Big News from Jefferson County, the
only inBloom pilot district in Colorado. Anti-inBloom candidates swept
the school board elections on Tuesday night, on Thursday their Superintendent resigned, and the existing school board unanimously voted to scrap inBloom. The school board president, Leslee Dahlkemper, was quoted as saying, "We decided that it was important to listen to the community." Congrats to the parents of
Jefferson County, and especially activist Rachael Stickland who led the fight! See Columbine Courier, Colorado News, Michelle Malkin’s column , Politico and EdWeek.
Now, only two states
remain from
the nine original inBloom “partners”: New York and Illinois.
In Illinois, the parent coalition More than a Score, along with the Chicago Teachers Union, have just begun the fight. The Illinois Federation of Teachers passed a resolution against sharing any personal student data to vendors without consent, and I am going
to speak at a public forum on inBloom in Chicago on November 21.
Here in New York, we are gaining
strength every day. On Tuesday, New Yorkers elected Bill de Blasio as Mayor by a huge margin. De Blasio is
already on record against inBloom, having written a letter last spring to the State
Education Department and the NYC DOE against this, repeating his opposition this fall, and
vowing to pull student data out of the inBloom cloud as soon as
possible. Here is an excerpt from his NYC KidsPAC candidate survey:
District leaders and school boards throughout the state are speaking out in protest, returning their Race to the Top funds, and refusing to sign up for the inBloom-linked dashboards. Superintendents from the Lower Hudson region have decided to send letters to inBloom, citing the provision in the state's contract allowing districts to opt out, and demanding that their student data be deleted.
They are also demanding that the corporation "immediately notify us so that we can consider next steps." South Orangetown Superintendent Kenneth Mitchell, president of the Lower Hudson Council of School Superintendents said, "Based on the contract, we believe we can do this."
More and more, it seems inBloom's days are numbered. If the Gates Foundation is wise, they will drop this unethical data-mining privacy-violating project, before they are targeted with lawsuits and the ensuing controversy brings down the Common Core as well.
