Regent Cashin proposes New York withdraw from inBloom

This happened  at the Board of Regents meeting this morning in Albany.

Unfortunately, Merryl Tisch changed the subject and ignored Cashin's proposal to be responsive to the pleas of parents, school board members, educators and elected officials to protect the privacy and safety of the state's children and pull out of inBloom Inc.

NYSED and Merryl Tisch FOILed for their communications re inBloom Inc.

See the Freedom of Information request, just submitted by attorney Norman Siegel on behalf of PS 75 in Manhattan and Community Education Council District 14 in Brooklyn, asking for all the communications between NYSED officials and Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and the Gates Foundation, inBloom Inc., Wireless Generation and News Corp, about their risky student data sharing scheme.

FOIL Request From STE LLP_6.17.13 by Molly

AFT’s Randi Weingarten letter about inBloom to Gates & Carnegie Foundations and their reply

Stacey Childress of Gates Foundation

On May 30, 2013, Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers and member of the Technical Advisory Group of the Shared Learning Collaborative, the precursor to inBloom Inc., wrote a letter to Michele Cahill and Stacey Childress, expressing her concern about inBloom’s privacy and security provisions.  Cahill is Vice President at the Carnegie Corporation, and Childress is the Deputy Director of the Gates Foundation, and they are both founding members of inBloom’s Board of Directors.  In

Michele Cahill of Carnegie Corporation

particular, inBloom is a creation of the Gates Foundation, and was launched via $100 million of Gates funds.

In her letter, Weingarten asks many questions, such as:

• How is inBloom assuring that there is no unauthorized access to personally identifiable student and teacher data? 
• What are inBloom’s plans to charge vendors for access to student data?
• How secure is its cloud-based storage compared with other methods?

Check out Weingarten’s letter, and the June 5th response from Cahill and Childress below.

InBloom Letter from Randi Weingarten 05/30/13 by Molly

Or download the pdf here: inBloom Letter 

June 5th response:

Letter to Randi Weingarten_06 05 13 by Molly

 Or download the pdf here: Letter to Randi Weingarten