Part III: Highlight's from NYSED's FOILed emails about inBloom in 2012
NYSED's emails to the Gates Foundation about inBloom and Wireless Generation from 2012 are below; highlights include a dinner party at Merryl Tisch's home, to which Commissioner King invitesan array of corporate reform leaders -- to the dismay of Joe Scantlebury of the Gates Foundation. Also amusing is their account when I crashed a Gates-sponsored " SLC Learning Camp" designed to lure software developers into designing products to take advantage of the wealth of personal student data to be gathered and shared by inBloom. You can also check outPart I and Part II for more background on this FOIL and excerpts from 2011.
1/6/12: Sandeep Chellani of NYC DOE warns Asst. Commissioner Ken Wagner and Doug Jaffe of the Regents Research Fund that the NYC Comptroller John Liu is about to reject the DOE’s renewal of its contract with Wireless for the DOE data system known as ARIS. “This information will likely … create challenges for us pushing this through. As this might have down streams [sic] effects on your work we wanted to give you a heads up…”
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| NYC Comptroller John Liu |
This rejection is announced ten days later, on Jan. 16, 2012. According to the NYC Comptroller, the DOE re-assigned the last month of the expiring five-year, $83 million contract from IBM to Wireless, which then allowed them to give Wireless two more years without undergoing competitive bidding. “Under that move, Klein’s company’s inherits IBM’s option to a two-year renewal.”
Susan Lerner of Common Cause comments: “This definitely has the appearance of an arrangement to avoid proper scrutiny and public oversight…In this time of budget shortfalls and economic challenge, we need greater transparency and scrupulous competitive bidding to ensure the public is receiving the greatest benefit from these large highly specialized contracts.”
Yet the rejection only delays the awarding of the contract but doesn’t stop it – as unlike the State Comptroller's cancellation of the NYSED's Wireless contract, the NYC Comptroller doesn’t have the authority to cancel DOE contracts, just delay them.
1/10/12: Rachel Monahan writes in the Daily News that the earlier State Comptroller’s rejection of NYSED’s Wireless contract may endanger their $700M Race to the Top grant, since it could delay the data tracking of student performance. “New York . . . has recently hit a roadblock that not only impedes Race to the Top but could threaten other key reform initiatives as well,” said US Education Secretary Arne Duncan.”
An email follows from Joan Lebow of Wireless to Tom Dunn and Dennis Tompkins of NYSED: “Did you guys see Rachel’s latest story? Do you have a PR contact in Duncan’s office? Her lead is the most absurd A equal C stretch of fiction.“ Yet later, when opposition to inBloom intensified, Ken Wagner NYSEDNYC Public School Parents: Part III: Highlight's from NYSED's FOILed emails about inBloom in 2012:
