July 28, 2014 5:38 PM

High powered education initiative implodes over student privacy concerns

Fall out from Gates-Carnegie project could lead to enhanced privacy protections ad ed goes higher tech

WASHINGTON DC - Billionaire Bill Gates launched the great $100 million ed tech startup experiment known as inBloom with massive pomp and circumstance at SXSWedu in Austin 2013, touting it as a new tool to accelerate student achievement across the country.

The Gates and Carnegie foundations pledged a nine-figure commitment to scale up what once was known as the Shared Learning Collaborative. In its new non-profit incarnation, InBloom proposed to warehouse data from school districts across the country in a massive cloud repository, pushing massive information back to teachers in a uniform dashboard.

Just over a year later, CEO Iwan Streichenberger was pulling the plug on inBloom after massive missteps in states like Louisiana and New York, where parents were outraged that hundreds of pieces of information, including Social Security numbers, were being stored and used by a third-party vendor.

By Kimberly Reeves