
A Student-Data Collector Drops Out - 001sky
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/technology/a-student-data-collector-drops-out.html
======
ynniv
This is good news. While their intentions may have been good, the information
they were requesting could have haunted the students being tracked for the
rest of their lives. As the government has asserted in their defense of PRISM
and related services, once this information has been shared with a company it
is often treated as semi-public, and as anyone on this site should realize,
information which is not protected as by law (HIPPA, etc) can never be made
private again. (Information which _is_ protected by law still can't be
retracted, but at least legitimate companies have to think twice about using
it.)

[
[http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2013/03/inblooms-...](http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2013/03/inblooms-
student-and-teacher-data.html) ]

[ [http://www.classsizematters.org/wp-
content/uploads/2013/04/i...](http://www.classsizematters.org/wp-
content/uploads/2013/04/inBloom-Data-Fields-excerpts.pdf) ]

~~~
dkarapetyan
Anonymize the information as soon as the students graduate. Done! That way it
can still be used for gaining insight without being traceable to any given
student.

~~~
ivank
Reidentification algorithms could still be used to identify students; see
[http://33bits.org/tag/de-anonymization/](http://33bits.org/tag/de-
anonymization/)

~~~
dkarapetyan
The same way RSA keys can be recovered from CPU noise/heat fluctuations. There
is a right way to do anonymization and a wrong way. The same way there is a
right way to do crypto and not leak information from side-channels.

~~~
Someone
Decent crypto uses 128+ bits; it takes only 33 bits to identify any human on
earth; less than 29 to identify a US citizen.

It also is way harder to anonymize data _and_ allow for it to be queried in
the aggregate.

~~~
dkarapetyan
Which 29 bits are those exactly?

~~~
Someone
[http://33bits.org/about/](http://33bits.org/about/)

2^29 is about 500 million.

------
nickbauman
I think they folded because they figured out that public education in the US
isn't about really developing understanding and learning. It's designed to
produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny appreciable
leadership skills and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens in order to
render the populace "manageable."

Individual teachers don't think this: they actually think they're supposed to
help develop a student's intellect. A lot of conflict arises here.

John Taylor Gatto wrote about this in his essay "Against School". It's a good
read.

[http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm](http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm)

------
ottertown
as a former, disenfranchised education technologist, comments like this: “If
this is still an ‘emerging concept,’ why are we implementing it?” are all too
familiar.

teachers and school administrators are fearful of tech solutions because so
many of them have been awful and have completely ignored the needs of the
classroom. but that means potentially worthwhile products go unimplemented.

if you're going to do a startup, I highly recommend not doing so in the
education space.

~~~
dkarapetyan
And yet blackboard exists and is thriving.

~~~
xux
And everyone hates it. Professors hate it. Students hate it.

------
Alex3917
Yet another major fuckup in the education space by Bill Gates. His flagship
high school, which he wanted to model every other school in the nation after,
literally got shut down after having a graduation rate around 20%. And yet he
has yet to pay even a dollar in reparations to all those kids whose lives he
destroyed. Diane Ravitch has a good quote about the Gates foundation in her
book:

"To advance its agenda, the Gates foundation increased its spending on
advocacy. From 2005 to 2009, the foundation quadrupled its annual spending on
advocacy to $78 million. Accord to Sam Dillon in the New York Times, the
foundation will pump an addition $100 million into advocacy over the next five
to six years. That kind of money buys a lot of advocacy and support. Gates
funded the groups that wrote the Common Core standards, the groups that
evaluated them, and the groups that advocated for them. Gates funded liberal
groups such as Education Trust, centrist groups such as the Center for
American Progress and the Center on Education Policy, and groups on the Right
such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation,
Jeb Bush's Foundation of Educational Excellence, and the Media Bullpen. It
funded groups that advocated for charter schools, such as the Education
Equality project, and groups that argued against seniority and tenure, such as
TeachFirst, TeachPlus, and the New Teacher Project. Kenneth Libby, then a
graduate student known for poring through tax filings of foundations and
advocacy groups, commented, 'It's easier to name which groups Gates doesn't
support than to list all of those they do, because it's just so overwhelming.'
[...]

Writing in Dissent, Joanne Barkan described the challenge that the aggressive
venture philanthropists pose for American society:

'Can anything stop the foundation enablers? After five or ten more years, the
mess they're making in public schooling might be so undeniable that they'll
say, 'Oops, that didn't work' and step aside. But the damage might be
irreparable: thousands of closed schools, worse conditions in those left open,
an extreme degree of 'teaching to the test,' demoralized teachers, rampant
corruption by private management companies, thousands of failed charter
schools, and more low-income kids without a good education. Who could possibly
clean up the mess?'"

