David Gamberg, the enlightened and thoughtful superintendent of the Southold school district in Long Island, New York, wrote a letter to the president of inBloom and asked that the corporation remove any data pertaining to the students of his district.
For his willingness to say “no, not with our students,” David Gamberg is hereby added to the honor roll as a champion of American education. He has done the honorable thing. He has defended his students against commercial exploitation and defended their right to privacy and their right to be left alone by a government and a private sector that believes that privacy is dead. Not in Southold!
New York is one of the few states in the nation that has agreed to hand over all personal, confidential student information to inBloom.
inBloom is the corporation funded by the Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation ($100 million from Gates) to collect personal, identifiable student data. The software was created by Wireless Generation, part of Joel Klein’s Amplify, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. The data will be stored on a “cloud” managed by amazon.com.
Gamberg does not want the personal data of the students in his district on that cloud. Good for him!
What’s is in the data set? 400 data points about every student. Personal, confidential, identifiable.
How is this legally possible? In 2011, the U.S. Department of Education changed the regulations for the federal privacy act, known as FERPA. As a result, this data may now be released to third parties without parental consent.
Why was all that data collected? In some cases it was necessary for the schools and the districts, but the sudden creation of huge data warehouses was mandated for those states that received funds from Race to the Top or waivers from NCLB.
In other words, friends, the Gates Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education worked together to assure that every piece of data about the children of America would be assembled in one place. inBloom makes no guarantees that the data cloud cannot be hacked.
Please read Superintendent Gamberg’s letter to the president of inBlooom, Mr. Iwan Streichenberger. It is attached to the link above. Ever superintendent and school board should use this letter as a model to protect the privacy of their students and families.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Word is that the inBloom contract with this clause expired at the end of 2012. But cannot find proof of this. If true, this letter does not hold power, if not true, this is a great out for many school districts. Does anyone know?
Contract or not, the state dramatically overstepped its moral and ethical bounds. I do not have the authority to sign a contract on your behalf. The state does not have the authority to sign a contract to turn over private student data to corporations without parental consent, whatever that contract might say. The state is usurping an authority that rests with parents and guardians, and with them alone.
Finally, common sense prevails preventing this next generation of data management from exploiting the basic rights and privacy of students.
The latest narrative that is being floated by the enemies of freedom is that in the age of the Internet, nothing is private anymore anyway, so we all might as well get used to it. Tech-entranced dolts write paeans to the “ubiquitous internet of things,” telling us how wonderful life is going to be when every object in our environments is a “smart object,” relaying information back SOMEWHERE to SOMEONE. Kudos to the courageous and smart Superintendent David Gamberg for not accepting we should start inuring our students, early, to life in a continual surveillance state.
“He sees you when you’re sleeping . . . .”
Read the Department of Education report on “Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance: Critical Factors for Success in the 21st Century.” It envisions a near future when students are hooked up to monitors of their affective states, such as retinal scanning cameras and galvanic skin response wristbands, that continually monitor their affective states and feed these back to the central database to ensure that students are on task.
Orwell’s Ingsoc had NOTHING REMOTELY APPROACHING that sort of fine-grained command and control.
Welcome to the Panopticon.
Note to David Coleman: Notice that I refer, above, to “the latest narrative that is being floated by the enemies of freedom.” Narrative is one of our primary ways of making sense of the world. We are story-telling creatures, and so-called “informational texts” are shot through with and informed by people’s narratives. So, your opposition of instruction on informational texts to instruction on narrative texts is unwarranted by actual human experience and contradicted by any real understanding of how “informative texts” work.
Just the prelude to the totalitarian state. I working on a novel. I think I’ll title it: When We Were Free.
The totalitarian state will not come about through sudden revolution. It will come about by degrees. People with particular agendas–often well-meaning people–will create the centralized apparatus of the public-private state machine, piecemeal, bit by bit. And then that apparatus will become available to ANY FUTURE LEADERS of a society that has become INURED TO LIVING LIVES THAT ARE CONTINUALLY MONITORED AND CONSTRAINED. A bit of 1984, a bit of Brave New World. This is not the future that I want for my grandson, for any of our grandsons and granddaughters.
“In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.”
