NYC Public School Parents: Part IV of the inBloom saga through FOILed emails: inBloom is born, faces increasing controversy, and dies

NYC Public School Parents: Part IV of the inBloom saga through FOILed emails: inBloom is born, faces increasing controversy, and dies:

Part IV of the inBloom saga through FOILed emails: inBloom is born, faces increasing controversy, and dies

This post, the final one with excerpts from the emails I FOILed from NYSED, documents the rise and fall of inBloom; through their communications to officials at the Gates Foundation and assorted consultants and allied organizations. inBloom was formally launched as a separate corporation in Feb. 2013 and died in April 2014, after little more than one year of existence. These fourteen months were marked by myriad public relations and political disasters, as the Gates Foundation’s plans for data collection and disclosure experienced national exposure for the first time and fierce parent opposition in the eight inBloom states and districts outside NY. 

Once parents in the rest of the country learned through blogs and news articles of the Foundation’s plans to upload onto a data cloud and facilitate the sharing of their children’s most sensitive personal information with for-profit vendors, their protests grew ever more intense, and inBloom’s proponents were powerless to convince them that the benefits outweighed the risks. Though the Gates Foundation had hired a phalanx of communications and PR advisers, they were never able to come up with a convincing rationale for inBloom’s existence, or one that would justify this “data store”, as they called it, that cost them more than $100 million dollars to create. 

The Foundation started the 2013 with a plan to promote inBloom through the media and at the large SXSWedu conference, and to expand the number of inBloom “partners” beyond the original nine states and districts that they said were already committed; instead they watched as every one of these nine states and districts withdrew or claimed they had never planned to share data with inBloom in the first place.

For the previous posts in this saga, see Part I showing how, after waiting a year and a half, we finally received the emails in December 2014, NYC Public School Parents: Part IV of the inBloom saga through FOILed emails: inBloom is born, faces increasing controversy, and dies: