EdWeek and Omissions, Or Hacking Our Way Around Acknowledging Student Rights
4 min read
EdWeek has an article up about inBloom. It commits many of the standard errors when writing about data collection and student privacy. The entire piece is filled with minor errors, but rather than nitpick the entire thing to death I want to highlight some of the general types of mistakes that get in the way of a coherent discussion of data collection and student ownership of their data.
We'll start with the article's incomplete characterization of what inBloom does:
InBloom provides school districts and states with a service that allows them to store data in an encrypted, cloud-based system. Educators can access that centralized system to pull together data that is usually stored in many different locations, often by third-party vendors. Though current clients are using its service for free, the company is phasing in a charge of $2 to $5 per student by 2015.
inBloom offers their entire codebase under an open source license. Any entity that wants to - from a school, to a district, to a regional education agency, to a state department of education - can install inBloom (the software) anywhere they want, and run it without interacting with inBloom (the organization) at all. This additional information matters. As the article is written, it implies that the only way anyone can use inBloom is by contracting with inBloom. If this were true, this would make inBloom like Pearson's SchoolNet or Powerschool, or Infinite Campus. But it's not true, and that inaccuracy should be corrected in the article.
The article continues with discussions and concerns about student privacy.
The general concerns about student privacy, data security, and misuse of personal information to pigeonhole students unfairly are real - but both the technology creating these risks and the habits of mind perpetuating them existed well before inBloom. At a more basic level, the need for the data collection that created these risks at scale is the result of a federal mandate. Moreover, if the discussions remain rooted and stuck on just privacy, the semantics of the dialogue continue to deny students agency in their own learning. We'll get back to that later in this post.
The EdWeek article ends by looking at Jefferson County, Colorado, which was going to use inBloom but backed out.
If districts are unwilling to use third-party companies like inBloom and unable to develop their own in-house alternatives, it is still to be seen how districts will manage digitized student data for dashboard-type programs, which aggregates student data for teachers to use to customize learning.
This sentence alone should be grounds for the author to never write about educational data collection again. It isn't "still to be seen how districts will manage digitized student data for dashboard-type programs" - the district will buy SchoolNet, eScholar, InfiniteCampus, or implement a solution based on EdFi. These are all solutions that existed before inBloom, and raise nearly identical privacy concerns. Given that data collection and reporting is required as part of federal accountability, selecting a data management solution is a zero-sum game - if you don't use one, you'll need to use another. An article dealing with educational data collection and student privacy should at least mention that there are other players in the vertical.
This is why I keep writing about this issue: student privacy matters. Student ownership of and control over their data matters. The myopic focus on inBloom does a lot to damage inBloom the organization, but it does nothing to address the larger issues around student privacy and student ownership. Stopping New York State from using inBloom as a datastore doesn't give students any additional rights. It leaves students just as exposed when the next solution gets implemented. To use a phrase I heard said best by Audrey Watters, ignoring the rights of students to own their data perpetuates the vision of students as objects. Given that statewide data collection has been ongoing nationwide for approaching a decade, we can't afford to continue to get the basic details wrong.
