Part II of the inBloom saga: what NYSED emails to the Gates Foundation from 2011 reveal
A few days ago I posted Part I of this saga, about how NYSED officials delayed for a year and half the release of their FOILed emails to the Gates Foundation, Wireless Generation/Amplify, and inBloom Inc. about their plans to share personal student data with these private corporations. Some of those emails were finally released to our lawyers on December 11, 2014, the day after John King announced his resignation as Commissioner. Part II is below, with excerpts from the their emails sent in 2011. Part III with more emails will follow soon!
When my FOIL was finally responded to I received hundreds and hundreds of pages with printed out emails to and from NYSED and the Gates Foundation mostly; offering all-expense trips for various meetings about teacher evaluation, data collection, and other issues, as well as a pile of contracts and agreements. It took weeks just to sort them and start to look through them. Sadly there were no emails from Merryl Tisch’s account, as I had asked for; and no emails from most of the state officials whose communications we had FOILed. But we did find out some juicy details; here are some excerpts:
1/6/2011: The first email that refers to the incipent inBloom project is sent to John King, then
Deputy Commissioner, from Stacey Childress, who led the data-sharing project for the Gates Foundation. She asks to schedule a “time to talk” about the “intersections between your RTTT instructional improvement plans and a project we are working on Gates.”
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| Stacey Childress led the inBloom project for Gates Foundation |
1/25/11: Joe Scantlebury, Senior Policy Officer of the Gates Foundation, thanks Commissioner Steiner and Deputy Commissioner King for joining a call this morning; he adds that “the foundation is supportive of your interest to implement your P-16 data NYC Public School Parents: Part II of the inBloom saga: what NYSED emails to the Gates Foundation from 2011 reveal: