The pushback and spin begins. See the WaPost oped today, On the question of student privacy by Steve
Winnick, the attorney for InBloom, the Gates-funded corporation that is collecting, storing and sharing the confidential student data from nine states, including NY, MA, LA, CO, IL, NC, GA, DE, and KY. More
states may get added on over time as Gates offers states & districts cash
to participate. (See our fact sheet here.)
In all, Winnick's oped is a highly unconvincing rebuttal to an earlier WaPost article by Valerie Strauss, about the way the Obama administration is being sued for having gutted student privacy protections under FERPA, to encourage highly risky data-sharing projects like inBloom. Winnick that does not
deny that inBloom will disclose sensitive and personally identifiable student information to for-profit vendors without parental consent. Indeed, this is what inBloom is designed
to achieve.
Though Winnick goes into great length about whether this
plan violates the pre- 2008 or pre- 2011 revisions of FERPA, this is immaterial
to most parents; it clearly violates all sense of decency and ethical
boundaries to provide such confidential and personally identifiable data, including
student names, addresses, photographs, emails, phone numbers, along with
their grades, test scores, special education and economic status, and
detailed health and disciplinary records, all provided to companies
without notifying their parents or asking for their consent.
If this plan is truly to "give parents more options to
be involved in their children’s education" as the attorney writes, they
should at least be told what is happening and be allowed to opt out.
Moreover, Winnick’s assurances that inBloom "is
committed to protecting the privacy and security of student records"
contradicts the statement
on its privacy policy that "inBloom, Inc cannot guarantee the
security of the information stored in inBloom or that the information will not
be intercepted when it is being transmitted.” Who will take
responsibility if and when this occurs?
In the comment section, there are other equally unconvincing
comments from inBloom board members Margaret Spellings (former Ed Secretary
under George W. Bush) and Michael Horn of Gates-funded
Innosight, who praises inBloom’s great push efforts at “unleashing
data.” Innosight describes itself as “a non-profit think tank devoted to
applying the theories of disruptive innovation to solve problems in the social
sector.”
Truly disruptive indeed. This risky venture has the
potential to disrupt millions of children’s lives.
For a look at just some of the personally identifiable
student and teacher data from nine states that InBloom intends to store on a
vulnerable data cloud and make available to vendors without parental consent,
see our NYC parent blog here.
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