Responding to the Challenge of Big Data: Lessons From the Collapse of inBloom

• In Event: Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: Educational Privatization: Charter Schools, Foundations, School Governance, and Technology

Abstract

Improvements in technology have allowed teachers and the education organizations that employ them to collect, aggregate, and analyze localized student data and compare it with data that has been collected by other organizations in other places. Because public education agencies often lack the capacity to perform these analyses, they often outsource the work to private firms. One such firm, inBloom, dominated the student data market for eighteen months in 2013-2014. In this paper, I explore the policy environment that led to inBloom’s meteoric rise and high-profile, activist-driven fall. This paper presents unique insights into the ways that inBloom failed, and highlights what that failure means to the future of education technology policy in the United States.

Author

• Andrew LaFave, University of Southern California