If you want to read about what happened the last time billionaires got
involved with the school system, John Taylor Gatto does a pretty decent job
documenting it in his Underground History book.

~~~
nopinsight
Do you have a reference about that supposed flagship high school with 20%
graduation rate? I searched and couldn't find it.

At least the info on why and how they failed would be useful to many education
innovators here.

~~~
Alex3917
Yeah Ravitch talks about this in her Death and Life of the Great American
School System book, in Chapter 10 on p. 207. That page and a bunch of the
previous pages are available to read for free on Amazon. The basic gist though
is that all the research shows that medium-sized high schools are the best for
students, because they're big enough that students can find classes and
activities (and friends) they're interested in, but not so big that they get
lost. But despite this research Gates decided to make having extremely small
high schools his main educational priority, with results that were basically
exactly what the research previously suggested they would be.

~~~
GabrielF00
I know a lot of big cities have implemented small schools by essentially
breaking up big high schools and putting three or four smaller schools in the
same building. How does this effect how small schools perform?

------
wallflower
FERPA is an important act for education startups as it is the HIPAA of that
domain.

It gets more interesting for post-secondary education. By law, students have
to grant permission to their parents to see their college grades.

Decades ago, colleges used to post final exam test scores _anonymously_. How
did they do that? They used SSNs. Of course, that practice is now verboten and
schools actually try to use something other than an SSN as the foreign key of
the student's records.

[http://www.studentaffairs.pitt.edu/sites/default/files/PDFsa...](http://www.studentaffairs.pitt.edu/sites/default/files/PDFsandForms/Parents/FERPA.pdf)

------
programminggeek
When they say $100 million, do they mean raised or company value? If they
burned through $100 million in 15 months, I have no idea how they could light
that much money on fire so quickly.

~~~
windsurfer
They raised $100 million. Source: [http://gigaom.com/2013/02/05/gates-
foundation-backed-inbloom...](http://gigaom.com/2013/02/05/gates-foundation-
backed-inbloom-frees-up-data-to-personalize-k-12-education/)

------
dkarapetyan
Honestly, where is this level of scrutiny when it comes to things like
facebook and google+. How are the privacy violation in those enterprises
different?

~~~
timbre
Children are not legally compelled to join Facebook and Google+.

~~~
dkarapetyan
And yet they do. So make school voluntary. Privacy violation problems solved I
guess.

------
judk
Good. The world needs an open source as solution that can be deployed locally
and respects student privacy.

~~~
iht
It is opensource under the Apache license ([https://github.com/inbloom/secure-
data-service](https://github.com/inbloom/secure-data-service) and a few other
repos). And I believe there wasn't anything preventing anyone from standing up
their own instance except time and some frustration.

------
Edmond
This is good...ordinarily I am relaxed about the issue of privacy and mostly
don't get the paranoia about government(US) surveillance...but the idea of my
life being reduced to a few data points terrifies me to no end...ironic that
this was being funded by the Gate's foundation (which I admire), it brings to
mind the Bill Gates mugshot
([http://www.thesmokinggun.com/mugshots/celebrity/business/bil...](http://www.thesmokinggun.com/mugshots/celebrity/business/bill-
gates))

------
doubt_me
Why do they have to shut down?

Why not just switch the model from gathering students data to creating the
apps anyways and just letting the school take care of sorting out which app
works best for who.

Seems to me like there could have been a bunch of better ways to handle this
other than shut it down

~~~
EpicEng
Well, that wasn't their goal, and I doubt it is easy to displace the systems
these schools are using today. The board probably felt that it would be wiser
to cut their losses.

~~~
objclxt
> _I doubt it is easy to displace the systems these schools are using today_

...which is pretty much why the players in this space who _are_ finding
success are companies like Clever (clever.com), who let schools keep their
existing SIS/student management software, but offer conduits to get the data
out into other applications.

I know the Clever co-founders post here fairly often, they'll probably chip in
on their perspective at some point.

~~~
EpicEng
Interesting. I looked at their site and I couldn't find mention of exactly
what sort of personal information is stored, but I do see the term "student
data" pop up a few times. I wonder; why aren't these guys having the same
problem?

------
christkv
To bad his actions speak louder than his words.

The children of Bill and Melinda Gates – Jennifer, Rory and Phoebe – have
attended Lakeside School, Seattle’s most elite, fancypants private school.

------
hackplus
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------
frade33
>it was too far ahead of its time

I would never get this phrase, does it mean, it is of no use at the moment? If
yes, why not say it so.

------
xname
Not directly related to the topic, but for those who might interested, here is
another piece of critique on Gates Foundation in education:

How the Gates Foundation Spins its Research
[http://jaypgreene.com/2012/01/07/how-the-gates-foundation-
sp...](http://jaypgreene.com/2012/01/07/how-the-gates-foundation-spins-its-
research/)

Quote: "With the latest round of reports, the Gates folks are back to their
old game of spinning their results to push policy recommendations that are
actually unsupported by the data."

