Leonie Haimson is the watchdog of New York City public education. She is the founder of Class Size Matters (I am a member of her six-person board), which operates on a shoestring. She is unpaid, yet she is tireless in her determination to police the awarding of contracts, as well as the administration’s attention to class size. She also is deeply involved in protecting student privacy. She and Rachel Strickland in Colorado brought down Bill Gates’ effort to data-mine American students, a project called inBloom, to which he contributed $100 million. In the face of parent criticism, inBloom folded.
Leonie reads every contract that the New York City Department approves. She did the same during the Bloomberg years, when she was also the mayor’s most persistent critic.
Here is her scathing report on the failure of the administration to perform due diligence before it awards contracts, in this case, for special education services, for Amazon, and for new technology. Once again, as under Bloomberg, the city’s Panel on Educational Policy (actually know in the law as the New York City Board of Education) mutely acquiesces and approves whatever the administration asks for, without debate or discussion.
This is a good reason to oppose mayoral control, state control, and any other undermining of democracy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I have an enormous amount of respect for Ms. Haimson, and the manner for which she exposed inBloom. Never underestimate the power of truth.
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Colleagues,
Here is a reminder of the history and players of In Bloom, with excerpts from an article by Andrea Gabor…..it was the partnership of Gates, Murdoch and Klein that created this toxic plan of data collection….
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“inBloom, Education Technology and the Murdoch-Klein Connection: A Son-of-Frankenstein B-movie Sequel?
Posted on October 8, 2013 by aagabor
Last Sunday’s New York Times ran a fascinating story on the controversy surrounding inBloom, which promises to serve as a one-stop warehouse-in-the-cloud for student data, but which many educators and parents worry might compromise the privacy of kids in grades K-12. Like a number of major education-reform ventures, this one was launched by a group of funders led by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Now that most states have signed onto the Common Core State Standards, which will use computerized assessments, the allure of creating a central repository of student data is more compelling than ever. The NYT lays out the potential benefits of the inBloom system, including the ability to store large amounts of student information and provide tools for analyzing the data–information that will be available not only to educators, but also to education-technology developers who can tailor products to student and school needs. The article also explores the privacy concerns raised by the easy access that large numbers of companies will have to a vast array of information, ranging from academic achievement to disciplinary problems, for potentially tens of millions of students.
The story touches, though only obliquely, on important questions about the balance-of-power between commercial vendors and public schools and school districts, which inBloom is supposed to facilitate.
But one of the most intriguing aspects of the story is one that the NYT does not address at all. No where does the NYT mention that the operating system for inBloom is being developed by the Amplify division (formerly Wireless Generation) of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. This is a striking omission given that that the NYT is the paper of record in New York City where the CEO of Amplify/Wireless Generation, Joel Klein, recently served as schools chancellor. And this despite the fact that New York is one of only three states out of an original nine that, according to the article, “continues to pursue the service.”
In a brief phone conversation, Natasha Singer, the author of the article, explained that the aim of her story was to focus on “one small district in Colorado” and how technology and privacy concerns associated with inBloom play out in an area with much fewer resources than New York City. She also noted that, as is often the case, much was cut from her original story during the editing process.
inBloom itself seems eager to downplay News Corp./Wireless Generation’s involvement, in the venture, even though it was a key partner in the Shared Learning Collaborative, which gave rise to inBloom. (inBloom was launched earlier this year with $100 million in funding.) Although a March press release announced that Wireless Generation would be one of 24 software providers, the “partner” and “provider” tabs on the company’s website lists 21 providers, but NOT Wireless Generation or Amplify.
For New Yorkers, inBloom may seem like something of a son-of-Frankenstein B-movie sequel (non-New Yorkers will want to know why…) inBloom traces its roots to a technological lemon. Several years ago, IBM and Wireless Generation developed ARIS (Achievement Reporting and Innovation System), a portal for the New York City Department of Education, which was widely seen as a failure.
Then Cisco began building a rival prototype portal that the company offered to the NYCDOE and that many teachers and principals said was much more useful than ARIS; but the city killed the project in August of 2010. At the time, officials at the NYCDOE said that when work on the Cisco portal fell behind schedule, the education department pieced together an in-house version and took over the professional training that Cisco had been providing for schools that were part of the much ballyhooed innovation-zone (or izone) initiative. More recently, NYCDOE insiders have said that the department pulled the plug because of investments it had already made in ARIS, which came to total about $100 million.
The Murdoch connection, then and now
In 2011, The Daily News disclosed that Wireless Generation was poised to win a no-bid $27 million contract to build an ARIS-like portal for New York State as part of the requirements for the state’s Race-to-the-Top bid. Joel Klein had just left his post as schools chancellor to become CEO of Wireless Generation. (The company noted that it had been in talks with the state long before Klein officially departed the NYCDOE for News Corp. in November of 2010.)
Following the hacking scandal at News of the World, a News Corp.-owned British tabloid, New York State declined to approve the Wireless Generation contract.
But by then, the Gates Foundation had already announced plans to help fund and develop the data-collection platform that would become inBloom and that would have a Wireless Generation-developed operating system. At the time, Sharren Bates, the official who had “launch(ed)” and “led” NYCDOE’s ARIS, was working as a Senior Program Officer at the Gates Foundation. Earlier this year Bates became the chief product officer for inBloom.
Much of the NYT’s story focuses on the privacy concerns of both Coloradans and New Yorkers (including the indefatigable Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters, one of the leading crusaders for children’s privacy rights) about inBloom’s plans to store student information in the “cloud” (on Amazon’s cloud servers, it turns out, though this is not mentioned in the NYT) and to allow private companies access to that data.
These concerns include the fact that new laws no longer require states to obtain a parent’s permission before sharing information in a child’s records:
“Recent changes in the regulation of a federal education privacy law have also helped the industry. That law, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, required schools to obtain parental permission before sharing information in their children’s educational records. The updated rules permit schools to share student data, without notifying parents, with companies to which they have outsourced core functions like scheduling or data management.”
Then, too, there’s the question of what kind of data inBloom encourages schools to collect. It’s not just grades and attendance, but disciplinary records and family arrangements. Says the NYT:
“InBloom seems designed to nudge schools toward maximal data collection. School administrators can choose to fill in more than 400 data fields. Many are facts that schools already collect and share with various software or service companies: grades, attendance records, academic subjects, course levels, disabilities. Administrators can also upload certain details that students or parents may be comfortable sharing with teachers, but not with unknown technology vendors. InBloom’s data elements, for instance, include family relationships (“foster parent” or “father’s significant other”) and reasons for enrollment changes (“withdrawn due to illness” or “leaving school as a victim of a serious violent incident”)”
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So the cautionary tale seems to be for all parents, all citizens, to beware not only of Gates, but of all the other oligarchs involved in making education a huge investment opportunity, and sadly now, it seems de Blasio has gone over to the dark side.
And thanks to Leonie for her strength and intelligence in fighting it all.
Ellen
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