CEO Iwan Streichenberger of inBloom, a technology startup specializing in education data, announced last week that the corporation is shutting down. The shutdown is largely the result of opposition from parent advocates and protection-of-information proponents who argued that inBloom’s handling of student data — including attendance records, disability statuses, disciplinary histories and grades — risked major violations of privacy and threatened minors’ right to a safe educational environment. The nonprofit, which received $100 million in funding from philanthropy giants including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, was in business for a mere 15 months.
InBloom’s purported mission was to provide education databases accessible to school administrators, maximizing productivity and allowing teachers to tailor their methods to the needs of each student. The company also planned, however, to make sensitive data accessible to vendors who would then use the information to pitch educational products to public school districts. InBloom’s activist-driven closure exemplifies the power of grassroots opposition in the face of corporate profiteering disguised as education reform — the demise of inBloom should be celebrated. The closure of a single company, however, by no means indicates the downfall of an entire market that seeks to pervert education by turning it into a major profit sector.
Opposition to inBloom culminated in lawsuits from several states. A New York State lawsuit cited concerns that all school districts receiving federal funding from the Race to the Top program would “lose control over the personal data of their students” if a deal with inBloom went forward. New York State sought to use inBloom as a means of implementing the Common Core Standards Initiative, a mostly nationwide program that establishes comprehensive teaching standards. An increase in federal grant money from Race to the Top and similar funds motivates states to take part in the Common Core program. It is troubling that state education departments justified contracting with a private corporation simply as a means of receiving additional federal dollars.
Furthermore, states’ willingness to compromise students’ rights to privacy is emblematic of a technology-obsessed culture in which all technological progress is viewed positively, no matter the cost to personal rights. A top-down push to bureaucratize and systematize education in the name of improving quality is counterintuitive when, in reality, this approach makes public school students’ private information unprecedentedly susceptible to misuse and abuse. The inevitability of an information leak loomed over the inBloom project. In an era when national security and credit card data leaks have become commonplace, would we assume inBloom would be able to safely store precious personal data?
There is an excessively idealistic expectation that anyone working in or around the educational sector unwaveringly views student interests as their top priority. In reality, the inBloom data cloud could have included student records with charged diagnoses such as autism or ADHD, or families’ records of involvement with Child Protective Services. A data leak could cause a revelation of this nature to follow a student through their public school career and beyond, and teacher access to CPS records without proper explanation or context could misleadingly paint a picture of a troubled home life, leading teachers to make inaccurate assumptions about a student.
One need only look to inBloom’s original privacy policy to be convinced that the company’s collapse is a privacy rights achievement. It stated that inBloom “cannot guarantee the security of the information stored in inBloom or that the information will not be intercepted when it is being transmitted.” If inBloom does not trust inBloom, why should parents or the public education system?
Thankfully, no one has to trust inBloom because the former Gates and Carnegie pet project is officially kaput. The inBloom case, however, powerfully demonstrates how a company with major corporate connections came dangerously close to infiltrating the public education system and jeopardizing the rights of millions of students. In no way are connections between the educational sector and private corporations unprecedented, for example schools giving bus companies student records to accommodate physical disabilities. But the inBloom case represents the dangers of these types of connections when the companies plan to disseminate private data on a massive scale. Furthermore, inBloom’s operating system was set to be designed by the Amplify Division of News Corp., Rupert Murdoch’s news corporation. The company had an unconfirmed contract in the works with New York State in 2011 to design a data platform as part of the state’s involvement in the Race to the Top Program. These plans were canceled following Murdoch’s involvement in the News of the World phone hacking scandal — infamously involving the abuse of sensitive data.
InBloom is no longer a threat to students’ privacy, but companies such as eScholar are pouncing on inBloom’s failure, emphasizing the ways in which their approaches to data collection are safer. It is critical that as technological advancements impact education, the desire for the latest and greatest technologies does not eclipse the protection of fundamental rights to privacy.
