Also in lawmakers’ sights: New York’s inBloom participation

Tacked on to the end of lawmakers’ public statements calling for a moratorium on Common Core consequences today was a request for a different delay: of the state’s participation in a student data system known as inBloom.

But lawmakers were divided about the appropriate length of the delay.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Education Committee Chair Catherine Nolan argued for an indefinite delay in the state’s participation, citing “persistent questions regarding the ability to protect such data from security breaches, the necessity of the details and categories of such student data that is being shared, as well as the highly inappropriate potential for commercialization.”

A trio of senators, including Education Committee Chair John Flanagan, called for a one-year delay in submitting student data to the portal. “Students, parents, teachers, privacy experts and school administrators have raised serious concerns about the ability of unauthorized third-parties to access personally identifiable information of students, teachers and principals that will be collected on the statewide Education Data Portal,” the senators wrote in a statement.

Multiple states had originally planned to use InBloom, which the Gates Foundation built to help states manage and use student data, but over time, many of them pulled out. New York is among the only states planning to use the system fully, though legislators had previously indicated they would challenge that plan and a lawsuit against it is underway. The issue had been scheduled for discussion in the Assembly on Wednesday, but the hearing was canceled because of the impending winter storm.