
These guys are all about Moneyball.
Do you have a link to the blueprint you reference?
Does Obama sit in on these plots or has he just delegated the job out?
Would Arne look me in the face and say that charters are, as a rule, better than public schools and that is his goal?
Lying sleazebags don’t usually make eye contact.
Actually, Linda, Lying sleazebags sometimes DO make eye contact.
And those are the scariest types: They’re called sociopaths.
Robert, what is in Obama/Duncan’s MEIN KAMPF for Phase 2? Please give us all the info. Thx
I can’t even put a kids name in an email. IEP’S must be kept under lock and key. Teachers cannot discuss medication and the names of other students to parents. All of which I agree with, but we can send 400 data points into cyber space for some technocrat to send back to us. This is science fiction.
Linda, so true.
I spent an entire career as a special ed teacher and special ed administrator guarding confidential info ‘with my life’ and all teachers did the same. Now we find out that the systems & states fed the CorpGreed$ Schmucks ALL…ALL…ALL…and more of the MOST CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION to Gates/Carnegie/Murdock and tons of vendors for $$$. And, no NATIONAL UNIVERSAL OUTRAGE? Why? Any ideas?
Not many parents know yet, when they do watch out. Since they can’t opt out and many are not even informed that it has already happened, they are getting away with it.
I have sent to many reporters here in CT. No bites yet, but I will keep at it. Write to your local and state reps. And senators.
Don’t give up. Keep informing.
Can we assume that all RttT states are already networked for inBloom to receive info?
Are there any resources available for opting out of that data collection? (Like the wonderful website providing testing opt out templates by state?)
Linda, on a personal note, thank you very much for your posts. I hope more University level education folks will see themselves as a link for teachers and parents to be united, informed and supported. I think that is what the honor of that level in this field carries with it. Teachers advocate for little people, professors advocate for the people advocating for the little people (or something like that). Bottom line: we are in it together in whatever capacity we can offer. Nobody can just sit back.
I wrote to my two state senators and my congresswoman. They are clueless and repeat the edubuzz words without understanding the meaning. I was informed they MUST notify the parents about sending their kids data to a third party, but you cannot opt out. I told them I knew of parents who were never notified.
Then, the aide gave me the name of a dept. within the USDOE to file a complaint. I pointed out this dept was under the supervision of Arne Dumpcan and nothing will happen.
It is better to rally the troops and educate ALL parents than waste my time filling out a complaint form.
By the way, I teach at the middle school level. My kids are grown, but I still consider myself a parent for “all my children”.
“Then, the aide gave me the name of a dept. within the USDOE to file a complaint.”
That is pretty rich.
Ah. I thought you were a professor.
Well, good work.
Why no NATIONAL UNIVERSAL OUTRAGE? My guess is becasue too many parents are in the dark. They have been told that Coomon Core is a good thing by their child’s teacher and no more. Teachers have been told this by thier proincipals. Principals have been told this by their superintendents. District superintendents have been told this by their State Superintendent. No one is doing the research! They are just listening and going along; the easy thing to do. After all, College and Career Ready is what parents, college officials and employers want to hear.
And when all of OUR children (spec. Ed, ELL, TAG, etc..all of them) are college and career ready, there will be jobs for everyone?
A small glitch in their plan.
I agree.
People are not seeing the connection of it all. I worked hard to compartmentalize it all, and now I am piecing it back together to see where I fit in. I talk to friends about it and they are unaware and unphased.
I had a text/ email conversation with my sister last night who has not really paused to give RttT much thought (critically)–she is a teacher and parent. In my opinion she even offered up the very buzz words used by RttT offices in an almost brainwashed way. A year ago I was where she is (when I went looking for this answers and found this blog), but I sensed that something was rotten in Denmark–I am not sure most people do. Teachers ate so accustomed to the next bigger, better, newer thing and the stagnant compensation that they seem numb. I don’t want to upset her or people like her who are comfortable with just making the best of where our state is right now. It is tricky to know when to speak up, or not. So I just do my job and observe.
The thing is, we have to be there for our students. We have to shield them from controversy or questionable judgement. And meanwhile we have to comply with what our state adopts. It is a delicate balance.
My students will only see me smile and give them everything I can!
But as a parent I am very concerned for my children.
Exactly….you have to have multiple personas to pull this off..teacher, parent, activist, rebel rouser, reader, analyzer, writer all while faking compliance while doing what you have always done: teaching, nurturing, guiding, mentoring, supporting, and advocating for children.
