Dive Brief:

• The New York Education Department is being forced to sever ties with InBloom, a Gates Foundation-funded nonprofit that stores student data in the cloud.
• Legislation passed this week no longer allows student data to be collected and stored for use in a data dashboard or portal, and data already uploaded must now be deleted.
• Despite reassurance by the education department and InBloom that identifiable student data would be secure and would not be misused or sold, the concerns of parents and educators ultimately proved too much for the project.

Dive Insight:

This is a black eye for both parties, as an extensive amount of non-identifiable data had already been uploaded to InBloom's clouds, with names and addresses soon to follow. There are two key takeaways from this: Parents clearly aren't comfortable with their children's data being in the hands of a third party that might sell it, and educators on the local level don't want to lose district control of those records.

The latter saw objections voiced to state officials by both the Westchester Putnam School Boards Association and Lower Hudson Council of School Superintendents, among others, on several occasions. Still, some view this as a single battle in a larger war.