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The logic of mining student data: corporate education reform, stakeholder activism, and the fate of inBloom

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The logic of mining student data: corporate education reform, stakeholder activism, and the fate of inBloom

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Content Running head: THE FATE OF INBLOOM 1

The Logic of Mining Student Data:
Corporate Education Reform, Stakeholder Activism, and the Fate of inBloom

Andrew L. LaFave

Faculty of the USC Graduate School
Urban Education Policy

Doctor of Philosophy

University of Southern California

August 6, 2016

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Table of Contents
Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………4
Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………5
Introduction: The Rise and Fall of inBloom………………………………………………6
Chapter I. The Data Problem……………………………………………………………...8
What kinds of student data do schools need? …………………………………….9
What can private firms offer? …………………………………………………...12
Understanding the Market………………………………………………………..14
Conclusion to Chapter I………………………………………………………….16
Chapter II. Corporate Boards, Institutional Logics, and the Fate of inBloom…………...17
The Institutional Logics Perspective……………………………………………..17
Corporate Governance as an Enactment of Institutional Logics………………...25
The Quality of the Extant Literature……………………………………………..38
Conclusion to Chapter II…………………………………………………………39
Chapter III. Methods……………………………………………………………………..40
The Rise and Fall of inBloom……………………………………………………40
Why inBloom? …………………………………………………………………..45
Research Questions………………………………………………………………48
Data………………………………………………………………………………52
Chapter IV. Data…………………………………………………………………………61
Prologue: The Shared Learning Collaborative…………………………………..61
Act I: The Rise of inBloom……………………………………………………...70
Act II: A Gathering Storm……………………………………………………….87
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Act III: The Fall of inBloom…………………………………………………….94
Epilogue: InBloom Wilts, the Industry Shrugs…………………………………123
Chapter V. Findings & Discussion……………………………………………………..127
The Logics at Work on inBloom’s Board………………………………………131
The Role of Social Context……………………………………………………..142
Confused Decision-making……………………………………………………..151
The Meaning of inBloom’s Collapse…………………………………………...158
Chapter VI. Implications for Policy & Practice...………………………………………168
Data Privacy…………………………………………………………………….169
The Holy Grail………………………………………………………………….171
Market Impacts…………………………………………………………………173
The Way Forward………………………………………………………………174
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………...176
References………………………………………………………………………………179
Appendix A: Research Question/Framework……..……………………………………204
Appendix B: Protocols………………………………………………………………….206

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Abstract
Schools today use a remarkably wide range of technological tools to aid management and
instruction. These tools generate a constant stream of data that educators can, in theory,
use to create (or improve) individualized instruction for students. In practice, this data
stream can be difficult for educators to manage and interpret, spurring the growth of a
private market for student data analysis contractors. While a great deal of education
research has examined the function of private firms in education markets, comparatively
few researchers have looked inside the “black box” of the firm to investigate the ways
that the managers of these private firms make choices and decisions that impact
education policy and educator practice. In this dissertation, I use the institutional logics
framework as a lens through which to examine one such contractor, a firm called
inBloom, and follow its genesis, its meteoric rise, its apotheosis as the best-funded and
most widely-used contractor for student data analysis, and its precipitous decline into
bankruptcy, all in the space of eighteen months. I argue that inBloom failed because its
managers failed to understand the difference between the education market and other
markets, largely due to an ongoing and unacknowledged conflict between the logic of
capitalist markets and the logic of communities. In light of this failure, I offer
recommendations for best practice on both the school and the contractor side of education
privatization.

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I dedicate this work to my wife, Dr. Elizabeth Mainz, for her tireless support and
encouragement; to my son, Patrick LaFave, for his understanding, his love, and his
patience; to my parents, Prof. Steven LaFave and Ms. Beth Easter, for believing in me
and showing me that intellectual pursuits are worth the time and sacrifice; and to my
advisor, Dr. Patricia Burch, for providing challenging feedback and pushing me to make
my writing clearer, my arguments sharper, and my conclusions stronger.

And finally, as always, to my eternal companions Ernie, John, Toby, and Hunter: Res
ipsa loquitur.

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INTRODUCTION
The Rise and Fall of inBloom

Schools today use a remarkably wide range of technological tools to aid
management and instruction. These tools generate a constant stream of data that
educators can, in theory, use to create (or improve) individualized instruction for
students. In reality, many of these digital tools rely on proprietary modes of data storage
(largely in the form of idiosyncratic file types and naming conventions) that prevent them
from “talking” to each other. Consequently, it can be difficult or often impossible for
educators to use the data their tools generate to form a unified picture of student
achievement and behavior.
In 2013, a nonprofit firm called inBloom was founded to address this specific
shortcoming of the then-extant student data ecosystem. InBloom offered a wide variety of
storage and analysis products aimed at integrating the data that schools collect and
displaying it “with a single-access point where teachers can view and easily match
students’ specific needs with tailored instruction” (inBloom, n.d.). This seemingly
anodyne mission quickly triggered a massive backlash from concerned parents and
politicians in the states where inBloom was operating, ultimately ending with inBloom
ceasing operations, closing its offices, and cancelling its contracts
1
.
What happened at inBloom? How did inBloom’s managers so badly mishandle
the firm’s image? Where did the backlash come from? And, most importantly, what
lessons can policymakers, education leaders, and the research community take from such
a high-profile failure in the digital education market? In Chapter I, I offer an exploration

1
For more on inBloom’s mission and the reaction the firm caused, see Chapters III and
IV.
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of the student data market and the functions that student data performs in schools. In
Chapter II, I review the literature on corporate board behavior and institutional logics,
with a particular focus on how the decisions of board members led to adverse outcomes –
in terms of share price and long-term profitability, among others – for the organizations
they manage. In Chapter III, I provide a discussion of the methods I used in the
dissertation, and a justification for why I chose those methods. Chapter IV is my own
narrative of inBloom’s story, from its genesis as an advisory body to the emptying of its
offices, told largely by the people who lived through it. I close with Chapters V and VI,
in which I respectively share my findings and offer some implications of those findings
for policy and practice.

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CHAPTER I
The Data Problem

Education has always been a data-driven enterprise. Teachers provide (or
facilitate) instruction, and the students internalize the material. Students then demonstrate
the extent to which they have mastered the material, and teachers make decisions and
adjustments related to future lessons based on the feedback that their assessments
provide. This is student data in its most elementary form, and data of this kind forms the
basis of the public education system in the United States.
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.
On the macro scale, nationally-representative data sets from countries around the world
provided by standardized assessments like the Trends in International Mathematics and
Science Study (TIMMS) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS)
tests allow policy-makers to adjust the goals of their national education systems based on
student achievement data. On the micro scale, improvements in instructional technology
have made it possible for teachers to assess student progress in real time and make on-
the-spot changes to their lessons as they deliver them (Datnow, Park, & Wohlstetter,
2007; Schmoker, 2003).
But student data goes far beyond what can be measured in terms of achievement.
Schools collect and stockpile students’ attendance, discipline, and demographic data in
addition to their grades and test results (Data Quality Campaign, n.d.; Datnow, Park, &
Wohlstetter, 2007). Being in possession of this kind of information allows schools to
form tolerably complete pictures of the students who walk through their doors every day,
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which can be a powerful tool to help schools address the needs of their student
populations. The challenge associated with collecting and storing so much student data is
primarily one of expertise: very few public school teachers or administrators have a
background in statistics or information technology (Bernhardt, 2003; Data Quality
Campaign, n.d.; Schmoker, 2003). In this environment, and in the context of the larger
movement to privatize public education in the United States (Burch, 2009), schools have
turned to private contractors to collect, store, aggregate, and analyze student data (Burch
& Good, 2014).
While outsourcing data-related functions solves the expertise problem for
education organizations, it also presents a new set of challenges. Who owns the data once
it has passed from the hands of educators into corporate interests? How can schools be
sure that student data will only be used for educational purposes and not, for example, be
sold or otherwise made available to third parties for marketing purposes? And, most
importantly in the eyes of student privacy advocates, how secure will the data be in the
hands of private contractors?
It is this final question that I will address in my dissertation.
What Kinds of Student Data do Schools Need?
As a data-driven enterprise, schools use a wide variety of data in order to fulfill
their function as centers for both education and the care of students. The types of data
that schools collect and use fall broadly into two categories: data for operation (the
information that allow schools to function), and data for accountability (the information
generated by schools that allows outside agencies to gauge schools’ efficacy).

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Student Data for Operation
Schools collect and store a great deal of information describing their students.
Because students spend so much of their lives inside the public school system, schools
are able to collect extensive amounts of data on each student, particularly relating to
behavior and attendance.
The data that schools collect on their students’ behavior allows teachers and
administrators to make disciplinary decisions based on the patterns that emerge over time
(Irvin et al., 2006). Attendance data is likewise useful in determining behavior patterns
over time. Like discipline data, attendance data allows school employees to see which
students are (ir)regularly coming to school and target interventions accordingly (Rocque,
2010). Attendance data is also important, as proof of per-student “seat-time” is the
primary way in which schools receive funding (Venezia & Kirst, 2005). Beyond concerns
over funding, tracking student attendance patterns is central to the functioning of schools
because students coming to class regularly is strongly related to graduation rates and
drop-out prevention (Powell, 1996; Venezia & Kirst, 2005).
Student Data for Accountability
In the current education policy context, the lines between school operation and
accountability are blurred; without access and response to accountability data, schools’
operation can be suspended by government agencies. So while the general public is more
concerned about the data that schools collect to ensure their continued operation (e.g.
Barnes, 2014), in reality, it is the increased emphasis on accountability that has driven
educational data expansion over the past twenty years (e.g. Bongiorno, 2011).
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Demographic data forms the bridge between operational and accountability data.
Schools must necessarily warehouse the names, addresses, and phone numbers of their
students, but they must also seek more sensitive data related to total family income and
the race(s) and ethnicities of their students. In the case of income, schools need this data
in order to determine which students qualify for the various Title I programs provided by
the federal government. In the case of racial demographics, schools need to pair this data
with achievement scores in order to comply with state and federal standards regimes like
No Child Left Behind.
Achievement data is also central to accountability: student test scores, grades,
credits received, and scores on large-scale standardized assessments all play important
parts in determining whether or not a school can be deemed “effective” by its parent
district or state government. Interestingly, the data that describes students’ achievement is
not limited to the traditional summative marks. Each technological application with
which a student interacts generates its own data; one estimate suggests that over ten
million data points are generated by the average student each day (Simon, 2014).
Tracking an individual student’s achievement, demographic, and disciplinary data
can easily be done by a teacher or a single administrator. It is when student data is
aggregated into large datasets that the strain on school systems comes into focus. The
necessity of not only generating and cataloging this data, but also analyzing it and taking
action based on what the data reveals has become a major expense for school districts in
the United States (Boser, 2013). Each new technological application adopted by a school
generates additional student data, and while the per-pupil cost of each application might
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be small – as little as $5 per year for the types of services offered by a firm like inBloom
2

– the aggregated cost of generating and analyzing data from hundreds of applications is
significant
3
.
While some districts are able to find the funding to support in-house data analysis
teams, many others turn to outside contractors which are better-equipped to meet the data
needs of public education agencies. In the next section, I briefly discuss what exactly it is
that private firms can offer public schools in this regard.
What Can Private Firms Offer?
The rise of “big data” in schools coincided with the cratering economy of the
2007-2009 recession (Ross, Beath, & Quaadgras, 2013). As demand for student data
grew on the demand side, private firms sprung up to plug the hole in the market. Private
firms like Knewton, inBloom, and others like them made their analytics services
available to education agencies, and schools were quick to sign on (Simon, 2014).
Interestingly, and contrary to the way that popular media often characterize the
firms’ business model (e.g. Kamenetz, 2014), private student data firms (by and large) do
not themselves create the data which is their stock and trade. Rather, these firms manage
the data that schools have already generated on behalf of their contractual partners. This
distinction may seem fine, but understanding it is essential to understanding both the role

2
InBloom is the “site” for this dissertation; for a full discussion of what inBloom was and
the services it offered, see Chapters III and IV. For now, simply recognize that inBloom
was a major player in the student data sector for eighteen months in 2013-2014.
3
For example, although it is exceptionally difficult to disaggregate the cost of data
collection, storage, and analysis from the total expenditure on education technology in
school budgets, the total technology budget of the New York City Department of
Education was approximately $900 million over the course of 2010-2015. It is reasonable
to assume that a significant amount of that $900 million went to servicing the system’s
contracts with data firms.
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of these firms in the education system and the reaction that parents and other advocacy
groups have had. When a school enters into a contract with a student data firm, it agrees
to share the information that it already has on hand with the firm in exchange for
analytical services such as tracking achievement data, synthesizing data across platforms,
and/or making automated recommendations for academic interventions based on a
student’s data set. Big-data advocates in schools argue that the information being shared
with the firms already exists; why bother generating the data at all if the system fails to
use it in the service of improved outcomes for students (e.g. Hodas, 2014)? Ulrich Boser,
writing for the Center on American Progress in 2013, suggested that the cost of
generating such large quantities of student data was too great – and its content too useful
to the system – to “leave it on the table, unexamined” (p. 4). If the data was to be left
alone, Ulrich argued, then it would be best to stop generating it and put data-related funds
to other uses (p. 7).
However, if education stakeholders accept that districts require third-party
vendors to analyze student data, how can they be certain that private firms will keep data
confidential and secure (Simons, 2014)? Once data has left the relative safety of school-
or district-level management, what will happen to it? Activist groups like Leonie
Haimson’s Class Size Matters campaign have expressed concerns over the ultimate fate
of the data that schools hand over to private firms (2014). Other opponents of these
contracts argue that the information generated and collected by schools should not be
shared with outside interests; schools should not provide opportunities for profits based
on the performance of children (e.g. Parker, 2013).
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Market forces have rendered these objections largely moot (Weber, 2015). For
most school districts, the costs of analyzing the massive amounts of data generated by
their students are simply too high (Gill & Engberg, 2009). Private firms minimize these
costs through their own economies of scale: the marginal cost of adding a thousand
student data-points to the workload of an already-employed statistician in a private firm
is much less than the cost of hiring a new statistician in a district’s central office
(Chandra & Borah, 2012). In fact, it is this very pricing model that allowed inBloom to
charge between $5 and $10 per student (depending on the district’s contract) to analyze
literally hundreds of millions of data points over the course of a school year. Like all
outsourcing contracts, schools find contractors that allow them to minimize the internal
costs while maximizing the benefit to themselves
4
.
At the same time, administrators at the school and district level face other sources
of pressure to outsource school functions (Burch, LaFave, & Good, 2015; Burch, LaFave,
& Smith, 2016). Regulatory pressures in the form of changing content standards (Linn,
2000), community pressures in the form of shifting demands from stakeholders (Maynard
& Kelsey, 1996), and market-based pressures in the form of competition among districts
for increased student enrollments (Burch, LaFave, & Good, 2015), among other
possibilities.
Understanding the Market
In January of 2013, inBloom entered the student data management market,
quickly securing contracts with nine state departments of education. Like other data
firms, inBloom offered a wide range of services to its clients, all of which required the

4
For a more complete explanation of the mechanics of transaction cost economics, see
Coase (1937) and Williamson (2008).
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sharing of student data (inBloom, n.d.). No other firm operating in this space responded
to the market conditions I outlined above as decisively as inBloom, and, in the period
between its founding and the beginning of an activist-fueled backlash that eventually led
to its dissolution, inBloom enjoyed significant first-mover benefits (Simon, 2014).
Examining the ways that inBloom’s management failed to consolidate these benefits are
potentially instructive for both the education technology and policy communities; did
inBloom fail due to managerial decisions leading to unsupported expansion (e.g. Horn,
2014; McCambridge, 2014), or were the concerns advocacy groups expressed to district
and state-level policymakers too pressing to ignore (e.g. Haimson, 2014; Ravitch,
2013b)? If inBloom’s failure was due to poor decision making, what made inBloom’s
management team different from other student data firms founded at the same time and
still in operation today? On the other hand, if inBloom’s failure was due to outside
pressure, why have so many other student data management firms been able to continue
to successfully do business? Smaller data management firms like Knewton, dreambox
learning, and 2U have continued to be profitable and have expanded their reach in the
eighteen months since inBloom’s collapse. As a first mover, inBloom enjoyed the
benefits of shaping an unexplored market, but also exposed itself to the risks associated
with expanding into uncharted space. Is inBloom’s story, then, one of a first-mover that
failed to effectively hedge its initial investments, or did something else happen?
The answers to these questions are likely to be less clear-cut than either the
business press or advocacy groups have made them out to be, especially since many of
the decisions that led to inBloom’s collapse are best-understood as political actions
(Friedland & Alford, 1975). InBloom’s managers responded to political pressures that
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came in the form of stakeholder protests, client districts’ withdrawal of support, and
legislative action at the state level. InBloom’s management made political choices that
were ultimately fatal; the board members’ inability to foresee the market consequences of
their political actions led to the firm’s dissolution.
Conclusion to Chapter I
In order to understand what happened to inBloom, I argue that it is essential to
examine the decisions that inBloom’s managers made during the eighteen months that it
was a viable enterprise, and to understand those decisions within a shifting political
landscape. In order to create a literature of corporate accountability in education, I
suggest that using analytical tools more commonly found in management case studies is
the way forward. Management case studies examine “the greatest challenges confronting
leading companies, nonprofits, and government organizations,” taking into account “the
constraints and incomplete information found in real business issues” to study real-world
business outcomes (Harvard Business School, n.d., web source). To that end, I further
argue that the behaviors and decisions of inBloom’s managers were constrained by the
social and regulatory environments in which they found themselves. Like many other
education services firms, inBloom was overseen by a managerial board. Literature
relating to the behaviors of these boards is not to be found in the body of education
research, even though the decisions made on these boards are increasingly central to the
administration of schools (Cucchiara, Gold, & Simon, 2011). I turn, therefore, to an
appreciation of the literatures on corporate board behavior and the institutional logics
which shape that behavior in the next chapter.

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CHAPTER II
Corporate Boards, Institutional Logics, and the Fate of inBloom

The central argument of this dissertation is that the failure of inBloom was largely
due to mismanagement of inBloom’s brand and the inability of top management and
board members to effectively communicate the nature of the services inBloom offered to
its clients and stakeholders. The logics that govern the institutions of which inBloom was
a part constrained the decision-making processes of its management (cf. Thornton &
Ocasio, 2008); the social dynamics at work among board members and top executives
constrained the behaviors in which they were able to engage (cf. Hambrick & Mason,
1984). In this section, I will examine the institutional logics perspective and evaluate its
usefulness as a theoretical lens through which to view inBloom’s story. Then, I will
review the literature on corporate board behavior with a particular focus on how the
demographic composition of boards-of-directors shapes the directions that firms take.
Finally, because private education services firms like inBloom are trusted with sensitive
information about the children who inhabit public schools, I will discuss the fiduciary
responsibility of corporate boards as it relates to both shareholders and stakeholders.
The Institutional Logics Perspective
Individuals within organizations find themselves behaving according to multiple
overlapping and often contradictory logics. In 1988, Jackall investigated this
contradiction as it applied to ethical and moral conflict within firms. Jackall’s
ethnographic work provides a way of understanding how competing forms of institutional
logic can inform the behavior of individuals in an ethically-fraught environment. One
ramification of these moral conundrums is multiple logics existing simultaneously in a
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single organization. These logics can coexist peaceably, or they can be in conflict; their
coexistence might be stable, destructive, or an intermediate stage before a new,
hybridized logic takes the place of the conflict. Many possibilities for the combination or
competition of institutional logics exist (cf. Delbridge & Edwards, 2013).
Glynn’s 2000 study of a labor dispute between managers and musicians in the
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (ASO) provides an instructive example. The role of the
ASO in Atlanta was changing, as previously dependable, wealthy donors fell away, and
the organization’s managers tried to re-brand the ASO as a more accessible cultural
institution. Market conditions dictated this change in identity, which was accompanied
by a shift in the guiding logic of the ASO; where before it had been largely concerned
with aesthetics, the ASO’s future was bound up in the logic of markets. Glynn’s
conceptualization of institutional logic included the intriguing idea that logics, although
certainly embedded within larger, societal trends, could also be locally defined by
organizational actors operating within Friedland and Alford’s (1991) macro-level
institutions.
But what about those macro-level logics? If, as Glynn (2000) implied, evidence
of additional local logics could be found in the behavior of micro-level organizational
actors, is it possible for local actors to find their own expressions of Friedland and
Alford’s (1991) large-scale logics? Greenwood, Diaz, Li, and Lorente inadvertently
explored this possibility in 2010 when they studied the responses of firms to economic
pressures. They referred to institutional logics as the “master principles of society” (p.
521), and pointed out that the research community has little understanding of why
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organizations are compelled to respond to the pressures created by these master
principles.
Greenwood and colleagues’ analysis of a large data set over a significant period
of time showed that firms used both the logic of family and the logic of the state
5
to
respond to what they called the “overarching logic of markets” (2010, p. 521), a not-
unusual finding for this kind of exploration of the interactions between and among
various institutional logics. What is interesting about their use of family logic is its
application to small firms as social groups. The authors had not set out to explore this
issue, and, as a consequence, mention this finding only in passing, but the results of their
study show that both the managers and workers in smaller firms tend to interact with each
other in complex ways that mimic familial relationships. This hints that, within the larger
logic of the market, local definitions of things like “family” are pervasive, and the
possibility of those local definitions shaping reactions to macro-level logics not only
exists, but may be likely. As with the findings of Delbridge and Edwards (2013), this
approach to logic definition adds support to Lounsbury’s central insight that institutional
logics do not exist in a vacuum, but rather influence each other in recursive ways (2007).
Hybrid Logics
Not all organizations are characterized by a single institutional logic (Besharov &
Smith, 2014). Consequently, organizational theorists have responded to the idea of
multiple logics existing simultaneously in a single organization in a variety of ways,
largely falling into three main camps. The first camp, often referred to as the “hostile