The theory…the more you know….the easier to subvert. 🙂
People are very fatalistic about information privacy. Not irrationally so. Many recognize how far down the slope we’ve already gone, and many correctly sense, even if only subconsciously, that information technology is growing faster than we understand, and that information, like water, can only be contained for so long. Other people are just not very smart.
My view is that the fatalism’s well-founded, particularly given that our notions of property and privacy are completely unequipped to deal with the realities of the Information Age. We need laws which clearly define the contours of what’s fundamentally private information, for both Fourth Amendment purposes and for commercial purposes. Unless that happens — unless “opt out” becomes “opt in” — agencies like the U.S. DOE will continue to bend to accommodate the Church of What’s Happening Now, the demands of commerce, the constant need for more of the stuff that feeds the appetite of Big Data and all the Nate Silvers in America. The problem isn’t that Arne Duncan has gutted FERPA. The problem is that FERPA is useless in the first place. Even if the DOE loses this lawsuit (and other things equal, you always bet on the federal agency to prevail in any lawsuit that challenges its interpretation of a federal statute), we’ll be back at this same spot soon. InBlooms will never stop popping up, the Executive branch will never stop trying to expand its ability to Get Things Done, and if Congress doesn’t do its job and rein this in, then we all would be wise to get real fatalistic, real fast.
My point just being that this is about Congress’s responsibility to protect our privacy in the most general sense. If it’s just about education policy or the Common Core, don’t get your hopes up, and don’t be surprised that nobody’s hip to it.
You are right on! How long now has national news been doing pieces on college graduates who can’t find work except at places like Starbucks if they are evn that lucky?
Murdoch, Gates, Klein, Duncan, Rhee, etc. operate by denying wrongdoing with the belief that the public will support the reform cause and listen to what is planted in the media. That’s how Murdoch has operated in the UK until Nick Davies of the Guardian worked for over two years to uncover Murdoch’s phone hacking and e-mail fraud.
An investigative reporter like Mr. Davies is needed to connect the reform players and the no bid contracts tied to Wireless Generation, Amplify and the inBloom database scheme. Then, savvy attorneys are needed to file class action suits related to FERPA violations and the privateers.
In the meanwhile, parents must file petitions for injunctions in New York, Colorado and Illinois so inBlooms data collection without parental consent will cease.
It’s our right to raise questions, file open records requests and register complaints.
This is why parents should be aware of the ramifications of what the Department of Education’s actions will be. If this is allowed to stand, all of your childrens school information becomes public. Do you want “them” knowing all this about your child?
PLEASE GET BUSY, PARENTS! Any investigative reporters out there willing to take this on?
Some background for an investigative reporter or an author –
Texas Education Agency awarded the New York based company Wireless Generation (now Murdoch’s Amplify/inBloom) no bid contracts for intellectual property development (corporate welfare). Then, TEA funneled millions to UTHSC-H in grant funds to buy back “intellectual property” called mClass assessments. TEA and current and former employees of UTHSC-H receive royalties (kickbacks) without disclosure of financial interests. Royalties are paid by Wireless to UT, then funneled to the individuals and TEA. Taxpayers pay for intellectual property development and they pay for the royalties. Students, teachers and schools generate costly licenses. A book could be written about the WG scam that snowballed across America with Texas sized corporate largess.
With ZERO financial disclosure, WG received millions in federal Reading First and Early Reading first funds for mClass TPRI and DIBELS PDA assessments. Funds were funneled to WG through the grantees. At the same time, Spellings, Paige, Lyon, Finn and individuals working at the USDOE, UT, TEA, WG and the University of Oregon deceived parents and educators in meetings, in the media, and through non-profits by stating that the progress monitoring assessments required by federal RF grant funds help children learn and teachers teach and are “scientifically proven.”
Readers will find Wireless Generation’s no bid contract signed by Arne Duncan interesting. Reformers funnel millions to corporate raiders in Chicago and other cities while class sizes increase and schools close.
Click to access 08-0723-PR16.pdf
Susan Ohanian and others have been connecting the dots for years.
http://www.susanohanian.org/outrage_fetch.php?id=580
Murdoch, Duncan, Gates and Klein are counting on the corporate bounty created by inBloom’s future student, teacher and school licensing schemes – similar to methods used by Wireless Generation that started over a decade ago.
