inBloom, Train Wrecks, and Ed-Fi

As I sat down to write this entry, my day was interrupted most unusually.  Doug texted me the picture to the left.  The caption said simply, “Say hello to 26th street and the railroad track.”  In the picture I saw the same view I see every work morning from the “Big Table” here at UPD where many of us sit.  After more than 4 inches of rain over 36 hours, the ground right outside our office gave way taking more than a dozen cars and half the street with it.  If you watch the video (found below) of the ground as it collapses underneath the cars, you will see that it left the wall with nothing to hold, and fell under its own weight.  The stories on the news have since revealed that the neighborhood has know this was a problem for years, but their complaints and concerns met a deaf ear in the city and with the rail company.

 

It’s hard to see such a calamity and think not metaphorically about my originally intended subject: the collapse of inBloom. inBloom was, in lieu of a more boring technical description, a cloud based data integration technology, that would enable districts and states to connect their data to an “app store” of programs and dashboards that could sit on top.  The vision was a seamless and less expensive way for teachers and principals to gain easy access to data about their students.

 

inBloom was a very big deal.  Started in 2011, several big funders and education heavies devoted their credibility and more than $100 million to try to make it successful.  Their efforts succeeded in garnering several state and district partners.  But since its inception, consumer groups, parents, and privacy advocates have worried that placing their students data in the hands of a third party would not be safe.  Or worse, inBloom might “sell” their student’s data to the highest bidder.  Then came Edward Snowden, and what was a niche news story went prime time.

 

If you look at the technology within inBloom that transfers and stores data in the cloud, the critics did not have much of a leg to stand on. inBloom’s data protection technology is as good or better than just about any existing state or district.  If you look at inBloom’s license agreement, parents and privacy advocates had more explicit protections than they have now with many student data systems.  What caused inBloom to collapse as quickly as the wall outside my window was more fundamental: trust.  As citizens, we trust districts and states with our students’ data.  And for all of inBloom’s technical explanations on the security of the data, they never made the case that we could trust them as an organization.  With the withdrawal of Louisiana, New York, Colorado, and several districts, nothing could hold inBloom up.

 

Over the past year at UPD, we’ve done a lot of work with the Ed-Fi data integration and dashboard suite.  We successfully rolled out the system for the entire State of South Carolina in about nine months (public dashboards here) and are very excited to start work with the Cleveland Metropolitan Public Schools to implement Ed-fi there.  Ed-Fi is very different than inBloom, even though they both utilize the same underlying data model.  Based on extensive research on what teachers and principals say they need, Ed-Fi provides a set of powerful data integration and dashboard tools that a district or state can download for free.  Rather than shooting data up into the cloud, Ed-Fi lives where most people already trust, in the data centers of the district or states.  19 states and more than 7,000 districts have licensed Ed-Fi.

 

The tragedy of inBloom is that it was a great idea ahead of its time and stood to do a lot of good in education.  But the protectors of the status quo should see no victory in its collapse.  Teachers and principals are clamoring for better information to help their students.  Ed-Fi seems ready to pick up where inBloom left off, and do so with the trust this work requires.

———————————

This blog was written by Bryan Richardson. Bryan is a Partner at UPD Consulting and brings over thirteen years of experience in private and public sector management. Bryan holds national expertise in performance management, data systems, and complex project implementation. 

Asking the Right Questions—Data Privacy and Security

There are a lot of good signs to be seen in recent news about security and privacy in the education technology sector. Some of the key questions being asked by educators and administrators are “how well are student data protected from prying eyes and greedy corporations?” and “who has access and how are the data being used?” These are good questions, and they represent the vestiges of our struggles with adopting modern technology over the past 15 years. Conversations have matured from simple arguments around the value of computers in every classroom to philosophical debates about our organizations’ embrace of performance data as the ombudsman of quality education. Progress has clearly been made, but in our rush to catch-up with our corporate cousins we missed asking what turns out to be a pretty important question–who owns all this stuff?

 

That’s the question that ultimately sealed the fate of inBloom, a non-profit offering a cloud-based data warehouse designed to help districts and vendors share student information. Despite funding from big foundation names like Gates and Carnegie, inBloom collapsed under the weight of a five word question they were never able to answer well enough to satisfy concerned stakeholders. If data are stored on a machine that is not physically located in a building owned by the district, who really owns the data?

The data issue is really a matter of security and access, which isn’t so different from the days of paper records in filing cabinets–information was kept in a secure, locked location and only certain people had access. With data warehouses replacing filing cabinets, the difference is that the information is stored off-site and the keys are also in the hands of the data warehouse manager (in other words, the system or database administrator). inBloom failed to effectively communicate this subtle difference early on, and any answer they eventually provided came across as reactionary, slick, dishonest, and–my favorite new term–“hand-wavy.”