5
By “family logic,” the authors mean a set of principles that might bind a family together
– love, loyalty, etc. – in a way that would be different from the principles that would bind
together another kind of group. Similarly, by “state logic,” the authors are referring to
the guiding principles of the modern, bureaucratic nation-state.
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20
worlds” approach, holds that when multiple logics compete in an organization, the logic
that is most-applicable to the organizational context will eventually come to dominate
and eliminate other, weaker logics (Haveman & Rao, 2006; Kuttner, 1997). The second
camp suggests that competing logics will, over time, blend together to create a new logic
that draws on elements of the older, more distinct logics (Rao, Monin, & Durand, 2003;
Stark, 1996). The third camp strikes a balance between the other two: that of logical
coexistence. Here, logics can exist together in an organization, and, while the logics may
be in conflict, they remain distinct and collectively inform the behavior of organizational
actors (Lamont & Molnar, 2002). However, as Murray (2010) observed, the idea of
coexistence largely ignores the problems that can arise when these distinct, coexisting
logics overlap.
In her extension of these three points of view, Murray (2010) investigated what
she called the “critical moment” (p. 341) when a group of academic geneticists
encountered the commercial implications of patents that they collectively held. She
found that the academic/scientific logic that prevailed in the geneticists’ lab remained
strong even as it collided with the commercial/market logic that informed the group’s
patent-related transactions. As a result, a hybrid logic emerged for the geneticists that
served to strengthen both the scientists’ commitment to the world of pure research and
their desire to be paid for the work they had completed.
But not all logic conflicts result in the production of a hybridized reality. In many
contexts, organizational actors experience conflicting logics in a stable way, with some
logics guiding one set of decisions and other logics guiding a different set; it is to this
literature that I now turn.
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21
Distinct Logics Operating Side-by-Side
Not all organizations comprising multiple logics find ways to blend those logics
together. Some organizations find ways to accommodate multiple logics simultaneously,
turning the competition – or peaceful coexistence – between or among multiple logics to
their strategic advantage (Reay & Hinings, 2009).
Often, these coexisting logics are dictated by organizational missions (Battilana &
Dorado, 2010; Binder, 2007). Organizations which are bound by market forces but which
must also be stewards of the public good are particularly likely to exist in multiple logics
simultaneously (Binder, 2007). When private firms enter into contracts with public
schools, they become part of a public system; schools and their stakeholders trust these
firms to act in the best interests of children (Acemoglu, Kremer, & Mian, 2008; Cibulka,
2000), even though that approach to managerial stewardship is often foreign to the firms’
executive team (Campbell, 2007; Weidenbaum, 1986). This balance is central to the case
of inBloom, an organization whose managers were seemingly unaware that the need to
balance market and community logics was a core part of doing business with public
schools.
The Fertile Ground of Healthcare Organizations
Healthcare workers and the organizations which employ them provide instructive
examples of the ways in which two diametrically opposed logics can combine in
surprising ways. Hospitals – which are often owned and operated by for-profit firms –
must carefully balance the need to secure returns for their investors against the desire to
provide the care necessary to keep patients healthy. The healthcare industry is constantly
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22
faced with a stark moral question: whether or not to provide care to a person who is
unable to pay for it (McKinney et al., 1990; Wanza, 2000).
In 2005, Dunn and Jones explored this issue in their study of medical education
logics. Healthcare workers must navigate the competing logics of organizational
efficiency and attentive patient care. Hospitals are businesses tasked not only with curing
the sick, but also with making space for new clients at a constant rate in order to
maximize profits for institutional investors. In this sense, healthcare workers are like
professionals in every other (potentially) altruistic field: they pursue a career in
healthcare because they want to help people. What happens when the desire to care for a
patient comes up against the financial needs of the hospital? Along those same lines,
what happens when the desire to care for patients conflicts with the common practice of
interacting with patients as impersonal representatives of medical science? Dunn and
Jones (2005) found that socializing workers in this sector into the multiple logics of their
workplaces begins in medical school, and that the guiding philosophy of each of the
schools they studied had a significant impact on the ways that medical professionals
navigated conflicting logics once they found themselves in the workplace.
Staying within the treacherous world of healthcare organizations, Heimer (1999)
explored the ways in which conflicting laws are able to shape the behavior of
organizational actors. Rather than referring to the ways of thinking that govern contested
organizational terrain as “conflicting logics,” Heimer labels these tensions “rival
normative systems” (p. 18). The difference in word choice between “logics” and
“normative systems” is important to note: the former implies some degree of cognitive
action, while the latter implies prescribed behaviors. This may seem like a semantic
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difference, but as Heimer further develops her argument – that some kinds of laws are
better-suited to governing the behavior of institutional agents than others – it becomes
clear that behavior is much more central to her view of organizations than is thinking. In
her framework, organizational agents use the laws as “tools” to take control over the
various aspects of healthcare in a neo-natal intensive care unit.
A Consideration of the Institutional Logics Perspective
The institutional logics perspective, as developed by Friedland and Alford (1991)
and refined by Thornton and Ocasio (2008) and Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury
(2012), has a good deal of explanatory power. Like other behavioral theories, however, it
has both strengths and weaknesses, and it has been extensively critiqued (e.g. Blatter,
2003; Kostova, Roth, & Dacin, 2008).
The primary strength of the perspective is that it grounds analyses in a concrete
context. Friedland and Alford’s (1991) central insight was that organizational actors not
only exist and behave within their organizations; they also exist and behave within larger,
societal structures that they called “institutions.” This insight was a powerful one,
because it suggested to future researchers that the behavior of individuals within systems
can be at least partly understood in terms of what exists outside those systems.
The systems that Friedland and Alford laid out in 1991, and those that Thornton,
Ocasio, and Lounsbury added in 2012, were specifically rooted in a Western context.
Capitalist markets (rather than markets in general), Christianity (rather than religion in
general), and the nuclear family (rather than family in general) specifically are constructs
that were not only created in the West, but that also primarily exist in the West. The
institutional logics perspective would be stronger and have more explanatory power if the
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construct was expanded to be more inclusive, particularly with respect to business
practices that come from non-Western traditions.
This critique gives rise to another, namely that the construct is vague. The
institutional logics perspective draws a great deal of power from its framing as a sort of
analytical gestalt. It is a totalizing framework in the tradition of thinkers like Bourdieu
and Parsons; the theory explains everything, and, by so doing, also explains nothing.
Freidland and Alford’s definition of logic as “a set of material practices, symbols, and
constructions” (1991, p. 248) makes it difficult to see where “logic” differs from
“culture.” Likewise, Thornton and Ocasio defined institutional logics as “the socially
constructed, historical patterns of material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and
rules by which individuals produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organize
time and space, and provide meaning to their social reality” (1999, p. 804). If
institutional logic is just another way of understanding culture, then theorists in this area
have contributed very little to the conversation.
However, the extent to which research in this area has focused on the context in
which behavior occurs – and the extent to which extra-organizational factors can explain
that behavior – makes it a useful tool for inquiry. I argue that inBloom’s managers failed
to see that their software platform, with its market-driven development and deployment,
came into direct conflict with the community-driven values of education activists until it
was too late to adjust their messaging strategies. Whether or not inBloom’s product
actually did constitute a violation of student privacy, as the activists maintained, became
increasingly irrelevant as time wore on, because the market logic which constrained and
dictated the behaviors of inBloom’s managers made it difficult for them to fully
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comprehend the public’s reaction to their product. The managers’ enactment Thornton &
Ocasio’s logic of capitalist markets (2008) made inBloom’s failure inevitable. But what
kinds of behavior does market logic dictate? It is to this question that I now turn.
Corporate Governance as an Enactment of Institutional Logics
The behavior of managerial board members has been extensively researched in
the management scholarship community. The ways board members act and the
relationships that develop among them have lasting effects on the performance of the
organizations they lead (e.g. Hillman & Dalziel, 2003; March & Sutton, 1997); the
difficulty in mapping and predicting these behaviors creates an opportunity for a wide
variety of empirical investigations. Scholarship in this area largely revolves around the
relationship between the decisions made by board-members acting in their managerial
capacity and the needs or desires of outside stakeholders – principally shareholders, but
also employees, clients, and governmental agencies – as they relate to firm performance
(e.g. Carpenter Galetkanycz, & Sanders, 2004; Yue, 2012).
Although a general theory of board members’ behaviors and the impacts these
behaviors have on organizational outcomes has yet to emerge in either the management
or education literatures, scholarship surrounding board behavior has nevertheless
produced a number of key insights into the ways that governing boards function. I will
first explore the world of corporate boards-of-directors, focusing on the composition of
these boards, and on the relationships between owners and managers. I will then discuss
the commonalities between the extant perspectives on corporate boards before moving on
to an examination of the ways that education scholars have conceptualized board-related
issues of governance and privatization.
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Corporate Boards
Private-sector firms are often governed by a group of people selected by the
firm’s shareholders or investors to manage the firm on their behalf; this group is
collectively referred to as a “board of directors.” The separation of the owners from the
decisions that inform the daily workings of a firm creates dynamic tension and can be a
source of conflict between what the owners want and what the managers judge as
important to the future of the firm. Consequently, the composition of boards-of-directors
– both demographically and ideologically – becomes an important variable in the
determination of firm performance (March & Sutton, 1997; Monks & Minow, 1991,
1996).
In 1984, Hambrick and Mason developed a perspective centered on the idea that
the board members’ backgrounds helped to determine the direction a firm will take.
Drawing on the idea that strategic choices are limited by the ability of individuals to
imagine possibly solutions, Hambrick and Mason suggested that board members’
“experience in some functional area” of firm management would, in part, inform the
decisions that board members would make (p. 199). They considered several other
factors as well, including age, education, socioeconomic background, personal economic
situation, and the heterogeneity of the member’s board, finally arriving at the conclusion
that all of these characteristics come together to exert a considerable influence on the
ways that board members act and, consequently, the decisions they make. Hambrick and
Mason’s further work in this area – as well as those, like Carpenter, Geletkanycz and
Sanders (2004), who refined the model – has become understood as the “upper echelons
perspective.”
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The upper echelons perspective has been employed in a variety of ways, most
notably as a way to correlate board composition with strategic decisions and firm
performance. Although he did not specifically align himself with the upper echelons
approach, Neil Fligstein (1987) nevertheless echoed the findings of Mason and Hambrick
(1984) when he examined the influence of chief executive officers (CEOs) with
backgrounds in finance on firm performance over time. Fligstein (1987) investigated the
organizational variables which led to the shift in preferred CEO background from
manufacturing to finance. He found that once organizational actors with a specific set of
background characteristics established themselves in a subset of firms in an industry, the
actors’ counterparts were able to use that fact to establish their own bases of power
within their own organizations. By so doing, Fligstein argued, individuals with
backgrounds in finance came to dominate the ranks of CEOs in the United States.
More recently, Smith et al. (1994) used the upper echelons perspective to link the
demographic features of firms’ top management teams indirectly with measures of firm
performance. Significantly, and perhaps most meaningfully in the context of this
proposal, they also investigated the social relationships between and among corporate
managers, integrating social-network-based analysis into their larger research design.
This is similar to the approach that I intend to use; through the integration of interviews
and website content analysis that seek to uncover the logics that underlie the decisions
they made, I will map the social milieu that inBloom executives and activists inhabited
and demonstrate how this environment worked in favor of (or opposed to) the aims of
inBloom’s board.
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Smith and colleagues (1994) found that the demographics of the board related to
firm performance by way of influencing the processes at work on the board, suggesting
that assembling a board of directors with heterogeneous background characteristics –
years of education, degrees held, institutions attended, etc. – had an overall positive
impact on firm outcomes and the types of decision-making processes the board would
use.
Along similar lines, Tian, Haleblian, and Rajagopalan (2010) explored how the
social networks of corporate boards influence the selection of new CEOs. They found
that stock prices were positively related to new CEO appointments made by boards with
greater stores of human and social capital. McDonald, Khanna, and Westphal (2008)
extended the idea of board demographics by examining the ways that top-level managers
leverage social resources outside the firm to help them make strategic decisions. They
found that governance strategies that take into account the problems predicted by agency
theory – a set of issues that I will discuss more fully below – can encourage managers to
seek advice from their social networks, ultimately improving firm performance across a
range of dimensions.
All of this work points to the idea that the composition of corporate boards makes
a difference in terms of ultimate firm performance, but research that focuses on the make-
up of boards rarely investigates the tensions that arise from the function of these boards,
regardless of how they are composed. Board members must act in the best interests of
investors and in the best interests of the firm itself; what counts as “best interest” is, in
part, dictated by the logic environment in which managers are enmeshed. Often, these
focal points of view are aligned, but just as often, they are opposed. InBloom’s failure is
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largely due to the inability of inBloom’s board and top executives to balance stakeholder
concerns against the concerns of its investors as inBloom’s software platform came
online (Horn, 2014). To more fully understand the tensions that arise from the function of
managerial boards like inBloom’s, I turn to a separate but related body of literature.
The Separation of Ownership and Control
Most small firms can be managed by their owners, but as the firm grows and
diversifies, the specialist knowledge necessary to manage its increasingly broad functions
often grows beyond the ability of the original owners to keep up. In these cases, the
functions of the firm related to its ownership – the raising of capital and sharing of profits
chief among them – become separated from the functions of the firm related to its
control. The owners hire specialists with the knowledge necessary to keep the firm
running smoothly, and trust those specialists to act in the firm’s best interests even as the
owners spend increasingly less time directly supervising the specialists. In this situation,
due to any number of reasons, the owners are unable to know with any certainty what
their specialist managers are doing, giving rise to what is commonly called the principal-
agent problem, and its accompanying theoretical framework, known as agency theory
(Eisenhardt, 1989; Fama & Jensen, 1983a, 1983b).
In abstract agency theory, the managers – referred to as agents – will always act in
their own self-interests unless their behaviors are constrained by clearly-worded contracts
and mutually-beneficial incentive structures (Eisenhardt, 1989). As Fama and Jensen
argued (1983a), contracts are not able to dispense with agency problems, because they
are not “costlessly written and enforced” (p. 327). That is, the creation of contracts by
owners – referred to as principals – comes with embedded trade-offs that can never be
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fully balanced. Principals and agents, therefore, are constantly in search of ways to
address this imbalance as they navigate the separation of ownership and control in large
firms.
Hillman and Dalziel (2003) used agency theory – along with resource-dependency
theory – to create what they considered to be a more complete picture of the relationship
between ownership and control in large firms. By re-conceptualizing Fama and Jensen’s
idea of “control” (1983a) as “monitoring,” Hillman and Dalziel (2003, p. 384) were able
to integrate both agency concerns and some of the social networking research done by
board-composition scholars like those discussed above. They argued that the social
capital embodied by the members of the board impact both the effectiveness of the
board’s monitoring functions and its ability to successfully distribute the firm’s resources.
Haynes and Hillman (2010) drew similar conclusions, but split their focus between the
social capital of the board and the extent of a CEO’s power within the firm. They found
that the board’s ability to enact strategic changes was constrained by the relative power of
the CEO, highlighting the possibility of intramural conflicts among the various agents
appointed by the principals in an organization.
The beliefs that owners hold about necessary courses of action to ensure the
continued viability of their firms often come into conflict with the beliefs held by their
agents. These conflicts – often either brought on by or as the result of organizational
culture or political processes – are not unique to the world of business; private industry
and public education share many of these managerial attributes, and it is to these
commonalities that I now turn.
Bridging the Gap Between Corporations and Education
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Mahoney, McGahan, and Pitelis (2009) noted the overlap between the
traditionally industry-based view held by strategic management scholars and researchers
involved in public policy. They suggested that, although the two communities rarely
interact with each other, integrating their bodies of literature could generate theories that
could be potentially much more powerful than either group could uncover on their own.
This approach had as its antecedent an essay written by Mahoney and McGahan in 2007,
in which the authors enjoined the strategic management community to look beyond what
they believed was a narrow view of what their discipline could do.
Management researchers conducting investigations within the context of the firm
have generated a wide variety of insights into the ways that boards of directors operate.
While these insights – agency theory and the impact of demographics chief among them
– might appear to have little bearing on the management of public education
organizations, there is in fact a great deal of commonality between the public and private
spheres. More to the point, the corporate board literature I have reviewed here is not only
greatly underutilized in the education research community, it is also deeply relevant to
top-level district managers in an era of increased focus on the private aggregation and
analysis of student data. There are two key areas of overlap that relate closely to this
proposal: the political behavior and processes undertaken by members of education and
corporate boards, and questions related to the locus of control of the boards.
Corporate board members and top-level school administrators who enter into
contracts with the firms that boards represent are tasked with similar responsibilities: they
must make decisions that will govern the future of their respective organizations while
balancing the needs of various organizational constituencies. The paths that these
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decisions take on the corporate side are often related to the backgrounds of the board
members (Hambrick, 1984), and a similar process is at work on school boards (Asen &
Gurke, 2014). Aside from demographic concerns, one key driver for the behavior of
board members is the political environment within which they operate (Asen & Gurke,
2014; Malen, 1994; Marsh, 2012; Reid & Toffel, 2009). Understanding these political
processes is essential to developing a meaningful understanding of how boards of all
kinds operate.
6

These types of political concerns were also explored by Ocasio and Kim in 1999,
with their work on the circulation of top-level corporate managers. Here, the overlap
between corporate behavior and education behavior lies in the nature of the political
struggle for control of the organization. Ocasio and Kim suggested that managerial
candidates in the upper echelons of corporate control compete largely based on the
visions they have for the future of the organizations they seek to lead. Managers of
education organizations also compete with each other based on vision (Wohlstetter,
Smyer, & Mohrman, 1994), although the nature of education and corporate visions are
not necessarily related to each other.
The idea of vision-based competition leads directly to the commonalities shared
by education and corporate boards surrounding questions of control. Agency theory as
discussed by Eisenhardt (1989) and extended by Fama and Jensen (1983a; 1983b), is
equally applicable to education contexts as it is to those of private industry. The question
of control on school boards is complicated by the fact that “ownership” of public schools

6
In this study, I am primarily concerned with corporate board behavior and its impact on
education organizations, but because corporate boards and school boards serve similar
functions, it seemed prudent to mention them in the context of an education policy
dissertation.
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33
is a much more ambiguous concept than the straightforward relationship between
shareholders and their investment targets. Still, voters and other groups of stakeholders
act as principals who “hire” school boards to manage their organizations. Principal-agent
problems abound in places where the electorate pays little attention to the activities of
school boards, most notably in places like Detroit (Kirst, 2003) and New Orleans
(Holley-Walker, 2007)
7
.
School Boards and Privatization
Having amassed and consolidated their political and social power, the managers
of education organizations are tasked with making a wide variety of decisions for their
districts and schools. As the public school system has become increasingly privatized
over the last half-century (Levin, 1999), one key way in which boards have exercised
their power has been to award instructional-support contracts to private vendors and to
manage the relationship between these vendors and the schools in which they operate
(Burch, 2009). The central concern of my dissertation will be to examine both how the
decisions made on corporate boards ultimately influence the public education system via
the case of inBloom.
Vendor selection. Interestingly, much of the literature surrounding the issue of
vendor selection by school boards is concerned with corruption. School districts are
usually required by law to initiate a transparent competitive bidding process when
selecting a vendor for any kind of service. As with any contracting process, accusations

7
The school boards in both of these cities have been (and, in Detroit’s case, continue to
be) massively corrupt, with board members embezzling large sums of money and
extensively granting no-bid contracts to friends and relatives. Because citizen-agents are
unable (or unwilling) to provide close supervision of their agents on the school board in
these districts, vast sums of taxpayer money have been wasted.
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of nepotism and corruption abound (McFadden, 2000), largely due to the widespread
practice of creating requests-for-proposals so narrow that only one vendor can reasonably
be expected to fill the contract (Mullan, 2012). In this sense, education services firms are
not actually competing with each other for market share so much as occupying territory
by offering products that their existing clients will be most likely to buy (Boser, 2013).
The upside of this behavior for stakeholders is that districts are able to develop trust-
based relationships with vendors over time; if the older products that a district has been
using are meeting its needs, newer products likely will as well (Burch, LaFave, & Good,
2015).
This benefit is borne out by research indicating that school boards and district
central office administrators are increasingly making contracting decisions based on
evidence that comes from student achievement and the larger research community
(Penuel & Coburn, 2014). This body of literature is an emerging one, with researchers
taking a more intense interest in this approach to decision-making as more and more data
becomes available to school districts (McDonnell & Weatherford, 2013; Penuel &
Coburn, 2014). School boards and other top-level district managers use the evidence
generated by the research community to make decisions about instructional-support
vendors and other managerial tasks, although the paths they take to make these evidence-
based decisions can be less than straightforward (Asen & Gurke, 2014; Coburn, Toure, &
Yamashita, 2009; Honig, Venkateswaran, McNeil, & Twitchell, 2014; Penuel & Coburn,
2014).
Managing relationships between districts and vendors. Having used research
evidence more-or-less effectively to select vendors to supply instructional support, school
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boards must then manage the new (or renewed) relationship. Similar political processes
are at work when boards manage these relationships (Coburn, Toure, & Yamashita, 2009;
Malen & Ogawa, 1988), and board demographics and social networks remain central to
the interactions between board members and vendor representatives (Asen & Gurke,
2014; McDonald, Khanna, & Westphal, 2008).
The Fiduciary Function of Boards of Directors
The central function of a corporate board of directors is its fiduciary duty to the
firm. Individual members of the board are fiduciaries – people who hold the firm in trust
– and their duty in that capacity is to safeguard the interests of the firm. On the surface,
this duty seems straightforward: the board must do its level best to ensure the continued
existence of the firm. In practice, however, this duty can be ambiguous and contingent
on cultural context and legal or regulatory concerns (Fiss & Zajac, 2004; Meyer &
Höllerer, 2010). In discharging their fiduciary duty, board members must ask themselves
what the interests of the firm are, and how best to protect those interests (Kennedy &
Fiss, 2009).
Shareholders vs. stakeholders. In the United States, the “best interests” of the
firm are held to be those practices which increase a firm’s profitability and therefore its
value to shareholders (Myer & Höllerer, 2010). Because the firm’s survival is contingent
on its profitability, it is the duty of board members to maximize this profitability with a
view towards serving the shareholders, to whom they owe their position on the board.
This view, called the “shareholder value perspective” is particularly market-oriented, and
primarily concerned with the individual benefits that can accrue to those who own stock
in a publicly-held corporation.
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Elsewhere in the world, particularly in Western Europe, the “best interests” of the
firm are seen in a somewhat different light. Called the “stakeholder value perspective,”
this alternate view of fiduciary duty holds that the best interests of a firm are embodied
by the various constituencies that are impacted by the firm (Letza, Sun, & Kirkbride,
2004; Meyer & Höllerer, 2010). Shareholders, with their more narrow focus on value,
are only one constituency among many; employees, clients, and even the board members
themselves also represent groups whose needs must be met in order to safeguard a firm’s
survivability.
Legal scholars have developed a variety of tools to define and constrain the
behavior of boards with respect to their fiduciary duty (e.g. Fairfax, 2005; Lin, 1993).
From a legal perspective, boards of directors are not required to maximize either
shareholder or stakeholder value (Stout, 2013), but, because they serve at the behest of
their firm’s shareholders, individual members may feel a moral or social responsibility to
maximize both value and profits (Johnson, Daily, & Ellstrand, 1996), a reality that
supports the shareholder value perspective. The stakeholder view is supported by the fact
that board members are legally obligated to safeguard the assets of a firm (Morck,
Shliefer, & Vishny, 1988; Stout, 2003), a situation which could easily benefit a firm’s
stakeholders at the expense of its shareholders (e.g. Varallo & Finkelstein, 1992).
The shareholder/stakeholder tension in the education services industry.
Previous research investigating the tensions that exist between the shareholder and
stakeholder views of the fiduciary duty of corporate board members has demonstrated
that this conflict can be linked to a clash of institutional logics (e.g. Hillman & Keim,
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37
2001; Lok, 2010; Ogden & Watson, 1999). The education services industry provides a
useful context in which to explore this tension.
As the core functions of public schooling have become increasingly privatized
over the last quarter-century, a vibrant market for private firms supplying education
services has sprung up (Burch, 2009). While some of these firms are privately held, most
of them are owned by public shareholders, and as such are just as susceptible to the
shareholder value perspective as any other kind of firm. However, because of the nature
of the products and services provided by these firms – the printing of textbooks, the
provision of professional development for teachers, and the development of digital
instructional support products, to name a few – they are also uniquely susceptible to the
stakeholder view. When public school districts purchase products from these firms or
avail themselves of the services on offer, they do so in their capacity as holders of the
public’s trust. The decisions made by districts surrounding the products they choose cast
a very long shadow; it is in the best interest of the boards of education services firms to
ensure that the goals of public schools and their plans for the future of their firms are
aligned.
This tension can be an important driver of policy and student achievement. It
may be in the shareholders’ best interest for the firm to develop products quickly, in order
to enjoy the strategic advantages that come with being a “first mover.” However, these
quickly-developed products, while profitable in the short term, might not provide long-
term benefits to either students or the education system as a whole. The quest for ever-
increasing profits that is driven by the shareholder value view has led, in some cases, to
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firms interacting with education policymakers in ways which have proven to be less-
beneficial to public education’s stakeholders.
The Quality of the Extant Literature
Like any body of work, the literature that I have reviewed here has strengths and
weaknesses. An significant strength of scholarship in the organizational management and
logics area is that the constructs are well-established. The work of Friedland and Alford
(1991) was path-breaking, but the ideas on which they drew have a long history in
organizational research. The most important element of the existing literature on
institutional logics is that it is mature; the knowledge base is both well-established and
robust. The literature on corporate board behavior is likewise mature, with research in
that area stretching back into the 1950s and before. The ways that corporate directors act
when tasked with managing a firm have been well-documented and firmly understood.
Where both of these constructs lack, however, is in their application to the private
firms that contract with public education agencies. As I will show in Chapter 4, the
education services market and other segments that are served by not-for-profit enterprise
are special. This means that firms operating in this space are uniquely susceptible to logic
conflicts, and are often best-served by developing locally-defined hybrid logics that allow
them to work more closely with the stakeholders which drive markets like the one for
education services.
Education researchers have only just begun to “look inside” the ways that the
managers of private firms make political decisions that impact the innovation of
instructional practice and students’ experiences at school. This study represents one way
to address this literature’s primary application to education firms: the investigation of the
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ways that institutional logics and board behavior come together to impact the public
education system.
Conclusion to Chapter II
So what happens when the desire to maximize profits for shareholders collides
with the need to create products that satisfy stakeholders? What if the “best” product for
schools is not the one which stands to deliver the highest return on investment? And how
do board members navigate their fiduciary duty under such conditions?
Based on the literature reviewed here, it seems reasonable to suggest that
executives working for a profit-seeking firm that has chosen to align itself with the
interests of children might find themselves navigating a unique logical conflict. Like
many contemporary organizations, education services firms likely encompass a wide
variety of logics that may or may not be compatible with each other or with the mission
of the organization. But unlike executives working in firms servicing other client bases,
the top-level management of education services firms must navigate an additional set of
conflicting logics that casts its long shadow over other intra-organizational logic
conflicts: how to balance the need to satisfy investors with their stewardship of the
future’s educated class. In the following section, I will develop a series of specific
questions aimed at coming to a more complete understanding of this dilemma in the
context of an organizational case study of the private data management firm inBloom.

