Bill Gates is creating a $100 million dollar database to track public-school students.
Over the past 18 months, a massive $100 million public-school database spearheaded by the $36.4 billion-strong Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been in the making that freely shares student information with private companies.
The system has been in operation for several months and already contains millions of K-12 students’ personal identification ‒ ranging from name, address, Social Security number, attendance, test scores, homework completion, career goals, learning disabilities, and even hobbies and attitudes about school.
Claiming that the national database will enhance education, the main funder of the project, the Gates Foundation, entered the joint venture with the Carnegie Corporation of New York and school officials from a number of states. After Rupert Murdoch’s Amplify Education (a division of News Corp) spent more than a year developing the system’s infrastructure, the Gates Foundation delivered it to inBloom ‒ a nonprofit corporation recently established to run the database.
School officials and private companies doing business with districts might have plenty to be happy about with this information-sharing system, but ParentalRights.org President Michael P. Farris says parents have plenty to worry about when it comes to inBloom’s national database.
“The greatest immediate threat to children is the threat to their privacy,” Farris 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.”
And with globalists like Bill Gates (the world’s second richest man with a net worth of $61 billion) and big government joining hands in the project, could children’s information be abused for ulterior motives?
When News Corp. purchased edtech startup Wireless Generation for $360 million in late 2010, Rupert Murdoch said of technology’s potential to transform learning: “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.”
Why am I telling you all this? Besides a shared expression of the importance of digital tools, big data and personalization in the transformation of learning (and education) — and the size of the opportunity and impact they potentially represent — they have something else in common as well. Bill Gates, News Corp.’s Wireless Generation and many more have all in some capacity contributed to the development of a program called the Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC).
We finally get a glimpse into what the Shared Learning Collaborative has in store — and the degree to which it has the potential to transform education. This morning, the SLC has officially renamed and rebranded itself under the guise of a new non-profit startup called inBloom, which it has been quietly building and developing over the past 12 months. Simply put, the new non-profit intends to help transform education by providing entrepreneurs, schools and districts with a better, easier way to make sense of and utilize big data.
Of course, with support from the Gates Foundation, organizations like the Council of Chief State School Officers as well as state and federal institutions, it’s easy to worry that political and financial interests could have a big (counterproductive) influence on inBloom’s direction. However, inBloom CEO Iwan Streichenberger assures us that the company was designed as a non-profit from the beginning to keep special interests at bay, in order to create a tool that is data, platform and user agnostic — one that can help educators, schools and entrepreneurs unlock the value behind the mountains of educational data that have long been trapped in proprietary data silos and myriad software platforms.
This fragmentation and lack of portability has rendered data incommunicative, he says, stripping it of much of its utility and, really, its value. As such, he believes that no company, institution or state program — no matter how massive — can create the underlying, agnostic data resource that can allow applications, software, tools and platforms of all stripes to communicate with each other and make their data more actionable. But, with $100 million from backers, the support of dozens of companies, institutions and districts, non-profit standing and open-source technology working in its favor, there’s reason to believe that inBloom might be able to succeed where others have failed.
http://www.wnd.com/2013/03/bill-gates-100-million-database-to-track-students/
http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/05/with-100m-from-the-gates-foundation-others-inbloom-wants-to-transform-education-by-unleashing-its-data/