Dear Commons Community,

Erik Bennett, a student in the Ph.D. Program in Urban Education, sent this piece to me that appeared on the Network for Public Education website. 

“David Gamberg, the enlightened and thoughtful superintendent of the Southold school district in Long Island, New York, wrote a letter to the president of inBloom and asked that the corporation remove any data pertaining to the students of his district.

For his willingness to say “no, not with our students,” David Gamberg is hereby added to the honor roll as a champion of American education. He has done the honorable thing. He has defended his students against commercial exploitation and defended their right to privacy and their right to be left alone by a government and a private sector that believes that privacy is dead. Not in Southold!

New York is one of the few states in the nation that has agreed to hand over all personal, confidential student information to inBloom.

inBloom is the corporation funded by the Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation ($100 million from Gates) to collect personal, identifiable student data. The software was created by Wireless Generation, part of Joel Klein’s Amplify, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. The data will be stored on a “cloud” managed by amazon.com.”

Every school superintendent in New York and elsewhere would be wise to consider taking the same action as Mr. Gamberg.  For more information on inBloom, I posted about it in early October. 

Tony