Parents Fight The InBloom Inc. Plan

These were fighting words:

"I know that you're just a messenger, so I want to make sure you deliver this message properly to your supervisors," parent and City Council candidate Jelani Mashariki told the Department of Education's deputy chief academic officer, Adina Lopatin, at a Borough Hall town hall packed with families Monday night.

"You're not going to give out my child's information to a third-party corporation to do whatever it is they want to do," Makarishi continued over whistles and applause from the audience. "The people are not going to have it and we are going to fight back."

Several other audience members had similar things to say regarding inBloom Inc., the controversial data-sharing initiative that parents at Monday night's volatile forum believe violates the privacy and security of their children. The $100 million initiative, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and federal grants, and built by News Corp's Wireless Generation, is responsible for designing something called an Education Data Portal in order to provide data tools to teachers and families.


As Lopatin later clarified, inBloom's EDP uses student data--including student demographics, parent contact information, dates of absence, suspensions, and state test scores--through an Amazon cloud-based service. That information is then shared with school-contracted vendors. The DOE maintains that this practice does not violate the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, and that vendors will not be able to even access the data without the school's permission, but there's also no provision for students and families to opt out.

"We live in 2013. Was anyone around last week when the AP was Twitter-hacked?" asked Natasha Capers, a parent and representative from the Alliance for a Quality Education. "It shut down New York City's Wall Street. We can only imagine what would happen when someone wants this information and knows how to utilize it properly."

InBloom Inc. representatives were invited to the forum, but declined the invitation.

Already you can see how dismissive of parents's concerns they are.

The powers that be in Albany - Silver, Tisch, King, Cuomo - do not seem overly concerned about parents concerns either.

There are two bills - one in the Assembly and one in the Senate - that prohibit "the release of personally identifiable student information where parental consent is not provided."

We'll see how far those bills go.

I cannot think of time in my nearly half century of life when politicians and their bureaucratic functionaries are less responsive to parents and their constituencies over these kinds of issues in education than they are now.

A parent at the forum put the whole mess in crystal form:

"We want to protect the privacy of our children," Lydia Bellahcene, a mother of five children in the public school system, told last night's town hall in one of the event's most impassioned speeches. "It is our God-given right. And I'm not signing that away because I put my daughter in public education."

Indeed.