As I’ve stated multiple times in these comments, I am a parent–in Jefferson County, where we will be piloting inBloom. I’m no longer a journalist, but I have looked into the issue. Both Haimson and others are missing a very important point: the recent FERPA changes aren’t the ones that affect third parties like inBloom. That law when on the books in 2008. See this Washington Post article for the details: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/03/28/on-the-question-of-student-privacy/
I’ve also talked at length with Jeffco’s administration about what this means in terms of marketing to my child (direct or indirect), what kind of information will be shared with third parties and what kind of information is already shared with some of the third parties (see the 2008 law) who administer some of the electronic databases already in use by the district. I’ve written about this here: http://www.examiner.com/article/jeffco-schools-addresses-concerns-about-inbloom
In short, I have “gotten busy” as one of the comments suggested, and I don’t see any reasons to be worried. This discussion doesn’t seem much different than the ones surrounding digital medical records several years ago. My medical records haven’t been misused (except possibly by insurance companies who had access to them anyhow), and I am familiar with how research can be done with medical records but without selective access to information. A researcher could have access to information from your medical records such as age and weight and a particular ailment you have, but that researcher does not have access to your name, address, or other identifying information. This research allows them to study medical issues across various populations and develop new treatments, but it doesn’t mean they even know anything about you or that they can directly market the new treatment to you. My conversations with Jeffco have indicated that access to student data will be selective, depending on the party wanting access (even within the district) and that while information could be made available to third-party vendors, it would done in a fashion similar to medical records. I don’t know what other districts are doing, but I have talked to mine and as someone who was involved with the district and attending board meetings long before inBloom surfaced as an issue, I don’t have a reason to distrust what they have told me.
If there is a “coincidence” involving FERPA and the recent changes, all signs point to more government involvement when it comes to “accountability” and standardized test scores. Those, as a parent, are where I want to “get busy” because those are what will have the most impact on my children’s quality of learning in the classroom. I would love to get rid of the draconian accountability measures passed by our state legislature, and I would love to see a moratorium on the new PARCC tests until we feel our students have had a chance to really master the material.
My big fear is that neither will happen, good teachers will lose jobs, our legislature will pass even more draconian (and unfunded) reforms, and any attempts to actually fund our schools at a reasonable level will continue to be confounded as various anti-tax parties ask why there haven’t been improvements despite all the accountability. The school “reform” movement scares me a great deal, and it’s something my district can’t control. After a hard-fought campaign to pass a local mill levy and bond issue here last year, I’m all too familiar with the real enemies for my child’s education. They’re local and they’re only interested in defunding schools (and most of them are happy to jump on the anti-inBloom wagon to claim that the district is “wasting” the money and lying to the voters about how the mill levy would be used). Those are the people who are already planning to oppose a tax increase that would improve school funding (per-pupil spending is already only ranked at 42 in the nation (47 when adjusted per $1000 of income), and this debate continues to fuel their fire.
I will request again that the inBloom debate be local. I’d be happy to talk about inBloom in Jefferson County as long as we bring the Jeffco administration into the discussion. Based on my experiences with them, I think they would be happy to talk with Diane or anyone else from the Network from Public Education and tell their side of the story. I think they would be happy to answer the charges that student privacy would be compromised. I would also like to acknowledge that parents will have different views on this issue and that we stop characterizing those of us who aren’t opposed as naive or ill-informed. I am neither. What may be happening in other districts in other states may indeed be cause for concern or even panic, but here in Jefferson County, our administration has proceeded carefully and cautiously, and I believe our students will not be at risk–or at least not anymore than their data already is for hacking through our local systems.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. You obviously trust the Jeffco administration, but once your child’s data enters the Cloud, they will have no control over who uses the information about her or him. Do you feel certain that the Cloud will not be hacked? Do you not care if your child’s data is given or sold to third-party vendors to sell stuff to her? I am a grandparent of a second-grader in public school, and I think that parents should have the right to opt out. If you want to opt in, that’s fine. But those who prefer to keep their child’s data private should be legally allowed to say “no.” Do you have a problem with that?
First, the student data in Jeffco is already in a database (actually, several). The question for some seems to be whether it’s in a cloud or whether it’s where it currently is, or whether the database comes from inBloom or a company they’ve never heard about. Do most parents currently know whether their district’s databases are local or come from third parties? They should find out. I don’t understand why no one cared before this–despite the fact that some student data is on third-party databases *right now*–or why this entire discussion isn’t about digital records and what can be released beyond the school district.
