inBloom — Analyzing the past to navigate the future
by Brenda Leong and Amelia Vance, Future of Privacy Forum
The fall of inBloom, a student data system designed with grand visions of scale, scope, and implementation that went from public fanfare to closure in less than a year, was analyzed exhaustively when it ended in 2013. Now, with the perspective of time, the Data & Society Research Institute has reviewed what happened, and considered what longer-term impact this experiment may have had.
There are many examples of projects that significantly impact the course of events by their failures as much as by their successes, and inBloom — from its launch to its end — is such a project. We are still rocked by the ripples it sent out into the world of education technology and student data privacy. It is critical to understand how we can learn from its example as we continue to search for ways to improve student outcomes with the use of data and technology; Data & Society has provided such a review. This detailed report tells the story of inBloom from inception to close. And, although it could perhaps have included more in-depth discussion of inBloom’s on-going legacy, it provides plenty to think about.
Focusing on inBloom’s privacy implications, we can easily identify one key takeaway: the necessity of parental involvement and trust. As the Data & Society report points out, proponents of inBloom had “difficulty in articulating what the concrete value would be for individual students.” As we know from the Future of Privacy Forum’s (FPF) annual Parent Survey (2015, 2016), benefits to individual students are the key. Parents are extremely supportive of technology and data collection when they clearly perceive the value to their own child, and to their specific school and classroom. Without that personal connection, or seeing only general collaborative value at the district or state level, parents are less trusting, less enthusiastic, and less willing to have their child’s personal information shared.
In direct contravention of that reality, this paper argues that it was unclear to so many what exactly inBloom was supposed to do, although “the promise was being able to give teachers information instead of data… the ability to have assessment data synthesized and pulled together so that we had really good knowledge about groups of kids.” The Data & Society report concludes that inBloom and its school and state level adherents failed to articulate that goal in a timely and meaningful way, and failed to build sufficient trust with others in the education network, not least of all parents.
It was simply inBloom’s bad luck that it launched in a perfect storm of national security leaks and revelations, commercial data breaches involving financial information, and overall education reform efforts that made any cross-state, top-down, data-intensive initiative suspect. But the paper rightly concludes that, even in a more forgiving environment, inBloom needed a convincing argument for its contribution — not only a crisp statement of the problem to be solved, but also a plain explanation of why inBloom’s solution was the right one. Crucially, future initiatives must be able to address parental privacy concerns where they live, on an emotional level, demonstrating the compelling value to be gained by teachers, students, schools, and communities.
Technical or legal responses certainly have their place, but they will not convince parents that their concerns are taken seriously, and that parent and student interests are truly considered.
As demonstrated by the responses in the Jefferson County, Colorado, and New York City school systems, even a committed school or district will not succeed in implementing a new education technology system that is seen as drastically different, or high risk; this is especially true if parent and community buy-in are absent.
The second lesson from inBloom is that a lack of clear communication about privacy protections can hamper parental buy-in. This lesson is still essentially about parental understanding and trust. As we also know from FPF’s Parent Surveys, parents are woefully uninformed about the existence or scope of current state and federal laws controlling student data. In the context of 2013 and the growing public awareness of data collection, privacy and security breaches, and the fallout of these failures, parental lack of understanding was fatal, and in fact led directly to many of the 86 student privacy state laws passed since inBloom’s demise. inBloom proposed a new era of granular data that would enable personalized learning for every student, but in light of the growing concerns about data profiling and amid anxiety about education reform more generally, parents were unwilling to accept technologists’ extremely general promises about privacy and security.
It is noteworthy that parents were the most public and vocal leaders in the public conversation both supporting or condemning the goals of inBloom. Failing to engage parents up front, neglecting to lay sufficient ground work at the local level, and an absolute failure to effectively communicate once the process kicked off left the field clear for impassioned opponents to frame the story. Parents who could have been won over were left almost unsupported in their efforts to understand the benefits and the protections. As the Data & Society paper points out, a “dedicated champion” for the value of inBloom was conspicuously lacking, but those parents who opposed inBloom left no such void and were therefore able to dominate the conversation.
The ripples from inBloom, which landed with a splash before schools, districts and communities were ready to communicate about it, have now spread across the education sphere. Ultimately, we agree that inBloom “catalyzed national discussions around student data use,” supporting and advancing the general awareness of technology in schools, as well as the potential uses and value of data. Other ed tech companies were able to work with schools more quickly than might otherwise have occurred, and certainly proceeded with a much greater awareness of the need for adequate privacy controls for their products.
After inBloom, FPF partnered with SIIA to encourage vendors to take a public stand on privacy and transparency with the launch and success of the Student Privacy Pledge, which now has more than 300 company signatories. The language of the Pledge, along with other efforts by companies and advocates, framed the debate and outcomes as states responded by proposing almost 500 student privacy bills in 49 states. The growing awareness and discussion of the privacy implications of student data is a legacy that inBloom and its supporters should be proud of.
Unfortunately, as the Data & Society report observes, the failure of a national, large-scale platform also had the effect of steering ed tech vendors toward state-by-state or district-by-district systems, rather than larger, open consortiums that would allow greater data sharing to benefit students. None of these individual systems can provide the efficiencies or greater analytic benefits of a standardized, interactive platform, and yet each continues to pose similar privacy and security challenges to inBloom.
Hopefully this report from Data & Society — published at a calmer time, with more transparency about how schools collect, use, and secure student data — can lead a re-energized discussion of next steps to achieve inBloom’s original goals: real-time, useful information for teachers and truly personalized learning for students, all with adequate and appropriate privacy and security controls and design. Hopefully, that will be the real and lasting legacy of inBloom’s ambitious vision.
Points: This piece is part of a series of responses and reflections on the new report, The Legacy of inBloom, which draws on interviews and research to trace the closure of inBloom, and analyzes the factors that contributed to its demise. See also:
- inBloom’s collapse undermined personalized learning and data standards efforts by danah boyd
- The inBloom Legacy by Olga Garcia-Kaplan
- inBloom — Data, Privacy, and the Conversations We Could Have Had by Bill Fitzgerald
- Rationalizing Those “Irrational” Fears of inBloom by Audrey Watters