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CHAPTER III
Methods

In the previous two chapters, I have offered both a description of the “data
problem,” and a review of the literature describing the managerial behavior of top-level
executives. In this third chapter, I will concretely describe the study that I conducted: a
qualitative, instrumental case study of the failed student data management firm inBloom.
First, I will discuss inBloom itself, providing a justification for the case and
offering some preliminary thoughts on what I hope will be the larger implications of my
work. Then, I will specifically describe the methods that I propose, including a list of
proposed research questions, types of data I propose to collect, and the strategies I will
use to collect and analyze the data. Finally, I will conclude this proposal with a timeline
for completion and defense of the dissertation.
The Rise and Fall of inBloom
As I have previously suggested, the generation, analysis, storage, and
communication of student data has been of growing concern to students over the last
quarter-century. Recent advances in technology – most notably the development of large-
scale, “cloud”-based applications – have made it possible for schools to outsource many
of the data functions that they had previously struggled to perform with in-house
personnel. Like other forms of educational privatization, the market for cloud-based data
management has seen a remarkable expansion in recent years, with small startups like
Knewton and Clever transforming themselves into major players on an accelerated
timeline.
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InBloom was different. Rather than following the familiar tech-startup trajectory
of being founded by “a couple of guys messing around in a garage”
8
, inBloom’s ultimate
form grew out of a series of conversations among some of the most influential (and well-
funded) people in the education technology market (Woolridge, 2014). In 2011, a large
group of educators, entrepreneurs, and state-level government officials formed an
organization called the Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC) (inBloom, n.d.). The
mission of SLC was simple: to “create a resource that better allows teachers to provide
students with learning experiences that meet them where they are, engage them deeply,
and let them progress at a pace that meets their individual needs” (inBloom, n.d., “about
inBloom”).
In order to do this, SLC created a complex digital application whose sole purpose
was to integrate all of the file formats being used in the public education system
(inBloom, n.d.). The development of this technology was exceptionally costly – both in
financial and human terms – so the original members of the SLC recruited a six-member
advisory board tasked with securing funding for the future of the collaborative.
These six people were remarkably well-connected, and represented some of the
biggest organizations involved in education technology at the time:
• Michael Horn, Executive Director of the Innosight Institute and prolific
proponent of entrepreneurial involvement in public education.
• Michael Lomax, President and CEO of the United Negro College Fund.

8
This Silicon Valley “creation myth” stems from the way that the founders of Hewlett-
Packard described their firm’s humble beginnings. Other digital technology giants –
Apple and Microsoft chief among them – have used similar stories to mythologize their
early days. For a somewhat cynical view of these myths, see Badalamenti, 2014, or, for a
more functional view, see Kenney, 2000.
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• David Riley, President of the Alembic Foundation. The Alembic Foundation is a
group dedicated primarily to the idea of “disruptive innovation” in the education
market.
• Andrew Rotherman, co-founder and partner, Bellwether Education Partners, an
education technology consulting group.
• Cheryl Vedoe, President and CEO, Apex Learning, a firm which develops and
provides digital instruction tools.
• Randi Weingarten, President, American Federation of Teachers.
While the board included Michael Lomax and Randi Weingarten, their main function was
to serve as representatives of the higher education and K-12 systems respectively; the
other four board members were more central to the development and deployment of
SLC’s product (Simon, 2014).
Over a period of six months, board members successfully secured $100 million in
grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching, making SLC the best-funded student data organization in the
history of the market. In order to deploy their data management product in schools, SLC
re-branded itself as a non-profit organization called inBloom in 2013. In March of that
year, inBloom formally debuted at an exclusive reception held at SXSWEdu conference
in Austin, Texas.
In addition to its high-profile re-branding, inBloom traded in its six-member
advisory board for a more traditional corporate governance structure: a chief executive
officer (CEO), a chief product officer (CPO), and an eight-member board of directors.
Interestingly, only one member of SLC’s advisory board made the transition to
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inBloom’s board of directors: prominent education reformer Michael Horn. The new
board included a token educator named Peggy Brookins; the other seven members were
from more traditional board-member backgrounds. Three of the remaining six members
were CEOs, two of them represented inBloom’s philanthropic investors, and one of them
was a former politician.
InBloom leveraged its new organizational form and the connections of its board
members to secure contracts with schools in Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, and, most
notably, the entire public education system in the state of New York. Although my
preliminary analysis has not made it clear exactly why these states were inBloom’s early
adopters, it seems reasonable to posit that inBloom was ideally positioned to work with
states like Massachusetts, with its historical reputation for high-quality instruction, and
New York, with its history of systemic experimentation. The size of inBloom’s
endowment and its rapid eclipsing of smaller firms working in the same market space
drew substantial attention from members of the press and concerned groups of parents.
Some groups were concerned about the fact that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation
had been involved in developing inBloom’s data management platform, and other were
concerned about what the adoption of inBloom’s products meant for students enrolled in
inBloom’s partner schools, but the main concern that emerged in the spring and summer
of 2013 was centered around student privacy and the security of inBloom’s data (Simon,
2014; Strauss, 2013).
The Involvement of Diane Ravitch and Leonie Haimson
On April 7, 2013, politician-turned-activist Diane Ravitch published a link to
inBloom’s “tools for developers” website on her blog. The page to which she linked
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listed over four hundred variables that inBloom was able to track for their client districts.
While many of these data fields were relatively innocuous (e.g. students’ names,
addresses, and attendance records), others were more invasive (e.g. immigration status,
data related to 504 plans, and parent occupations) (inBloom, n.d.). Ravitch labeled
inBloom’s collection of these types of data “identity theft,” and called for “a class action
lawsuit to protect students [sic] privacy” (Ravitch, 2013a).
The call was taken up by parent activist Leonie Haimson, whose organization,
Class Size Matters, had already been conducting an anti-inBloom campaign in New York
state that centered around student privacy issues (Class Size Matters, n.d.). Together,
Ravitch and Haimson brought significant pressure to bear against inBloom on both the
district and state level in New York, eventually leading to New York’s legislature
including a provision in its 2014-2015 budget that prohibited schools from sharing data
with inBloom or its successors.
InBloom Wilts, the Industry Shrugs
District officials and parent groups around the country had been paying close
attention to what Ravitch and Haimson were able to accomplish in New York. When the
policy environment shifted decisively against inBloom, clients across the United States
cancelled their contracts with inBloom. With no districts to service, inBloom formally
ceased operations on April 24, 2014.
It is interesting to note that while inBloom is no longer a player in the student data
market, many firms doing the same work as inBloom have continued to enter into data-
management contracts with public school districts. Student privacy advocacy groups won
the battle against inBloom, but are in the long, slow process of losing the war against
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sharing student data with private firms. The advantages that accrue to educational
organizations through the analysis of both individual student data and large-scale
aggregated student data – just-in-time instructional interventions for students, the
mapping of long-term achievement trends, etc. – are too great for education agencies to
walk back their commitment to the trend. While both Ravitch and Haimson continue to
campaign against the private sector’s involvement in this market (Ravitch, 2015),
education technology startups both old and new have continued to gain market share and
policy relevance. At this year’s ASU+GSV Summit – an annual “must-attend” event for
entrepreneurs operating in the education technology space – fifty-seven student data
management startups made pitches for Series A funding, and another twenty-two
established student data vendors presented on their products and services. At a corporate
event with two hundred thirty-six vendors making presentation, the presence of seventy-
nine student data companies represents a significant commitment to this type of
contracting, and anecdotal evidence of the direction in which education technology firms
are headed.
Why inBloom?
A case study of inBloom presents a unique opportunity to make a substantive
contribution to the literature on school privatization and increase the research
community’s understanding of how private firms operate in public spaces. InBloom’s
story is significant in two central ways. From a management perspective, inBloom’s
high-profile founding, early success, messaging missteps, and eventual collapse is a rich
case from which to draw a wide variety of conclusions. How could a firm with so much
momentum flame out so quickly? How is it possible that so many experienced education
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technology entrepreneurs failed to grasp the depth of concern held by parent groups until
it was too late to change?
From an education policy perspective, inBloom’s unique organizational form and
drastic overreach provides insight into both the extent to which neoliberal thinking has
permeated education reform circles, and the power of outside stakeholder groups to
agitate successfully for change. The tension embodied in these two logics – responding to
the will of the market versus responding to the will of the people – is central to the most
heated education policy debates happening in the United States at present. In this way,
coming to a more complete understanding of inBloom’s story is a way of understanding
more precisely the tensions underpinning our current education policy conversation.
Why a case study?
I conducted a qualitative, instrumental case study of inBloom’s rise and fall. Stake
(2000) defines the object of a case study – its “case” – as “a complex entity operating
within a number of contexts” and “a contenation of domains” (p. 439-440). When it was
operational, inBloom was indeed a complex entity, over time comprising multiple
organizational forms and management structures. InBloom also existed within social,
political, educational, and technological contexts, making it a fertile ground for case
study inquiry.
Stake (1995) also points out that not all case studies are qualitative; the medical
field, for example, is full of statistical case studies to help physicians understand
treatment protocols and regimens. The case study I conducted, however, was qualitative.
While it would be possible to examine inBloom’s story from a quantitative perspective, I
argue that a full examination and explication of the overlapping contexts and stakeholder
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interests that brought about inBloom’s failure could only be accomplished using
qualitative methods. Denzin and Lincoln (2000) suggest that qualitative researchers
“study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or interpret,
phenomena in terms of the meanings that people bring to them” (p. 3). A key part of my
research design involves understanding the meaning that key actors in inBloom’s story
have made from what happened. Consequently, I am interested in another of Denzin and
Lincoln’s contention: that qualitative research describes “routine and problematic
moments and meanings in individuals’ lives” (p. 3-4).
Finally, the qualitative case study that I conducted was instrumental. Stake (1995)
makes a distinction between instrumental and intrinsic case studies. Intrinsic cases are
unremarkable not because of their ability to explain a larger issue or trend, but rather
because the case is limited in scope by its own unremarkableness. In contrast,
instrumental cases are representative of larger trends and large-scale societal movements.
InBloom’s instrumental case provides insights into a number of larger trends, including
education privatization, the increased use of digital technology to support instruction in
schools, and the macro-scale neoliberal project to globalize trade in the 21
st
century.
A case of what? InBloom is first and foremost a case of a business that failed due
to changes in the social and political contexts that gave rise to it in the first place. While
it would be tempting to think that inBloom was doomed from the outset, that is very
much not the case. The people who founded inBloom and the education officials who
chose to enter into contracts with them likely did not expect to encounter any resistance
from stakeholders; if the data was already there, what harm could there be in bringing it
all together under one roof? In this sense, inBloom is a case of mismanaged expectations,
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48
with executives fundamentally misunderstanding the reaction that stakeholders would
have to their products.
On a more conceptual level, inBloom is an excellent example of the rapidly-
widening divide between the direction in which the public education system is going and
the path that (some) parents and student advocacy groups would prefer to see pursued. As
the dust settles from inBloom’s failure, it becomes easier to see that data management
firms are certainly still going to exist in the education technology market. What inBloom
changed is the scope of these firms in the near-term. In this sense, the case of inBloom
can provide valuable lessons to the education technology community on what not to do.
Research Questions
In examining the issues presented by inBloom as a case, I was guided by a set of
questions
9
that deal with the social and policy contexts that existed around inBloom, the
internal dynamics of inBloom’s top management, and the strategies that were employed
by advocacy groups to “defeat” inBloom.
• RQ1 (Policy Context): How did inBloom leverage policy to gain a competitive
advantage in the student data market?
o RQ1.1: What (if any) dynamics or relationships existed within the top
management team of inBloom that allowed them to leverage policy?
o RQ1.2: How did policy eventually shift against inBloom? Why?
o RQ1.3: Who were the key actors both within and outside inBloom who
contributed to the initial context that allowed inBloom to come to