As far as hacking–yes, anything can be hacked. The cloud can be hacked. The current Jeffco student databases can be hacked even as we speak. My child’s medical records can be hacked at her doctor’s office. That’s the reality of the digital age. Of course, paper records could be–and were!–copied and used for identity theft, so those weren’t safe either.
A decade ago when I was working on my Ph.D., university’s student records were hacked into on two different occasions (this was before clouds, but the records were digital by then). We were sent letters each time to show to law enforcement our data was in fact used for identity theft. I’m very aware of the dangers of hacking, but my children’s data is already vulnerable, whether at their doctor’s office or their dentist’s office or in the current Jeffco systems. I don’t have more concerns about the cloud, largely because Amazon.com has kept my sensitive data (i.e., my credit card and associated info) safe for years now. Obviously, it’s always vulnerable, but again, that’s a reality of the digital age. Also, another concerned Jeffco parent who does IT security had a chance to look into the system. He was concerned, having read some of the questions raised about inBloom. What he found in terms of encryption at every level satisfied him, and he told this to the school board at a study session about inBloom. I attended that session because I wanted to hear the all the details of what was going on in our district. They are planning another session once school gets closer the last time I heard, and I will be there again.
The marketing issue concerns me, but it concerns me from a **much** larger perspective. For example, I don’t like the fact that a local karate place does a demonstration at school (direct marketing) and my child comes home able to tell me when the new karate lessons start. I hate our association with LifeTouch Photography. In the fall, they threaten to not take a picture unless you send the money. In the spring, they take pictures of the kids without my consent or money, send the developed photos home a week later, and threaten that I have to pay for merchandise I never ordered or return it. They do that with photos of kindergartners in caps and gowns too. No parent should have to tell a 5-year-old “sorry honey, but we have to return these cute pictures of you because I’m not forking over $20 for it.” And yet, every new batch of kindergarten parents is faced with exactly that decision, as are the rest of us with the unwanted and unordered spring photos. I could go on, but the marketing at that low level has concerned me for some time and I’ve repeatedly brought it to the attention of our School Improvement Team. Some improvements have been made, and in others the benefit to the school outweighs my concerns about shielding children from marketing.
As far as inBloom goes, I’ve talked to the district and they have told me that they can and will control what is released to third-party vendors, if anything. They also told me that no, there wouldn’t be a situation where my third-grader might receive marketing offers in the mail based on say, her test scores or something similar. My understanding is that what third-party vendors might have access to would not be individually-identifiable; it would be more like the data university researchers get: third-graders scoring between X and Y on a test, possibly with a range of zip codes or other socioeconomic data attached to it. My husband does medical research at a local university, so we’ve talked a bit about how those systems work too.
Does it bother me that that data, even if anonymous, will be cheap or even free to for-profit companies? Yes. It’s a miserable state of affairs when schools have to beg for money and corporations with plenty of money are constantly looking to make a dime off the backs of others. But, I can see some benefits of the technology for my child. I greatly value differentiation, and with class sizes the way they have been in Jeffco due to years of budget cuts, I understand how the technology will help. I’m willing to make the trade-off. My ideal, of course, would be that our schools are adequately funded and we could completely shield our children from all marketing–yes, including the karate place and the pee wee baseball and all that, but until it is, this seems like a reasonable middle ground that keeps my child’s data as safe as is possible and, in Jeffco at least, won’t compromise her privacy to third parties.
All that said, I plan to keep a close watch on what is going on. The last word was that they hadn’t decided which data fields would be used or what data would be included, and they certainly hadn’t decided what information would be available to people within the district much less outside of it. I plan to keep track of those things within our district, and won’t hesitate to write letters and speak at board meetings if I have concerns. I attend the school board meeting each month, so I’m able to keep track of new developments about inBloom and a whole host of other issues.
As far as opting out, I understand the concern but wonder how that would impact the children who were opted out. None of those children are opted out of digital records currently, so presumably they would stay in the same mess of databases, and may not get the level of differentiation they deserve. This is not because teachers are lazy or incompetent or are punishing the child, but rather the reality of a teacher with 24 kids or 27 kids or 30 kids in a classroom. We’re busy implementing Common Core because we don’t have a choice, and teacher accountability and school accountability mandates are all coming down the pipeline at the same time, which is a nice way to say that our teachers are being dumped on by all sorts of unfunded mandates at a time when they also have larger class sizes and less paraprofessional help. I don’t doubt that they’ll do their best to meet everyone’s needs, but it defeats the streamlining benefit of the technology and may not be the best thing for that child in the long run. Obviously, it won’t make them safe from hacking (see note above regarding all digital files). Perhaps it will prevent them from being marketing to by those associated from inBloom, but it certainly won’t prevent LifeTouch and the karate place and others from direct marketing to them in school. That issue is still under discussion in Jeffco, so opting out may yet become an option before everything has been decided.