“f you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”
–George Orwell, 1984
Here’s the Department of Education’s plan for the next best thing to brain implants:
Click to access OET-Draft-Grit-Report-2-17-13.pdf
Here’s a great warning about what a surveillance state looks like:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/
And we should trust Murdock with our kid’s data? Cripes! One can’t trust his employees to do right. You know, that nasty little phone hacking scandal in the U.K.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/28/world/europe/uk-phone-hacking-trial/
I’ve read that in Communist China all citizens have a “black file” which documents everything a person has done from birth to death. Since the “end game” of the totalitarian takeover of the U.S. is Communism for us and Capitalism for “them,” electronic records available to anyone in power appears to be the U.S version of the “black file.” Language to overrule FERPA was apparently buried in the Patriot Act.
“New York is moving toward contracting with nonprofit Atlanta data company inBloom, Inc. to “store student test scores, disciplinary records, disabilities and other vital subjects.””
Just curious, but do you think any of the elite private schools (you know, the places where those calling the shots send their kids) are contracting with inBloom?
If this sort of data storage is so great and so necessary and remotely appropriate, why not?
Instructors at elite private schools are at-will employees who can be terminated without cause. Do you think public schools should follow this model, or are you just cherrypicking?
The serious answer to your question? They’re private schools. They are much smaller, with no bureaucracy, and they are under no legal obligation to store or report student data in any specific way. They can let their instruction and outcomes speak for themselves. Good thing we have them!
It is not cherry picking (but nice try to slip in a logical fallacy…Cherry picking implies to willfully ignore data that does not support ones point) …to ask a question.
Of course they are under no obligation to do anything….I never said they were. But nice red herring (mis leading in order to make an irrelevant point).
Your answers seems to be private schools can do what they want because they are pirate. No argument from me.
You are glad we have private schools. Again, no argument from me.
You say private school outcomes speak for themselves. Not sure of your point here. There are some great public schools out there with great outcomes that “speak for themselves”.
But I still pose the question.
If storing student and teacher data with private corporations is so necessary to help children (as has been stated in the materials presented to us), so helpful to the teacher (as has been presented to us), and so necessary to ensure quality teaching and learning (again, this is what we are being told) they why aren’t private schools availing themselves of this WONDERFUL new opportunity to help their students and teachers excel even more?
I await any real answer.
Ang, you got your answer: Private schools are mostly exempt from the various reporting provisions required by state and federal laws, and for the most part they are small, independent, and very lean administratively. There just isn’t the need for something like inBloom.
Since you clearly feel that best practices at elite private schools are useful, it was fair to point out that these schools have vastly different labor arrangements with their employees.
Tim,
Another red herring…
Labor practices at private institutions are not at issue here (although you may be interested to know that they are as good or better than public school practices at several Southern elite privates).
And again, private schools are exempt…Yes, agreed. They can do whatever they want.
But why do they not WANT to use this awesome, super useful, crazy great new tool? Because they are lean? All the more reason to have all student data on some cloud. No (less) internal administration for all the records (at least thats what we were told when being sold the data services).
I don’t see how having or not having a bureaucracy has anything to do with wanting to provide teachers, students and parents with timely and important information regarding student progress (again, this is what we were assured the databases would do.)
We were assured that these “tools” would help students, parents and teachers “perform better”, address and problems early (yes, even rich kids can have learning problems), help student excel, and a laundry list of other claims.
If we accept these claims as true, who would not want this?
I would think elite schools would need the best of everything, no?
David is a a thoughtful, courageous and child-centered school leader. He is a true gem.
Clearly. A hero. We need more like him, and like you, Ms. Burris! Your courage and his are models to us all. Thank you.
Good for you, Mr. Gamberg!
YEA, Mr. Gamberg!
Just wanted to make you aware that students are planning to protest outside of Ward Melville HS against the CC during King’s visit on Novemeb12 12th since they are not allowed to speak in the forum. http://threevillage.patch.com/groups/events/p/ward-melville-students-protest
We need to draw the line at last! David has always been about what’s best for the children. It was an honor to have worked with him. It was our district’s loss when he moved on!
Holy mackerel. In doing my usual due diligence to confirm that yet another honor roll inductee comes from a district of relative privilege (yep: 85% white, 1% black, 14% free lunch, 4% ELL, per student expenditures >$30,000), I noticed that this district has about 850 students. Total, K-12. That’s about the size of the average K-5 elementary school in my district.
This is probably worth having in the back of our minds the next time we rail against a charter network leader’s salary or blaming the explosion in education spending on testing. The district structure not only perpetuates segregation, it is also wasteful.