9
For a comparison of how each question relates to the various elements of my conceptual
framework, see Appendix A.
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prominence, and why did these actors come together? What factors
contributed to their collaboration?
• RQ2 (Social Context): How did inBloom interact, both internally on the executive
team and corporately through messaging, with the social environment to initially
succeed and then fail?
o RQ2.1: How did SLC/inBloom present itself to institutional actors in order
to gain its “series A” funding from Gates and Carnegie?
o RQ2.2: What was the “story” that inBloom representatives told
policymakers, stakeholders, and potential clients? How (if at all) did this
story change over time? Who was tasked with “telling” this story and
why?
o RQ2.3: What was the “story” that activists told policymakers,
stakeholders, and contract-holders? How (if at all) did this story change
over time? Why?
• RQ3 (inBloom Management): Who were the executive decision-makers at
inBloom, what were their backgrounds, and where did they come from?
o RQ3.1: What (if any) interlocks – in terms of relationships that existed due
to serving on the boards of other organizations – existed between
executives at inBloom and other firms in the student data management
sector? With other firms in education technology generally? With firms
outside the industry?
o RQ3.2: How (if at all) did the backgrounds of the top leadership team
impact decision-making at inBloom? What (if any) factions existed on the
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board and/or in the c-suite? What did those factions mean? How did they
come to exist?
o RQ3.3: What drove the decision-making at inBloom? What logics did
executives bring to bear on inBloom’s strategic positioning?
• RQ4 (Advocates and Activists): Who were the leaders of the movement against
inBloom, what were their backgrounds, and where did they come from?
o RQ4.1: What (if any) other movements or groups were the key activist
actors members of? For what (if any) other causes did they advocate?
o RQ4.2: How did the activists leverage inBloom’s strategic positioning and
messaging to change the political and social environment?
o RQ4.3: What strategies did the key players use? Was there unity in the
movement? Why (if at all) was there unity or disunity?
o RQ4.4: What (if any) logics informed the organization and execution of
the advocates’ agenda?
• RQ5: What happened to inBloom?
o RQ5.1: In what ways was inBloom’s aggressive expansion into the student
data management market similar to or different from other firms in the
same market?
o RQ5.2: How did inBloom balance the tension between creating strong
protections for student data against its rapid expansion strategy? How did
this “balancing act” go wrong?
o RQ5.3: How do the differing perspectives of the actors in inBloom’s story
inform their views of “what happened?”
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51
• RQ6: What can be learned from inBloom’s rise and fall?
o RQ6.1: What (if any) other issues underpinned inBloom's formation and
dissolution? How (if at all) were these other issues reported in both the
formal press and inside the activist community? Why?
o RQ6.2: How did inBloom executives first build confidence in its products
in order to entice investors? How was that confidence eroded when the
tide turned?
o RQ6.3: How did leaders and implementers see inBloom balance the needs
of investors/funders against the needs of stakeholders, and what factors
contributed to the balance skewing first one way and then the other?
Taken as a group, the answers to these questions built on the literature related to
the privatization of public education and corporate board behavior. RQs 1-3 seek to
explore the ways that inBloom’s directors shaped the landscape in which their firm
operated. While the broad involvement of private firms in public education has been
well-researched over the last twenty-five years (e.g. Burch, 2009; Levin, 1999), the ways
that corporate boards directly influence education policy through the actions of the firms
they manage has received much less attention. This issue has been extensively explored
in a management context (e.g. Smith, et al., 1994), but very rarely by education
researchers.
With RQs 4-6, I approach the institutional logics framework that underpins the
study. By examining both the interlocks on inBloom’s board and the “interlocks” in the
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52
activist community, I build on the literature on conflicting institutional logics
10
. Again,
the idea of conflicting logics is well-understood in the management community (e.g.
Murray, 2010), but education researchers have paid very little attention to this construct.
This is unfortunate, because, as I argue, the large-scale misunderstandings that existed
around inBloom’s business model came down to conflicting logics. By showing how
different, conflicting logics constrained the terms of the debate in inBloom’s case, I have
also shed light on other education policy and reform debates.
Data
Case studies are characterized by the researcher drawing on multiple sources of
data to create a rich and detailed understanding of the reality of the case as experienced
by participants in the study (Stake, 1995). Bringing together conflicting viewpoints and
disparate methods of analysis – what Levi-Strauss referred to as bricolage (1974) – is a
key element of case study research as well as the larger enterprise of qualitative research
(Denzin & Lincoln, 2000). To answer the questions I have posed above, I explored two
primary sources of data: texts written during inBloom’s rise and fall, and interviews with
key players in the inBloom story.
A note on Sampling
I used a purposive approach to selecting participants for the interview portion of
this dissertation, a strategy by which “particular settings, persons, or activities are
selected deliberately to provide information that is particularly relevant” to a qualitative

10
I use the term “interlocks” in two related ways here: the first is in the usual
management sense, meaning the web of relationships that exist because of the
multiplicity of boards that members sit on. The second way is as a less-usual term for
describing the relationships between/among activists and the interests they represent. In
both senses, the interlocks can be literal, personal relationships, or more ethereal
conceptual interlocks.
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study (Maxwell, 2013, p. 97). Starting with Merriam’s conceptualization of Internet
sources as documents available “in static form” (2009, p. 157), I developed a three-part
strategy for identifying key players in the case, an approach which takes Erickson’s
(1986) method of working from the outside of the case to its core. First, I used Google to
get a broad sense of what material existed on the Internet related to inBloom, and to
develop a boundary for the case (Miles & Huberman, 1994). Early search terms included
simple searches – “inBloom,” “inBloom failure,” etc. – but as I learned more about the
case, I refined the search terms. Second-round searches included more detailed searches –
“inBloom data student privacy failure” and “inBloom management board commentary,”
among others – which yielded more targeted results. I followed the links that these
searches provided to what I consider to be mostly tertiary sources. That is, material from
mainstream media websites and blogs which linked to secondary sources, the group of
sources which led to the second level of sampling.
Unlike tertiary sources – sources which link to secondary sources – secondary
sources link to primary sources. Because of the perceived legitimacy of websites which
link to primary documents (Skipton & Bail, 2014), these secondary sources formed the
largest category of sources by volume, at present including one hundred twenty-two
websites. It was at this stage that I was able to begin to see interview candidates emerge.
Michael Horn, for example, himself a member of inBloom’s board, wrote an extensive
post-mortem on forbes.com, a document which I consider to be a secondary source
because of its extensive linking to documents purposely generated by inBloom before its
collapse. At this second level, I also began to understand which documents in inBloom’s
library were key to contextualizing the debate that sprang up in these secondary sources,
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54
again guided by Merriam’s view of documents (2009, p. 139). One of these documents
was a database which gave education organizations over four hundred options for the
types of student data that inBloom could track on behalf of schools. This database was
linked to one hundred thirteen times by sites that I tracked, and, by using a simple
software tool called SEO SpyGlass to examine backlinks
11
, I was able to learn that the
page containing the database was the target of over one thousand incoming links
12
.
Finally, I moved on to primary documents – guides for software developers,
information on inBloom’s now-defunct website (accessed via web.archive.org), and
reports generated by organizations which were not accessed via links for other sources –
and looked for names which appeared more than twice. Many names from intra- and
extra-organizational actors appeared once or twice in the documents I reviewed, but as
this study is focused on managerial decision-making, I chose the generally-accepted
criterion of three mentions as the beginning of centrality for each actor (Bernard, 20120;
Palinkas, et al., 2015). As one might expect, InBloom’s CEO, Iwan Streichenberger, was
mentioned seventy-six times, indicating a high degree of centrality in the firm’s
operations. Peggy Brookins, one of two practitioner-representatives on inBloom’s board
also enjoyed a high degree of centrality with fifty-four mentions. Interestingly, Sharren
Bates, inBloom’s Chief Product Officer, was only mentioned thirteen times in the
documents I reviewed; certainly, her function on the board was central to the

