A Student-Data Collector Drops Out
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| Lily Padula |
To hear executives at inBloom tell it, their $100 million education technology start-up is shutting down after only 15 months of operation because it was too far ahead of its time.
The seed money for this nonprofit corporation came from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, along with the Carnegie Corporation of New York. InBloom aimed to streamline personalized learning — analyzing information about individual students to customize lessons to them — in public schools. It planned to collect and integrate student attendance, assessment, disciplinary and other records from disparate school-district databases, put the information in cloud storage and release it to authorized web services and apps that could help teachers track each student’s progress.
But the program ran into strident oppositionfrom a number of parents and privacy advocates. They warned that school district officials were unequipped to manage, or even audit, how outside vendors might use delicate material — like a student’s disability status. The resistance culminated a few weeks ago, when the New York State Legislature passed a budget that prohibited state education officials from releasing student data to amalgamators likeA Student-Data Collector Drops Out - NYTimes.com: