Mercedes Schneider has turned her investigative skills to unearthing the history of inBloom.
She explains what it is, why it matters, and why it is deeply embroiled in the controversy over the Common Core standards.
You may be astonished by the connections among the major players in inBloom, CCSS, and every other aspect of the current “reform” agenda.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you, Mercedes. I commented with this information on her post, which seems to have attracted a cluster of people with the expertise needed to follow up. Here it is again, though, so other educators in Massachusetts and Ohio can see it, and maybe make some sense of it. There are several links, so it’s gonna get hung up in the moderator screen.
Here in Massachusetts, parents don’t get to decide who sees their child’s data, because the process is being carried out so secretively, parents don’t even know.
The Massachusetts data vault (located in Edwin Analytics) is scheduled to merge with the newly-created Edwin “Teaching and Learning” interface in a few months. http://www.doe.mass.edu/edwin/ . The Edwin teacher/student dashboard is rolling out now, and districts are being trained to implement a program that promises to track student data from preschool to grade 12.
When we began our training, we saw that we are all actually logging onto a site run by a private contractor called thinkgate. http://thinkgate.net/about-us/partners/ I’m already in the site, and so are all my students. Teachers are being ordered to create and upload four dummy classroom assessment points this year. Students will submit their responses directly to the vendor’s site, on their iPads. The dashboard also displays a feature which will collect and upload “district assessments”. The site promises to centralize data-driven decisions for individual students, and I found it shocking to see my students’ names already listed there.
Confidential student academic and discipline records are being used in “complex” statistical calculations that flag individual students, without parental consent. The Massachusetts DOE site recommends not informing parents that the system has labeled their child at “high risk” for low performance on an upcoming high stakes exam, for instance.
This contract escaped the Massachusetts safeguards for ethical and transparent procurement by a novel extra-legal maneuver, through which invoices are generated in Ohio and paid by our state DOE, without oversight:
“We had to make some concessions in order to abide by Ohio’s procurement rules …. Leadership in both states stepped in on multiple occasions to help negotiate pathways around obstacles … We had to figure out how one state would reimburse another for example, since states are much better at processing payments than issuing invoices.”
http://www.dataqualitycampaign.org/blog/2013/05/go-far-go-together/
I suppose that’s what kept the deal so quiet here. I wonder if readers in those other states have more information about this contractor?
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Wireless Generation’s Reading First connections that started in Texas have never been investigated. Since 2002, multi-millions in federal and state tax funds have been funneled to the NY corporation now owned by Rupert Murdoch and renamed as Amplify.
In 2010, Klein understood how to get Murdoch involved and gain a million dollar yearly salary at the same time by using students and teachers for WG “licenses.”
Reading First is the business plan for inBloom.
http://ny.chalkbeat.org/2010/11/22/murdoch-buys-education-tech-company-wireless-generation/
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Thank you for this important post. NY’ers please sign and share this student data privacy petition http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/protect-new-york-state We need to keep pressure on NYSED and elected officials to stop inBloom and to defend the privacy rights of students and parents.
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Wow ! Mercedes – Talk about BUSTED! Let me know when your book/movie comes out! I would love to invest in this BLOCK BUSTER!
No wonder this is so hard to fight in Louisiana: 1)Bobby Jindal’s former employment at the “pinnacle” of the Common Core Initiative – Mckinsey Corporation, 2) His appointment of head of the LDOE Superintendent John White from New York, 3) John White’s connection to Joel Klein (NY), 4) Klein’s association to Rupert Murdoch, 5) Murdoch’s connection to Bill Gates (InBloom))….and lest we forget, 6)Holly Boffy (La. BESE member) working for John White – oh but I thought John White worked for her:
7)….and I still can’t figure out why the Superintendent of Catholic Schools in New Orleans went for this hook, line, and sinker.
All in all – just makes for a more fascinating read: Gates Foundation, Rupert Murdoch(child hacker scandal), Federal Government, and even the Catholic Church all interwoven, involved for the “benefit” of our children???
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The only thing keeping the testing fiasco alive is the lack of an alternative. http://www.wholechildreform.com
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The only thing keeping the testing fiasco alive is thinking we need an alternative.
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Correction – child “phone” hacker to my earlier comment. In addition now we understand why John White withdrew Louisiana from InBloom
http://www.thenewsstar.com/article/20130419/NEWS01/130419017/Superintendent-John-White-recalls-student-data-stored-nonprofit-inBloom-?nclick_check=1
Louisiana is the ONLY state in the country where students’ social security numbers are their student identification numbers. This would have brought too much attention to InBloom uploading children’s social security numbers to their cloud site. InBloom wanted to keep this quiet so that they might continue their expansion into other states.
To this day parents across Louisiana have never been notified that their children’s social security numbers have been compromised/ damaged. Isn’t their a law that you have to NOTIFY people with respect to taking/sharing their Social Security numbers?
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Mercedes,
You may consider this a less academic connection or even a weak one, but Bloomberg also lives next door to Merryl Tisch in Manhattan. Tisch, as President of the NY Regents, heads one of the only two – if not the only one – state Education Departments that is STILL hanging onto inBloom. Tisch’s husband is at the core of the banking and investment community on Wall Street.
