Data-collecting software is riling privacy and education activists.<\/p>\n
When you were a kid and got in trouble at school, did they ever threaten to \u201cput it in your permanent record?\u201d That\u2019s a scary prospect, knowing that the information could be seen forever by anyone with access to it. But what if that record had more in it than just grades and disciplinary problems? What if it included things like when your parents got divorced, or that you had been homeless for a while?<\/p>\n
Starting at the end of last year, a nonprofit organization called inBloom began to test new cloud-based software to collect information from student records and use it to individualize the education a student receives. Much of this individualized instruction will come from third-party for-profit companies that will be granted access to students\u2019 data, effectively giving corporations that deal with inBloom free rein to mine student data as they see fit.<\/p>\n
A joint venture of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, inBloom has a long list of corporate partners, including Amazon, Dell, and Scholastic (maker of The Magic School Busand The Magic Treehouse children\u2019s book series). Originally, inBloom was known as the Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC), a Gates Foundation- and NewsCorp-backed organization that had been quietly developing a \u201cset of shared technology services\u201d for several years, in order to \u201cconnect student data and instructional materials.\u201d<\/p>\n