Education Week - May 7, 2014 - 9

INDUSTRY & INNOVATION > Tracking business trends and emerging models in K-12
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Data-Sharing Challenges in Spotlight
As inBloom Sputters to a Shutdown
By Benjamin Herold
With the rapid demise of the controversial
data-management company
inBloom, the daunting technical hurdles
that have foiled efforts to bring
streamlined, high-tech uses of student
information to public school classrooms
are once again front and center.
And now, experts say, the states and
districts hoping to expand their use of
student data must also contend with
heightened public concerns about privacy
and security, a thicket of ed-tech
vendors vying to control individual
slices of the fragmented education
market, and a vocal group of advocates
vehemently opposed to the brand
of technology-driven education that
inBloom came to embody.
"I think there's a real lack of clarity
within the K-12 sector right now about
how outside parties should access student
data, and how easily they're able
to share it," said Douglas A. Levin, the
executive director of the State Educational
Technology Directors Association,
or setda, based in Glen Burnie,
Md. "The problems inBloom sought to
fix haven't gone away, but now we're
back to having a variety of competing
technical standards, with a variety of
competing platforms and middlemen
trying to address the issues."
Founded with $100 million in support
from the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation
of New York, inBloom aimed
to serve as a single, secure repository
for the student data now collected by
districts and stored across numerous
disconnected systems. (Gates and
Carnegie have also provided grant support
for Education Week's coverage of
business and innovation.)
InBloom also promised to help districts
more easily share that information
with the growing array of vendors
offering software and apps to schools. In
the process, it hoped to shake up existing
public-private relationships within
the education sector, spurring improvements
in both classroom practice and
product development by bringing order
to the chaotic, inefficient system for
using student data that is now in place.
Practical Problems
Confident in its mission, the Atlantabased
nonprofit made an audacious
public launch-replete with parties,
indie rock bands, and breathless presentations
about the future of "personalized
learning"-in March 2013, at the
annual South by Southwest education
conference in Austin, Texas.
Thirteen months later, following a
series of high-profile departures by
state and district partners, inBloom announced
it will "wind down" operations.
"We have realized that this concept
is still new, and building public acceptance
for the solution will require
more time and resources than anyone
could have anticipated," wrote Iwan
Streichenberger, the company's ceo, in
an April 21 letter to supporters.
Before its freefall, proponents had argued
that inBloom would help clean up
the inconsistent rules, definitions, and
technical standards that now govern
how districts and their vendors store,
access, and share student data.
'Tedious, Unsecured'
In practical terms, said Mr. Levin of
setda, the current lack of "interoperability"
between different software systems
means that schools and districts too
often must manually download student
information from their various discrete
software systems, manually organize
the data in spreadsheets, and manually
upload the data to vendors-a tedious,
unsecured process that can take weeks.
Worse, districts must repeat such routines
each time they select a new vendor.
And there's no guarantee that the
data-transfer process that works with
one vendor will also work with another.
For proponents, then, inBloom's solution
was a potential game-changer, on
three levels.
First, the company aimed to holistically
address the problem: It promised
not only to build the infrastructure
that would allow districts' and vendors'
software to securely and efficiently
talk to each other, but also to host the
student data itself, removing from
districts' plate the challenging and expensive
work of managing secure data
servers and cleaning and organizing
student information according to consistent
standards.
In addition, the computer code that
powered inBloom's tools was public.
Open-source proponents, including Mr.
Levin, argued that such an approach
might drive down costs and weaken
vendors' ability to lock states and districts
into particular products.
And, at least initially, many were
also intrigued by the scope of inBloom's
ambition. Buoyed by its lavish philanthropic
support, the company aimed
from its inception to offer a central hub
and data-sharing infrastructure for
states, districts, and vendors across the
country, creating a single platform and
set of specifications that could replace
the hodgepodge of nonstandard "pipes"
and connections currently available.
Even as he announced that inBloom
was shutting down, Mr. Streichenberger
defended the company's grand
strategy.
"[Our] solution can provide a highimpact
and cost-effective service to
every school district across the country,
enabling teachers to more easily tailor
education to students' individual learning
needs," he wrote.
Not everyone was taken with inBloom's
vision, however, especially the
part that involved the nonprofit company's
assumption of responsibility for
storing as many as 400 pieces of information-including
sensitive disciplinary
and health records-per child.
Critics-and even some proponents
of robust use of educational data-also
questioned the wisdom of attempting
to drop such a large data infrastructure,
seemingly overnight, into an education
system that remains primarily
local in nature.
"It doesn't feel like the right thing for
this marketplace," said Robert J. Moore,
the founder of Overland Park, Kan.based
ed-tech consulting firm rjm Strategies
and the author of a recent dataprivacy
"toolkit" for educators. "These
kinds of efforts need to start small and
work their way through the system."
