For the last year and a half, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — a $36.4 billion philanthropic trust that focuses on educational, world health and population initiatives — has backed a $100 million public-school database that would freely share student information with private companies.
The Gates Foundation was joined by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and school officials from several states in the development of the national database. Amplify Education — a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. — after spending a year to develop the infrastructure for the system, helped to establish inBloom, a nonprofit corporation established to run the national database.
While the expressed purpose of this is to improve the educational system, the intentions of the Gates Foundation and Murdoch are unknown and worrisome to some. “The greatest immediate threat to children is the threat to their privacy,” Michael Farris, president of ParentalRights.org, told WND in an exclusive interview. “The Supreme Court has recognized a sphere of privacy within the family, but this project would take personal information about each child, apart from any considerations of parental consent, and put it into a database being managed and monitored solely by the government agencies and private corporations that use it.”
Finding the best way to teach
In recent years, there has been a push in American education circles toward personalized education, or teaching toward the individual needs of the student. The expanding use of technology in the classroom offers educators a chance to deviate, in part, from the traditional role of a teacher as instructor and instead have the teacher serve as facilitator, allowing students to learn independently and at their own rate.
This has proven to be a difficult proposition to execute, however. While there are excellent educational softwares available to the school districts, without a proper dataset of the needs of the typical student, it is difficult to craft and install an appropriate and fitting pedagogical program.
In addition, the implementation of the Common Core State Standards — U.S. Department of Education-authored curriculum standards that have been adopted by most states as a replacement to “No Child Left Behind” — have created new standards and new goals for student learning, in which many districts may not have the resources to ensure adherence.
Ultimately, education relies on systems that cannot necessarily speak to each other. Older computer systems are not able to interface with newer systems, districts may choose to use contrasting software protocols and there are no commonly-accepted standards for data archival.
The expressed hope behind inBloom is to build an open-source, cloud-based education data infrastructure that will bring interoperability to the various databases and computer systems used in education and make needed student information readily available where it is needed most, when it is needed most.
While many educators conclude that there is a need to reform the way data is accessed in education, there are clear misgivings about who is leading the charge and why. “I cannot speak to Mr. Gates’ personal motivations, [but] the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been connected with human rights organizations that promote the internationalist mindset, and this project clearly fits with that agenda,” Farris continued. “The Convention on the Rights of the Child committee has repeatedly browbeat nations to create a national database just like this that will allow the government to track children, purportedly to make sure their human rights are being protected ‒ different declared purpose, same kind of system, same invasion of privacy for government purposes.”
As chairman of the Microsoft Corporation — a computer software publisher whose portfolio includes educational software — Bill Gates is posed to directly benefit financially from the existence of this database.
Privacy laws
The Family Educational Records and Privacy Act (FERPA), known commonly as the Buckley Amendment, prohibits schools and educational institutions that receive federal funding from releasing school records or any other personally identifiable information (PII) without the prior consent of the student or a guardian if the student is a minor, with a few specific and narrow exceptions. Many states have laws that expand the basic protections FERPA offers.
Violations of FERPA can cause a school to lose their federal funding and criminal and civil charges may be imposed under the Privacy Act.
Educational records can be released to a third party under FERPA if the third party is another school the student intends to enroll in, governmental education officials, financial aid providers and testing and accreditation officials for the purpose of developing tests or improving instruction. In the later case, any disclosed information must not identify any specific student, must have a specific use and must be destroyed once that purpose is satisfied.
“We believe parents have the fundamental right to direct the upbringing, education and care of their children,” Farris stated. “Historically, the Supreme Court has supported that right. That means parents are the primary guardians of a child’s privacy.”
“Now the government is sharing private student information with other organizations without parental consent,” Farris continued. “We believe that infringes a child’s right to privacy, and it infringes the parents’ right to be the first line of defense for that child.”
Federal officials have maintained that the database does not violate privacy laws, as FERPA allows schools to share student records with any “School officials” with a “legitimate educational interest” — which, according to the U.S. Department of Education, includes school-contracted private companies. Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York and North Carolina have already agreed to share their records in a pilot run of the database.
Questioning security
Bill Gates is a major backer of International Data Privacy Day, which states on its website, “In this networked world, in which we are thoroughly digitized, with our identities, locations, actions, purchases, associations, movements and histories stored as so many bits and bytes, we have to ask – who is collecting all of this data – what are they doing with it – with whom are they sharing it? Most of all, individuals are asking ‘How can I protect my information from being misused?’ These are reasonable questions to ask – we should all want to know the answers.”
This principle directly contrasts with the inBloom database. As stated on inBloom’s privacy statement, “[inBloom] cannot guarantee the security of the information stored … or that the information will not be intercepted when it is being transmitted.”
Education in the United States is a $850 billion a year business. When News Corp. purchased educational technology startup Wireless Generation in 2010, Rupert Murdoch said “When it comes to K-12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching.”
The Massachusetts American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), the Massachusetts State Parent Teacher Association, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and Citizens for Public Schools have all formally complained against their states joining the database.
“This program forces public school students to trade their personal privacy for access to education — even without their knowledge or their parents’ consent. Students in the Commonwealth should be able to trust that state officials will not quietly hand over intimate information about them en masse to private corporations or other third parties,” said Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty program at the ACLU of Massachusetts.
Currently, 21 companies have announced that they will develop software that works with inBloom, including Agilix, BloomBoard, CaseNex, Clever, Compass Learning, ConnectEDU, CPSI, Ellevation Education, eScholar, Global Scholar, GoalBook, Gooru, KickBoard, Learning.com, LearnSprout, LoudCloud, PBS, Promethean , Scholastic, Schoology and Wireless Generation.