The two also share seder dinners together and both their daughters grew up together and are close friends.
Additionally, Sheldon Silver, a major, institutional powerhouse in the Democratic party up at Albany, NY, and who I have admired and respected most of the time, is childhood friends with Merryl Tisch . . .
The Bloomberg-Tisch-Silver connections are also key ingredients that add to this recipe of political incest and a hubristic and dangerous upholding of inBloom . . . . .
I have to say that I am gravely disappointed in Sheldon Silver at this point for his flip flopping approach to APPR, testing, and inBloom.
Leonie, would you agree there are connections here as well?
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Robert, some of the tightest connections are “nonacademic.”
I don’t discount your revelations.
Thank you for the information.
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Thank you, Mercedes.
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Robert Rendo: thank you for the information.
The leading charterites/privatizers instinctively recoil from having to disclose much, or most, of what they really are and what they really stand for. It’s “personal.” Remember Governor Chris Christie reacting so rudely to questions about where he sent his own children to school and relating that to what sort of education he was mandating for OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN? A bit from a June 17, 2011 piece [link follows]:
[start quote]
A mom named “Gail” started the ball rolling.
“You don’t send your children to public schools. You send them to private schools, so I was wondering why you think it’s fair to be cutting funding to public schools?” the woman asked.
It was a question Christie has gotten before, but this time it seemed to have gotten under his skin.
“Hey Gail, you know what, first of all it’s none of your business. I don’t ask you where you send your kids to school. Don’t bother me where I send mine,” the governor responded. …
Christie spokesman Mike Drewniak said the governor was “was just being honest with the caller in what he believes is a personal and private decision on where his children attend school.” …
The New Jersey Education Association said it has no problem with the governor sending his kids to private schools. It just would have liked for him to answer the question.
[end quote] [click link for full context]
Link: http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2011/06/17/christies-its-none-of-your-business-comment-ruffles-feathers-of-n-j-voters/
Joe Louis, boxing great, had him and his edubully peers pegged long long ago: “He can run but he can’t hide.”
Please keep commenting. I’ll keep reading.
😎
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Well put!
Christie is a disaster.
He is a bully and a slob.
But no one is done with him yet . . . . .
Perhaps we should all chip in and hire Cake Boss to make a birthday cake for Christie that will resemble a huge bridge with lanes that are clogged with traffic.
Marzipan, here we come . . . . .
But with the way things are going, let’s hope Chris Christie will be so put through the mill and dragged through the coals, that he won’t so much as get a Jenny Craig commercial to refresh his public image . . . . . . .
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Excellent work, again, Ms. Schneider!
One note regarding this statement in your piece: “Even though other ‘data clouds’ might exist, both the money and well-positioned individuals behind inBloom make it possible for inBloom to swallow the meager competition, literally, via business deals and possible mergers.”
The idea here is that there would be a single repository for all student test scores and responses. Creating anything other than a monopolistic situation would require legislation stating that state education departments and local education agencies contracting with inBloom also contract with any legitimate competitor, just as breaking up the telephone monopoly required legislation that made AT&T share trunk lines with other companies. Legislation requiring that student data be freely accessible to any potential competitor with inBloom is HIGHLY UNLIKELY for many reasons, including the multiplication of security risks.
Also note that the national database of student responses and test scores is useful for its intended purpose–adaptively delivering “personalized” instruction and assessment to the extent that it is complete–that all a students’ information is in it.
It looks to me as though the plan here, from Day 1, was to leverage something close to a “natural monopoly” in order to position inBloom to take advantage of a number of revenue streams:
a) per-student fees charged to state and local education agencies for maintaining the database and providing access to the data
b) fees charged to educational materials providers (curriculum and assessment developers) for connecting to the database
c) fees charged for proprietary educational software (e.g., software owned by inBloom) connected to the database
In other words, this is a powerplay to establish the equivalent in the computer-based educational materials market of the future the equivalent of what the PC operating system is in the PC market–the piece that everyone has to use, at a price.
The potential revenues from such a system are enormous–trillions, over time.
And, in order to make it work, one had to have, first, a single set of national standards. So, it’s not surprising that Gates would first fund the development of the Common Core. This is all part of a single business plan.
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Of course, it is possible to have computer-adaptive assessments and curricula without having such an Orwellian centralized database. There are many products on the market today that are adaptive based on integrated diagnostics and checktests. The idea goes all the way back to the “programmed learning” approaches developed in the 1960s and 1970s.
A word of caution, however: People get inured to these Orwellian ideas over time, and then they don’t seem so Orwellian.
A case in point: When the first president Bush first floated the idea of having a single set of national standards and national tests, he was shouted down, immediately, by people on the left, right, and center. So, the proponents of such top-down centralization bided their time and went about achieving their goal by other means–first uniform state standards and tests (NCLB) and then the Common Core “State” Standards. There’s a boiled frog phenomenon occurring here. The idea of invariant, mandatory national standards and tests created and enforced by a centralized, totalitarian agency was one that ALMOST EVERYONE instinctively recoiled at a few decades ago, but people have become used to this outrageous idea by increments, and that’s by design.
I suspect that having met with overwhelming resistance to this Orwellian student data cloud, its proponents will look for other means to accomplish the same thing over time, just as they did with national standards and tests.
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