WHEREAS, public schools have a responsibility to protect the privacy of students, including to guard personal information such as on students’ disabilities, academic performance, discipline records, individual test scores, addresses and phone numbers; and

WHEREAS, New York State has a contract to transfer all of the student information collected by  school systems across the state to a new non-profit organization, inBloom, which would store the data in a computing cloud run by Amazon; and

WHEREAS, the information includes at least 400 data points on students, including their religious affiliation, whether they walk to school, their disciplinary history and incarceration records; and

WHEREAS, personal information on teachers pertaining to teacher evaluations and licensure could also be turned over to inBloom; and

WHEREAS, the UFT is not opposed to gathering data on public school students to guide a teacher’s instruction of individual students, and is also not opposed to aggregating student data on a broad scale, if individual student identities are concealed, to inform public policy decisions such as on where to allocate resources; and

WHEREAS, inBloom’s data-collection and storage system was created by Wireless Generation, now called Amplify Education, a company controlled by Rupert Murdoch and headed by former New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, and has raised concerns about the continued encroachment of private for-profit business interests into public education; and

WHEREAS, although the stated purpose is to give teachers access to student data that informs their teaching, parents and advocacy groups have raised concerns about the ability of inBloom to protect sensitive student information from unintentional leaks, deliberate hacking or use by private vendors seeking to market products to school districts; and

WHEREAS, these concerns over the privacy and security of student information has led a group of New York City parents to file suit against the state commissioner of education and the Board of Regents to prevent implementation of the inBloom contract, and, has in addition led about 20 districts in the Hudson Valley to reject Race-to-the-Top funding in a bid to keep their students’ data out of the inBloom storage system; and

WHEREAS, of the nine states that reportedly had planned to participate with inBloom, including Massachusetts, Louisiana and Colorado, all have dropped out except two states, New York and Illinois, but while Illinois is reportedly giving individual school districts a choice on whether to use inBloom, New York State is requiring all districts to participate; therefore be it

RESOLVED, that the United Federation of Teachers calls on the New York State Education Commissioner John King and the Board of Regents to recognize the valid and serious concerns over the privacy and security of student data by halting implementation of the state’s contract with inBloom; and be it further

RESOLVED, that the UFT calls upon the New York State Education Department to develop and maintain control of their own statewide student-data system; and be it further

RESOLVED that the UFT supports the concerns of parents about privacy and calls on the state not to share or sell student information to private companies.