Lisa,
You didn’t answer my question
Do you agree that parents should have the right to opt their child out of inBloom?
I think I will ask this before Dwaine does: should parents have the right to opt out of all school record keeping? In my district at least the students records are kept on a computer system, vulnerable to being hacked.
There is a point at which certain definitions of privacy become incompatible with life. Should schools not be allowed to write down the names of students? Seems quite ridiculous. If you have a problem sharing that kind of information, it’s probably time to go Amish. For those of us who like electricity and don’t speak German, the issue isn’t about record keeping generally, but the rules that govern record sharing, with the assumption being that even if some break the rules, the rules themselves matter. It requires a lot of line drawing, and I’m too blotto to embark on that difficult task now, but the idea is that the lines are the important stuff, I think.
But the objections here were not simply about record sharing, but also security of the records. Is Amazon or your local school district more likely to have top notch security?
When it comes to security, one aspect is the strength of the software and protocols. Another is the visibility of the target. Another is the potential magnitude of the breach. They interplay, but that’s enough to make the point. Amazon has much better software, probably better protocols. But it’s a much bigger target, because the payoff is bigger, because the data is richer and organized for productive purposes. And the downside of a breach (or the upside, from the perspective of the breacher) is much bigger at Amazon than at my local school district, because as much as I may say that my child’s attendance and disciplinary records are sacrosanct, my credit card and identity are even more sacrosanct.
Sorry to reply again here but I didn’t see an option to do it below (probably because replies would look like e. e. cummings poems–which would be cool but not useful for discussion. So, do I believe parents should have a right to opt out? Yes, but on a limited basis so that the system can be used for emergency contact information. That data needs to all be in the same place, whether inBloom or not.
In the case of an emergency, we need to have a child’s name, grade, teacher, school, and emergency contact information available immediately. That’s true for medical emergencies (broken bones, etc) or the kind that require schools to go on lockdown or be evacuated. In an emergency of that kind, our teachers and staff need to be able to contact parents quickly, and the current systems are set up so that they can immediately send out messages to those affected at a particular school. The idea that we’d have a handful of kids whose emergency contact information exists in a separate database (or worse, whose records only exist on paper in an evacuated school or one on lockdown and at the district office) and whose parents aren’t getting the message at the same time as everyone else seems like a disaster waiting to happen. Perhaps the current systems wouldn’t be affected by inBloom and our messenger system can stay as it is (though I certainly hope parents wouldn’t try to opt out of that!). This may seem paranoid, but then again, Columbine High School is in our district.
Individuals who are following inBloom and Amplify would disagree that the inBloom debate is local – in Jefferson County.
Do you have copies of the Jeffco inBloom contracts, agreements, and amendments to share? If not, other interested individuals will file open records requests for these documents with Jeffco.
Student and family privacy have been compromised without parental consent by your state and district. It’s important for Jefferson County’s taxpayers to know that family information is included in the “data points” about each child and now in a “cloud.”
According to your post, some individuals in Jeffco seem to trust Murdoch’s business record and have a tendency to believe claims promoted by those tied financially with Murdoch and Gates.
Have financial conflicts of interest been disclosed to taxpayers related to potential profits created by students, families, teachers and schools?
Teachers do not want databases or “corporate tools” to improve instructional practices. Teachers want smaller class sizes and professional treatment.
The inBloom multimillion dollar database boondoggle will fail like ARIS failed in NY with or without students’ data because the purpose of the database is to increase profits for the News Corp shareholders.
If inBloom crosses over to my state, parents and educators will organize and stop the invasion of privacy.
My point was not that inBloom is just about Jeffco, but rather that we aren’t doing ourselves any favors by overgeneralizing.
Jeffco has yet to finalize contracts with inBloom–including agreements about which data will or won’t be included. However, they have a very good website and are happy to comply with all open-records requests. Their school board meetings are taped so you can listen to the audio versions if you cannot come in person; most documents approved by the board are on the website in PDF format so that all the taxpayers can read them. The school board members typically disclose if there is a conflict of interest and I have not heard of any.
