Thanks to tireless bloggers and parents, who FOILed the emails, you can now read about how and why Louisiana State Superintendent John White decided to turn over confidential student data to the Murdoch-Gates collaboration.
Do you want to know what the powerful say to each other? Read this fascinating account of The Art of the Deal.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
White replies; “Dude—you are my recharger! Dinner it is, of course.”
Are you kidding? This sounds like a line from Dumb and Dumber. Boy…you really can’t make this stuff up. How embarrassing.
Just another TFA “leader”….Wendy must be so proud.
Parents and educators must unite and push back on all corporate schemes related to inBloom and the gathering of personal and assessment information without parental consent. inBloom/Wireless Generation are corporate welfare scams paid for by taxpayers with students and teachers generating the database profits without their knowledge.
Wireless Generation has been collecting personally identifiable information from students and families without consent for at least a decade. It started with NCLB and accelerated with RTTT. Murdoch is in on the scheme for the billions that he believes inBloom/Wireless Generation will generate for News Corp and the shareholders.
inBloom/Wireless Generation, now Amplify (owned by Murdoch) should be investigated for “unusual contracts” (corporate welfare) awarded by the Texas Education Agency with millions funneled to WG through the University of Texas Health Science Center for the TPRI (Reading First) and mClass WG assessment nonsense. As a result of “unusual contracts” (federal and state grants), the TEA, the University of Texas Health Science Center, and at least 20 individuals in Texas receive “royalties” (kickbacks) from Wireless Generation.
K-12 Entrepreneurship: Slow Entry, Distant Exit
Click to access 20071024_BergerStevenson.pdf
(pg. 25)
“In the negotiation, the team at the TEA took enough of an interest in the challenges that we would face scaling from a twelve person company to a company that could serve the whole state that they agreed to establish an unusual contract in which we would be paid a fixed amount every year for seven years as we scaled up from 1 percent to 100 percent of the students in Texas. At the beginning, this would be more money than we would normally charge for serving 50,000 students (the extra could go to building our capacity for the future), but by year seven, we would be getting much less than we would normally charge for serving 1.2 million students. This was a win-win – they won by mitigating the risk that we were too small to handle the project and by getting a better overall price; we won by getting growth capital from a key strategic customer rather than by taking on debt or selling equity.”
I am so confused about inBloom. After a few E-mails back and forth with someone from my state, I received the following reply:
“Sharing student data is not the purpose of inBloom. It is being developed as a utility to allow all types of digital devices to be used to access materials for helping children learn–digital textbooks, online materials, assessment items, and software from various vendors, etc. without having to deal with software compatibility issues.”
That doesn’t make any sense…then why do they need your child’s test scores, attendance records, discipline records, etc…
Why don’t you have the option to opt out?
They want your child to stare at a tablet all day.
Email Mercedes Schneider…see her blog link here:
http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/
What state if you don’t mind?
Why was the multi-million dollar Gates/Murdoch scam now called inBloom (shared learning collaborative) created as a database if the purpose is not for sharing student and teacher data held in the database to create profits for the corporations and favored insiders? Someone in your state is spreading false information to moms.
Bingo! And I never understood why they evolved from SLC to inbloom.
I emailed inbloom and asked. I never received a response.
SLC had this really cheesy, tacky video with stick figure kids and a stick figure teacher. It was slammed with negative comments and it seems to have disappeared when they became inbloom.
Love the email where they call Charlotte Danielson lame because she wanted them to use her full rubric in evaluating teachers. It’s funny how Bloomberg wanted to do the same thing in NYC but it was over-rided by the governor. Funny and sad to witness this in-fighting by all of these Rheeformers. Maybe they’ll eventually destroy each other while their scrambling over the big pie of education.
Is Louisiana in fact still using inBLOOM? I saw that on May 2013 an article was published saying they were backing out of it.