11
“Backlinks” are links which come to a site from other sites. Tools that track backlinks
allow researchers and consumers to determine which sites link to which pages without
having to use a blunt instrument like Google.
12
The leaking of this database led Diane Ravitch to call for a class-action lawsuit against
inBloom in a post on her blog which, again by tracking backlinks, was linked to eight
hundred thirty-two times. I consider this blog post to be the “ignition point” where large-
scale resistance to inBloom’s business model began.
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55
development of inBloom’s products, but in terms of decision-making, she appears to have
been less central.
While inBloom provided a list of board members on its website, sourcing
interview participants in that manner lacked the methodological rigor that I required. By
taking a more active, in-depth approach to sourcing interview candidates and web
sources, I was able to determine which people and conversations merit a closer look, and
which ones can be examined less-closely. Using this process, I have been able to
construct two broad categories of interview participants: influencers and implementers.
Influencers made decisions on the supply side and/or made arguments about inBloom’s
products, while implementers existed on inBloom’s demand side. Once I begin analyzing
the data I collect, these two sampling categories (Miles & Huberman, 1994) will form the
initial basis of my coding scheme (Saldana, 2013).
By way of an example of the entire sampling process, one of the influencers is
named Richard Culatta, head of the Office of Education Technology at the federal
Department of Education. During my first exploratory round of research, I found a
website using the search terms “inBloom education+policy” which provided a brief
commentary on inBloom’s business model and which included a list of links to other
websites under the heading “for further reading.” One of these links led to a piece written
by an important secondary influencer, a journalist named Valerie Strauss. In the piece,
Strauss linked to a primary document from the Department of Education which laid out
best-practices guidelines for software developers operating in the student data space.
These guidelines appeared in a larger Department of Education report which credited
Richard Culatta as its primary author. Culatta never worked directly for inBloom, but, in
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his capacity as a promoter of digital technology’s many uses in education, he helped to
shape the environment in which inBloom was able to operate, and is therefore an
important informant for this study.
Primary texts. From the start, inBloom was a remarkably high-profile firm which
was written about extensively during all phases of its lifecycle. Professional journalists
from well-respected, legacy-media sources; amateur journalists writing for non-
professional but still well-sourced blogs; and angry citizens with an axe and a Wordpress
site on which to grind it all wrote about inBloom and what it meant to them personally
and society as a whole. As a firm trying to sell its product and present itself in the most
positive light possible, SLC/inBloom also generated a large amount of texts on its own,
including its website, guides for developers, and promotional materials for prospective
clients. By exploring all of these diverse voices – from the institutional to the personal – I
arrived at a more complete general version of inBloom’s story.
I analyzed each text in two ways. First, I performed concordance and frequency
analyses on the texts to establish narrative commonalities across multiple sources, and to
see if any macro-level trends emerge (Fairclough, 2003; Bazerman, 2008; Huckin, 2008).
Second, I used a reading protocol (see Appendix A) to guide my close reading of the
texts and ensure that analysis is uniform across the various sources (Bazerman, 2008;
Huckin, 2008). The conclusions I reached from my textual analysis led directly to a set of
preliminary codes (Saldana, 2012) to inform my analysis of interview data (see below).
Interviews. In order to arrive at a more complete specific version of inBloom’s
story, I needed personally interact with key actors, several of whom I have mentioned by
name above. Many of those actors have given interviews to the press about inBloom –
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57
which I will use as primary texts – and I had the opportunity to meet some of them
personally at a meeting I attended in April. My participant list is comprised of:
• Iwan Streichenberger (inBloom CEO)
• Michael Horn (inBloom board member and education entrepreneur)
• Sharren Bates (inBloom Chief Product Officer)
• Michele Cahill (inBloom board member, representative of Carnegie)
• Stacey Childress (inBloom board member, representative of Gates)
• Peggy Brookins (inBloom board member)
• Gene Wilhoit (inBloom board member and CFO)
• Bob Wise (inBloom board member)
• Richard Culatta (Director of the Office of Education Technology, US DoE)
• Diane Ravitch (education reform activist)
• Leonie Haimson (education reform activist)
• Stephanie Simon (journalist for Politico, covered inBloom extensively during all
phases of the story)
• Dan McMinimee (superintendent, JeffCo Schools)
• Greg Mortimer (CIO, JeffCo Schools)
This list includes employees of inBloom, members of inBloom’s board of directors,
individuals capable of providing valuable context on the policy and industry context in
which inBloom existed, and key players in the movement against inBloom.
I conducted semi-structured interviews with each participant based on interview
protocols (see Appendix B) that featured interview questions linked to my research
questions. While many of the questions were the same for all participants, some changed
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based on the role(s) that the participants played in inBloom’s rise and fall. Once the
interviews were transcribed, I used multiple rounds of coding, beginning with the
preliminary codes suggested by my textual analysis and progressing through open, in
vivo, and axial coding (Saldana, 2012). In this way, I arrived at a more complete
understanding of the meaning that my participants have made from their experiences with
inBloom.
Limitations of the design. The design I chose for this study imposed several
limitations on the data I was able to gather and the conclusions I was able to reach. Case
study research is by definition bounded by criteria set by the researcher and limited in
scope (Stake, 1995). I chose to limit my inquiry to documents and key players that have
specific, identifiable relations to inBloom and its collapse; those are the bounds of the
case. I chose to examine in depth the period from inBloom’s founding to its closure:
January, 2013 April, 2014. An exploration of the rise of Big Data in schools and the
factors that contributed to its widespread use would be illuminating, but accounting for
all the people, places, and ideas that gave rise to the student data market would be a
project that could last many years and involve many researchers. Similarly, it would be
possible to “zoom out” and examine the student data management market as a whole and
draw conclusions from the ways that market behaves and unfolds, but those issues are
beyond the scope of this study.
The complex landscape of (non)conflicting institutional logics is another
boundary of the study. By selecting among the many possible theoretical lenses through
which to view a problem, a researcher necessarily chooses to “see” some dimensions of
the research environment while remaining blind to others (Maxwell, 2013). I suggest that
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the conflict between activists and inBloom’s managerial team was largely informed by a
clash of logics, with activists being motivated by the logic of the community (e.g.
Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, 2012) and inBloom’s management being motivated by
the logic of capitalist markets (e.g. Thornton & Ocasio, 2008). By proceeding in this way,
I ignored other possibilities, such as cognitive factors or psycho-social issues.
Considering issues would have been instructive, but, because of the questions I have
chosen to answer in my dissertation, these issues are outside the scope of this study.
Finally, I am arguing that inBloom’s story was shaped by individuals taking many
forms of collective action – branding and messaging, activism, policymaking, etc. – all of
which I conceptualize as qualitative behaviors. I am specifically not arguing that shifts in
macro-scale financial markets or other quantitative corporate outcome measures resulted
in inBloom’s failure. These types of inquiry would be valuable to contextualize
inBloom’s early and late phases, but are outside the scope of this study.
Anticipated contribution. I anticipate that this dissertation will contribute to the
education literature in two main areas. First, while management scholars have spent a
significant amount of the last seventy-five years exploring the ways that private firms and
the people who manage them impact the markets they serve, the education community
has spent comparatively little time on this issue. Studies that examine the impacts of
private firms on public education tend to focus on student outcomes (e.g. Ascher, 1996;
Lipman, 2013; Verger, 2012) or to describe education privatization generally (e.g. Levin,
1999; Levin & Belfield, 2003; Ritter, Maranto, & Buck, 2009) rather than looking
“inside” the management teams of the major private players who are both shaping and are
shaped by the current environment that surrounds public education. This is an emerging
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area of interest for education policy scholars (e.g. Burch, 2009; Burch & Good, 2014;
Burch, Smith, & LaFave, forthcoming), but presently the issue is under-examined.
The second contribution of this dissertation will be in the area of qualitative
methods relating to the use of web-based data sources. The Internet provides a wealth of
data to researchers interested in tracing the development of ideas and discourses over
time (DiMaggio, Hargittai, Neumann, & Robinson, 2001; Mautner, 2005). Researchers
have drawn heavily on the Internet as a tool to collect data since at least the mid-1990’s
(Duffy, 2002), and as a result, there has been extensive research on how best to use the
Internet as an open space to conduct experiments (e.g. Azar, 2000), to interact with study
participants (e.g. O’Neil, Penrod, & Bornstein, 2003), and, most commonly, to create and
administer surveys (e.g. Coomber, 1997; Fricker & Schonlau, 2002; Gosling, Vazire,
Srivastava, & John, 2004). While all of these uses of the Internet are valuable, they fail to
recognize the potential of the Internet to stand as a source of qualitative data on its own.
The existing body of methodological research on the use of the Internet as a
source of data in and of itself has been overwhelmingly quantitative, with a special focus
on linguistic content analysis (e.g. McMillan, 2000). However, the qualitative methods
community has paid relatively little attention to techniques that might be used to gather
data based on the qualitative content of the Internet. In this dissertation, I will offer a
novel approach to sampling the Internet itself in order to create timelines and establish
connections among the authors of texts in the context of qualitative case study research.