However, seeing as you are not from Colorado, much less Jeffco, please do not speak for Jeffco teachers. They can speak for themselves. What works for you, your family, your teachers and your state may very well be quite different.
With Gates and Murdoch $$$ involved, there is a possibility all Jeffco teachers are not comfortable to speak out, so maybe they cannot truly speak for themselves. Gates controls the message once he “donates”.
Jeffco teachers are not informed about the realities of inBloom. They are given glossed-over versions of talking points.
Let’s also be honest about their union. The president of the CEA wrote an opinion piece in the Denver Post applauding inBloom. She failed to mention the CEA received over $5 million from Gates in the last two years. She also failed to mention she a fellow of this Gates-funded project: http://bellwethereducation.org/aspen-teacher-leader-fellows-2012/
Lisa,
I am also a parent in Jeffco. I have been in dialogue with the same Jeffco administration you reference and I have a very different opinion of the local conversation. As a vocal opponentof inBloom, I have worked with district officials, the Jeffco PTA, the local teachers’ union and the community, and have been called much worse than “naive” and “ill-informed.” I have been marginalized, scolded and put on notice. District officials brought the media to my children’s school during a school accountability meeting. Why? Because I am a parent who is trying to shed light on this dangerous, untested and clandestine experiment of student data collection and sharing. And I think you should know that not everyone opposed to inBloom is from the education “de-funding” group you mention. Some are parents like me who are trying to inform parents about the decision Jeffco made without community input or without a formal vote from the Jeffco Board of Ed.
You have given your assessment about how the real bogeyman is reforms under the guise of “accountability” and “standardized test[s].” How is it possible to separate these “reforms” from massive data collection and mining? Data is the Holy Grail. If we make it *easier* for districts to collect hundreds (or more?) data points on our children and store them in a massive database, we have only ourselves to blame when they use this data to carry out their agenda: to increase class size, deprofessionalize teaching, generate more standardized tests and privatize public education. Signing on to this database is the lynchpin; this will destroy Jeffco, not make it stronger.
Which brings me to your statement that our district “can’t control” the “school ‘reform’ movement.” My answer is YES WE CAN. You can control the reform movement by speaking up and opting your children *out* of these dangerous practices. Opt them out of standardized tests; demand the right to opt them out of inBloom (or any other massive data collection project). Destructive reforms flourish in silent and complacent environments. Parents must speak up and say no!
As I mentioned before, I have a very different view of what has unfolded in Jeffco. I believe Jeffco had every intention of keeping this partnership quiet. It was only because of the work of Leonie Haimson – and the details she’s uncovered – that we are even having this conversation. Otherwise, I truly believe they would have moved forward with this project without telling a soul. And while you may trust what the district administration is saying about inBloom’s purported benefits, they are only regurgitating talking points provided by inBloom’s public relations teams. When you ask them detailed information about what data they will share and when they will share it, they refuse to be specific. I don’t believe they have nefarious intent; I believe they don’t know. How can a district with 85,000 children sign on to a project this massive and not know which data points they will share, how they will share them and when? What’ s the long-term cost to update our technology? Who will be responsible when -not if – this data is compromised? Where’s the plan?
As to your comment regarding passage of the local mil and bond issue, Jeffco’s CIO told me in the hallway outside the Board Room on March 7th, 2013 that they couldn’t have proceeded with inBloom/Loud Cloud without the passage of the mil/bond in November 2012. Whether the mil increase directly funds the technology project or it frees up surplus monies to fund the contracts, my vote for 3a/3b supported inBloom. This was never communicated to me as a voter.
Jeffco is playing with the big boys here and I’m not sure they know what they’re doing. If you are an education writer, you surly know how “education reforms” are destroying our neighboring district of Dougco. inBloom will bring the same or similar destructive reform strategies here.
Please look deeper into the relationship between the Gates Foundation’s and the Carnegie Corporation’s (the founding partners of inBloom, formerly the Shared Learning Collaborative) vision for public education and their inBloom product. Gates’ monies always come with strings. This “free” gift is a Trojan Horse.
