The good news and mostly bad news from NYSED at the NYC Council hearings on inBloom
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| Ken Wagner and Nicholas Storelli-Castro of NYSED |
On Monday, the City Council hearings on inBloom and the state’s plan to share personal student data with vendors without parental consent opened with Ken Wagner, NY State Education Deputy Commissioner, along with his sidekick, Nicolas Storelli Castro, head of NYSED governmental relations, being sworn in. In his presentation, Wagner was careful never to mention the words inBloom, but instead gave a long power point, including information on the high remediation rate of NY high school graduates. He argued that arguing that data systems like the “Engage NY portals” or the data dashboards that the state is requiring NYC and most districts sign up for that pull data from the inBloom cloud will help students become “college and career ready.”
The good news is that, in response to questions, Wagner said that the personal data of NYS students has not yet been uploaded to the inBloom cloud, but only de-identified data so far.
But there was a lot of bad news, too. The worst was Wagner’s statement that even in 2015, when districts have to pay or choose to cancel their contracts with the dashboard companies, they still will be unable to take