Mr. Moore and others also pointed
out that many critics attacked inBloom,
in large part, because of the support it
received from the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation, a lightning rod for criticism
from some public-education advocates.
"There is a bit of truth in that," said
Leonie Haimson, a New York Citybased
parent activist who led the push
to get New York state officials to sever
ties with inBloom. "We oppose the technocratic
vision of the future being imposed
top-down by Bill Gates and other
billionaires."
For-Profit Alternatives
With inBloom essentially out of the
picture, some educational data-use proponents
are now turning their attention
to a handful of smaller, for-profit
companies that have been quietly taking
the kind of bottom-up approach Mr.
Moore described.
One example is Clever, a San Francisco-based
startup that connects 20,000
schools in the United States with about
100 educational software and app developers.
Rather than attempt a comprehensive
solution to all the data-related
challenges those districts and vendors
face, said ceo Tyler Bosmeny, his company
aims only to perform a single, narrow
function involving a very limited
slice of student information.
"Clever makes it easier for schools to
create and manage student accounts
for all the different learning software
they use," he said, and the only data exchanged
between schools and vendors
are class rosters.
Clever itself does not store or warehouse
any of that information, Mr. Bosmeny
stressed, adding pointedly that
"we are literally nothing like inBloom."
Other groups are attempting to fix
other pieces of the problem, or are offering
more comprehensive solutions
that are geared only toward their own
products and partners. (See related box,
this page.)
Mr. Levin of setda called it ironic
that parents' and advocates' fight to
take down inBloom will likely open the
door for more private, for-profit players
to control how student information is
stored, accessed, and shared.
But Ms. Haimson, the New York City
activist, said the battle over inBloom
was just the first in what promises to be
a long series of fights over the growth of
data-mining technologies and "personalized
learning" efforts in public schools.
"Parents want to limit access to
personal data, not facilitate it," Ms.
Haimson said.
"I was unaware of the scope of the
problem before inBloom popped up,
but I know my involvement in this
issue is going to continue."
Schools Turning to Other
Data-Sharing Alternatives
Safely sharing student information with outside vendors
remains a challenge for states and districts. No other
players in the K-12 sector appear to be attempting
a solution as comprehensive as that proposed by
the controversial nonprofit inBloom, which recently
announced it will "wind down" operations. But a number
of companies and groups, including the following, are
attempting to fix specific pieces of the problem:
CLEVER
Like inBloom, this San Francisco-based startup serves as
an intermediary between schools and vendors, helping to
facilitate secure, efficient sharing of student information.
But that's where the similarities end, says ceo Tyler
Bosmeny.
"Clever will never build data warehouses, and we never
want to go near the types of information that people think
is really sensitive," he said.
Instead, the company focuses on a very specific
problem commonly experienced by classroom teachers:
the instructional time that gets wasted trying to log
students on to learning software. Clever serves as a "data
bridge," Mr. Bosmeny said, automatically creating and
updating student accounts by securely sharing class-roster
information between schools and approved vendors.
Four years ago, the company was used by two schools.
Now, through word-of-mouth sharing, and with the help
of substantial outside investment, Clever connects 20,000
schools with 100 software vendors.
"I think top-down is almost always the wrong way to go
in education," Mr. Bosmeny said. "You know you're solving a
real problem when one school recommends you to another."
ED-FI ALLIANCE
A wholly owned subsidiary of the Michael & Susan Dell
Foundation, the Austin, Texas-based Ed-Fi Alliance is
a national leader in addressing the "interoperability"
challenge in education. By providing free technical
specifications and data standards, source code, and
development tools, the alliance helps 19 states and roughly
7,000 districts get disparate information systems talking
with one another and with vendors in a common language.
eSCHOLAR
Among the most widely used off-the-shelf software
programs to help districts gather and manage their
educational data is White Plains, N.Y.-based eScholar. The
company, which integrates data from multiple sources into
a single central warehouse for each of its clients, is used by
more than 3,600 school districts.
LEARNSPROUT
The San Francisco-based startup works by establishing
direct connections with schools' student-information
systems, then creating free daily reports for school
administrators. The aim is to turn a tedious manual
process that typically takes days into an automatic,
near-real-time service. The company hopes to eventually
generate revenue by offering districts a premium product
with additional features.
PEARSON
The London- and New York City-based publishing giant offers
numerous products and services to K-12 schools, including
the PowerSchool student-information system, currently used
by about 4,500 districts. In many cases, Pearson does not
store the thousands of pieces of student data managed by
the software. But the company facilitates the sharing of that
information with district-approved third parties.
-BENJAMIN HEROLD
EDUCATION WEEK | May 7, 2014 | www.edweek.org | 9
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