Rachel,
I’m thankful there are informed parents like you who refuse to drink the inBloom Kool-Aid. It’s important to request all contracts, agreements and amendments between inBloom and Jeffco and post the information on the internet. Jeffco administrators are being used by the Billionaire Boys Club to buy inBloom snake oil without knowing the facts or even knowing what questions to ask. THEY are responsible for opening the gates to receive the Trojan Horse. Stay strong and refuse to back down.
Rachel, I’ve seen your website and been following some of what you’ve written. I haven’t had a chance to talk to you at the school board meetings because you seem to leave once you’ve had your chance to comment, but I would love to talk via email at some point because some of your concerns have perplexed me. If you follow the link to the article I mentioned above, there’s an email contact if you’d like to get in touch and talk about this more. I think I can answer the 3A 3B question too, since I was pretty involved with that campaign last year.
Lisa,
Ask Bill and Rupert if they will be making their children’s data available to inbloom. Let us know.
Lisa,
You must have me confused with someone else. I’ve only commented at one board meeting. It was at that meeting that I followed Mortimer out into the hallway to discuss inBloom where he shared with me the information regarding 3a/3b. I also attended the unfair and unbalanced inBloom study session where I had to bring my children – no public comment was allowed. While I did my best to keep my children entertained for over an hour past the scheduled start time of the discussion, I had to leave to get them dinner. However, I was interested to listen to the parent IT expert’s opinion of inBloom security. Did he mention to you his employer owns a company who contracts with the US Dept of Ed?
My email is on the website you have visited.
Yes, I heard you speak at the one board meeting you mentioned. I assumed that you, like I, attended the study session, which I didn’t find to be unfair but opinions do differ. And yes, I agree that board meeting can be long, tedious and difficult, which is why most people don’t stick around past the public comment parts.
By the way, I’m only an “education writer” as a hobby. I left journalism many years ago to pursue a PhD in musicology and I teach part-time as a musicologist at a local university. I am pursuing some of these topics because they affect my children and because our local paper’s coverage of any education topic has been sadly lacking in depth and all too often, facts. You may have noticed that they not only approve of what’s been going on in Douglas County, but actually praised it by giving the president of their school board some sort of “best in education” award in 2012 (I don’t remember what it was called and won’t take the time to look it up. I do remember inflammatory and untrue statements like along the terms “removed the district from the union’s shackles” or some such in it, which is more evidence that very few education topics will be given fair coverage by that paper).
Lisa,
If your plan is to defend inBloom and Jeffco’s partnership with Gates, I encourage to spend more time researching before you dabble in education writing. You may trust Jeffco central admin, but their bedfellows will destroy this district. And whether or not you realize it, your support of inBloom in pieces like the one you posted on the examiner will do the same.
Good folks on this blog site who live outside Jeffco offer their opinion of inBloom because they understand and have experienced the forces of corporate reform and privatization. When it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, they waste no time calling it a duck.
We in Jeffco have been fortunate enough to be insulated and isolated from destructive ed reform policies. In general, we don’t know what that duck looks or sounds like. Our parents, teachers, journalists and IT experts are inclined to trust our district admin because, in the past, there was no reason not to. Now that corporate reform is at our doorstep in the form of inBloom, that duck is poised to walk through the hallways of our schools with no one to stop it.
Since 2009, Dougco has been under constant corporate reform pressure. It’s only within the last year that most parents were able to identify the “duck” walking their halls. Incidentally, those parents fighting to reclaim their schools are terrified and mortified that Jeffco is partnering with inBloom. They now know what corporate reform looks like, they “get it” and they don’t want it spreading to their district. Spend a few minutes checking out their facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/SPEAK-for-DCSD/113649758761679
If parents in Jeffco wait four years to get it, we will lose our schools to the corporate reformers and our children’s data will be used as a commodity in the process. As I said before, please spend time researching before you support inBloom.
How can we teach our children not to lie when almost everyone in DC is doing it on a daily basis?
inBloom is not the same as medical records. It’s about inBloom selling students’ data to vendors so the vendors can buy the information and create “tools” to sell back to schools, school districts and states for “reform.” It’s about inBloom profiting off student and family personal information without parental consent.
Education reformers/profiteers seek vulnerable administrators and teachers and uniformed parents.
Will Murdoch/inBloom/Amplify/Wireless Generation come forward as data breaches occur so parents may seek legal remedies?
The “profit without parental consent” argument is utterly unpersuasive to me. Are we concerned about privacy, or are we concerned about not getting our cut of the profits? At most this should be a pile-on, “furthermore” kind of point.