 

Schools and districts aren’t used to asking those questions, and the education technology sector isn’t used to answering them. This disconnect doomed the effort from the beginning. Had the question “who owns this stuff?” been asked early on, the answer would have at least brokered a conversation rather than distrust and eventual dismissal–not to mention a waste of about $100 million dollars in grant funding.

 

Ideally, that conversation would lead to a compromise where information storage and archiving solutions satisfy the security and access needs of all players–parents, teachers, administrators, and the general public. Perhaps the right solution keeps an element of the status quo: secure data such as individual names, contact information, and other personally identifiable information could be stored on-site with the keys in the hands of the same people, but the bulk of the data could be stored in the cloud. Hybrid solutions like this are possible with dashboard software like Ed-Fi where the software itself can be installed on-site along with the secure data and set up to pull the remainder of the data from the cloud.

 

In the consulting world at UPD, we see those disconnect problems all the time: Group A spends a ton of time and money solving a problem for Group B without ever truly engaging the members of Group B. inBloom undoubtedly engaged their stakeholders in the early stages, but not deep enough to where someone was able to ask “who owns all this stuff?” This is often the result of too much focus on delivering a solution and providing answers rather than asking questions and identifying the problem. It comes with the territory–we get so excited about the possibilities of new technology that we jump right into requirements gathering without stopping to think if we’re asking the right questions and solving the right problem. It might just be as simple as an issue of maturity; if we’re getting serious about our relationship with technology, it’s probably time we start asking about intentions.

———————————

This blog was written by Andrew Keller. Andrew is a Consultant at UPD Consulting and brings over 10 years of experience in education, policy, and data metrics.  

Improving the Ground Game in Education

We know political campaigns are driven by numbers. Since long before we started talking about data-driven decision-making as a key driver in education reform, political strategists had sophisticated models for crunching numbers and using them to determine where their money was spent, what their candidates said and where their rallies were held. But even though politics has always been a numbers game, in the aftermath of the 2012 presidential election, experts on both sides of the aisle are marveling about how the Obama campaign used innovative implementation strategies to take that game to the next level.

What does that “next level” look like? Broadly speaking, it is more precise, more dynamic and more individualized than its predecessors.  With a sophisticated strategy for using demographic data (including the 2010 census) to target resources and local campaign headquarters efficiently, Obama’s team built an unprecedented grass-roots level organization that generated support in key swing states.  They didn’t just crunch the numbers, they used them to develop a successful plan for turning them into votes.

As I read about the Obama campaign’s successful strategy, I was struck by the fact that several of the things they did very well are things that continue to serve as obstacles in implementing data-driven reforms at the state and local level in education. We know we should be using data to drive decision-making, but have we paid enough attention to our ground game?

Here are two areas where the Obama team’s strategy provides some insight into current challenges in education reform:

1. They connected their databases– When the Obama team realized that their fundraising database wasn’t connected to other key systems (such as their voter registration database), they immediately went to work, connecting all systems with critical voter information that previously didn’t talk to each other. This probably sounds eerily familiar to anyone who has worked in a school district or state-level education agency.  Separate databases are the rule, not the exception and connecting data sets to actually learn from the numbers is often a time-consuming task assigned to someone who is probably already working over-capacity. States are making progress with efforts to build longitudinal data warehouses, but progress is slow. In the meantime, people on the ground who need to use the numbers to drive decisions and resources don’t have the access they need. Instead, with the task of managing schools filled with thousands of students and teachers, leaders have to continue to build inefficient systems and work-around processes around disconnected data. We are moving to change this, but are we moving quickly enough?
2. They created an infrastructure in the field that supported their strategy– The Obama team developed sophisticated statistical models that allowed them to target groups of potential voters with extreme precision. With early warning systems and value-added growth data in student achievement, we are beginning to do the same in education. We are using data more precisely, and using it to plan instruction that targets specific students and specific skill sets. The critical difference is that the Obama team developed a new infrastructure in the field, designed to support that dynamic, individualized attention. They created small field offices in key counties, tight-knit teams of campaign staff trained specifically to provide the ground-level outreach to potential voters that their numbers told them was needed.  This is where education reform continues to lag behind. While we may be developing the systems and skills to help educators gather and analyze data, we have not made much progress in creating an infrastructure in public schools that allows us to use the data to drive action and resources quickly and creatively.

Education reform initiatives, like political campaigns, fail or succeed in their implementation. We should be looking for and learning from examples of successful implementation efforts wherever we can find them to ensure our ground game (like our president’s) is strong.

— JS