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CHAPTER IV
Data

As I have argued, the case of inBloom is a complex one, with broad implications
for both private actors seeking to engage with public education, and for public education
leaders as they seek solutions to pressing technological concerns in their systems. In this
section, I will show that inBloom’s story is essentially one of miscommunication, with a
series of events where, with the barest amount of forethought, inBloom’s managers could
have altered the fate of their firm. The focus of this chapter is the fact that they did not.
I will present, narratively following the classic formal outline of theatrical drama,
the story of inBloom in the words of the people who lived through it, drawing on data
from interviews, printed documents, and material from the Internet. My analysis had led
me to make two central contentions. First, that inBloom’s failure amounted to a “failure
of imagination” on the part of its managers who blindly believed that inBloom’s altruistic
mission rendered it immune from opposition and scrutiny. And second, that the activists
who were successful in their campaign for policy changes that made it impossible for
inBloom to operate, nevertheless failed to reach what they conceived of as their primary
goal by focusing their attention in the wrong place; by mobilizing against private actors
who contracted with public education – rather than the public servants who made the
decisions to enter into private contracts – they won the battle, but, as the data shows, they
lost the war.
Prologue: The Shared Learning Collaborative
As the first decade of the twenty-first century drew to a close, the educational
reform conversation that had resulted in the rigorous federal accountability framework set
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forth under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in 2001 began to change. Special
interest groups representing teachers and parents had applied pressure to legislators all
over the United States with an eye toward relaxing NCLB’s heavy emphasis on testing
(Johnston, 2011; Los Angeles Times Editorial Board, 2015). Federal education officials
responded to this pressure by commissioning the Common Core State Standards, and
then leaving their adoption and implementation to the states.
At the same time, advances in education technology had allowed education
agencies at the local and state levels to amass significant amounts of student data (Data
Quality Campaign, 2015). Each new digital tool that a teacher, school, district, or state
selected and used generated data points for each student, giving educators unprecedented
insight into the ways that students were learning (Simon, 2014). In theory, all of this data
could be used to improve instruction by recommending individualized interventions for
students exactly when they need it. In practice, this was almost impossible; each digital
application used its own format for storing student data, and, because these formats were
largely proprietary, there was no way for educators to analyze a student’s performance
across multiple software platforms (Avidov-Ungar, 2010). Teachers using more than one
application simultaneously in their classes could not reasonably use the data generated by
these applications to alter their instructional practice because there was often no way to
“see” all a student’s data in one place.
The confluence of the Common Core and the surfeit of incompatible student data
formats presented a remarkable business opportunity and at first this space was occupied
by a small but well-funded group of educational advisors. InBloom’s story begins with
this group of advisors.
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“In the beginning, we just tried to give good advice.”
13

The Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC) was founded in 2011 as a non-profit
space for educational leaders to share ideas about how to share and use student data
(Phillips, 2011). SLC advisors facilitated communication among educators in different
states as they all came together to respond to the challenges of implementing the new
Common Core. “In the beginning,” said Michael Horn, one of SLC’s original board
members, “we were just trying to give good advice.” According to SLC’s now-defunct
website (the URL currently redirects to a home improvement website), the purpose of
SLC was to build “technology that helps bring personalized educational materials and
powerful tools directly to teachers’ fingertips so that they can easily find the resources,
techniques and strategies that will help them meet individual students’ learning needs”
(Shared Learning Collaborative, n.d.). To that end, SLC’s board selected and entered into
a contractual relationship with a software development firm called Wireless Generation
14
,
which, in July of 2011, began working on the software platform that would eventually
become inBloom’s principal product. Vicki Phillips, one of SLC’s early board members,
described the student data landscape as it existed at the time of SLC’s founding:
It was hard, in those days, because nobody could really figure out what students
were doing. Or, we could understand what they were doing, but not what any of
that meant. We had a lot of data, tons of data, showing what students were
actually doing, but there wasn’t any way to compare across platforms. So nobody
did.

13
Quote from Michael Horn, board member of both the Shared Learning Collaborative
(SLC) and inBloom.
14
Wireless Generation is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, a detail which
will become important to activists later on in the narrative.
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This may be an over-simplification of the ways that the consumers of student data
conceived of their practice, but the perspective was widely held. Michael Horn, another
of SLC’s board members, put it this way:
Look, teachers are busy busy busy. They have to take time for this, they have to
plan this other thing, and now, oh look, there’s a conference with some parents,
and it all takes time, right? Only so many hours in the day. So if you have a data
environment where it takes extra time to look into how one of your fractions
programs compares to another one of your fractions programs, you’re not going to
do it. Maybe some people do, but honestly, if I was in that position, I wouldn’t do
it, so we shouldn’t expect teachers to do it either.
Here, Horn suggests that teachers want to engage more deeply with student data,
but choose not to engage because of time restraints. This suggestions reveals Horn’s
underlying assumption that, given the proper tools, teachers will enthusiastically examine
their students’ data in order to improve their own instructional practices. This perspective
is shared by many in the education technology industry (e.g. Amplify, 2015; Kickboard,
2016), and is predicated on the idea that teachers need outside help to fulfill the
requirements of the job (e.g. Gee, 2012). Whether teachers and their colleagues in central
offices took the time to integrate data platforms on their own or not is unclear, but
regardless, a market developed around finding a way to solve the problem of not having
enough time. SLC was not the first startup to address this issue. Small firms like Clever,
Intellify, and Junyo all used cloud-based storage and analytics, and they all pre-date
SLC’s founding (Harven 2014a; 2014b; 2014c). What set SLC apart was the scale of its
funding and ambition to save teachers time. Still, when I asked Michael Horn if time was,
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in fact, the main concern that the educators using SLC to collaborate expressed to him, he
told me that it was not.
It is about time, sure, but it’s also about expertise. English teachers, most of
them, aren’t programmers. Gym teachers aren’t statisticians. So for a lot of
educators, they don’t really know how to integrate what you might charitably call
disparate data sets. You can have all the time in the world, but if you don’t know
what you’re doing, you’re not going to get anywhere.
As time wore on, it became more and more clear to SLC’s advisory board that the
problem of “disparate data sets” was a pressing concern for the educators who had been
brought together under SLC’s umbrella. SLC’s board chose to seek investment capital in
order to develop a software platform that could address this problem, and although the
software itself would eventually become massively complex, SLC’s public justification
of the platform’s utility was not: “Just listen to teachers and put children first. Then, give
them both the tools they need to succeed” (Phillips, 2011).
“If you wanted to really dominate the market, this really helps.”
15

The capital to fund SLC’s platform came primarily from the Gates Foundation, in
the form of a grant administrated jointly by Vicki Phillips on SLC’s side, and by a
woman named Stacey Childress on the Gates side. Phillips had been the Secretary of the
Pennsylvania Department of Education and the superintendent of schools systems in
Oregon and Pennsylvania. Before coming to work for Gates, Childress was a senior
lecturer at the Harvard Business School, and she has since moved on to be the CEO of the
NewSchools Venture Fund, a group which provides funding for education startups. The

15
Quote from Andrew Rotherham, SLC board member and president of the Bellwether
Group, a firm that provides education technology consulting services.
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Gates portfolio includes many education technology startups operating in many subsets
of the market, and the inclusion of SLC in its portfolio signaled that Gates was committed
to expanding the uses of – and market for – student data analytics (Gates Foundation,
2009; Phillips, 2015). The Gates Foundation’s initial investment totaled $87,333,334,
making it one of the largest up-front investments in the history of education technology.
We were thrilled with that, obviously. I mean, we were expecting to have a
positive outcome from the pitches we had been making all over the country, and
with Gates particularly since David
16
had a lot of contact with them, so it wasn’t
really a surprise, no. But it was certainly welcome
17
.
The size of this initial investment, along with the composition of SLC’s board, led to a
blurring of the lines between the not-for-profit nature of SLC’s organizational form, and
the for-profit nature of the firms that many of SLC’s board members managed. This
confusion began to take root as board members tried to make sense of the Gates
investment. Andrew Rotherham, a prominent education journalist, education consultant,
and member of SLC’s board, put it this way:
The Gates investment actually was a sort of VC [venture capital] investment, but
you can’t really call it Series A. Series A is for people trying to turn a profit; it’s
about selling equity shares, preferred stocks. So that’s not really what we got from
Gates, even though, if SLC had been a for-profit company, it probably would

16
David Riley was another of SLC’s board members who was, at the time, president of
the Alembic Foundation, a non-profit group which, at the time, was heavily involved in
promoting “disruptive” education technologies. Alembic is now primarily concerned with
the healthcare industry.
17
Quote from Andrew Rotherham.
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67
have been Series A. And if you wanted to really dominate the market [for student
data], this really helps.
In the for-profit world of technology startups, the first round of funding is called Series
A. Developers looking for venture capital investors make presentations to attract funding
in exchange for equity stakes in their companies. Although it is not uncommon for large
sums of money to change hands as part of Series A negotiations, $87 million is still
represents a significant investment. In 2014, for example, an estimated $350 million in
venture capital went to fund startups, only a third of which went to firms in the
technology sector (Kolodny, 2014). Stacey Childress, the grant administrator from the
Gates Foundation, had a different perspective.
No, we didn’t think of it as Series A at all. We don’t provide Series A
investment. The mission of the Gates Foundation directs us to find technological
innovations that can solve real-world problems, and we considered SLC’s
software platform to be a good solution to a problem that we had also noticed: the
difficulty of comparing data across applications in schools.
Even though Rotherham and Childress appear to be saying similar things, their
underlying assumptions are quite different. When I probed them both further about the
purpose they had both hoped the funding would serve, I received very different answers.
First, from Childress: “The funding was to help SLC develop a software package that
would help students and teachers succeed.” And then, from Rotherham: “The funding
was to put SLC in a strong position in the market so that we could develop the software
that our client-educators wanted. It allowed us to respond very quickly to the market that
we were seeing develop.” The tension between wanting to develop SLC’s (and later
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68
inBloom’s) software to help educators and wanting to develop a product that would
define the market for student data is central, and would come to be a critical force in the
behavior of inBloom’s board members as their firm collapsed around them.
“We shouldn’t let them get away with ducking their responsibility like that.”
18

Over the course of the following twelve months, from the summer of 2011 to the
fall of 2012, SLC continued to develop its software platform, eventually reaching a point
where it could be made available to education agencies. By January of 2012, SLC’s
description of its platform had changed from Phillips’ education-centered framing of the
product being about giving students and teachers “the tools they need to succeed” (2011)
to something more concrete and market-oriented. The Gates Foundation’s description
from January of 2012 said that SLC “is building a set of shared technology services that
will make it easier for a wide range of content developers, regardless of location or size,
to reach educators,” and that they will “offer educational publishers and content creators
an opportunity to expand their customer base and differentiate their offerings in the
marketplace” (Gates Foundation, 2012). At this stage, SLC’s official position was still
that, although it was gradually bringing a variety of products to market, it was “primarily
an advisory body”
19
.
In its capacity as an education-technology advisor, SLC entered into contractual
arrangements with a small group of education agencies to provide support services for
any of the various products that SLC had made available, now collectively known as the
Shared Learning Infrastructure (SLI). Among the more prominent clients in this group

18
Quote from Leonie Haimson.
19
A perspective here directly quoted from Michael Horn, but one which was echoed by
both Andrew Rotherham and Stacey Childress.
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69
was the New York State Educational Department (NYSED). Even though the relationship
between SLC and NYSED was governed by a contract, SLC considered NYSED to be a
partner, because, as Michael Horn said, “even though yes, we [SLC] had entered into a
contract with them [NYSED], we were still working with them to develop the products.
We helped them as much as they helped us.”
The contract, signed by Stacey Childress of the Gates Foundation on behalf of
SLC and New York Executive Deputy Commissioner of Education Valerie Grey,
stipulated that NYSED would not pay SLC for use of its platform while it was still in the
development phase or while it was in beta release. That is, NYSED would only begin to
pay SLC for its use of the SLI once it had reached its final form. The contract even goes
so far as to explicitly describe this dimension of the relationship between SLC and
NYSED: “For the avoidance of doubt, additional School Districts within an SLI Pilot
Participant’s state will not pay any fees for SLI Service or Support Services during the
Initial Term” (Shared Learning Collaborative, 2012, p. 8, emphasis in original).
The contract between SLC and NYSED was released to the public on October 14,
2012 at the request of a student privacy activist named Leonie Haimson, leader of a New
York City-based student advocacy group called Class Size Matters. Haimson’s group is
an independent, non-profit organization which works “for more parent decision-making
in the area of education policy, including the ability of parents to protect their children’s
privacy and control the disclosure of their personal student data” (Class Size Matters,
n.d.). In a statement on contract released that same day, Haimson stated that the contract
…confirms our worst fears that parental consent is not going to be required; in
addition, there are only minimal protections from ‘data leakage’ and the Gates
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70
Foundation has written the contract to shield itself from nearly any financial and
legal liability if the project violates FERPA or other laws and if data breaches do
occur (Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, 2014).
In our conversation about SLC’s contract with NYSED, Stacey Childress was
dismissive of those objections. “Of course we shielded ourselves from legal
repercussions. That’s what a contract is for! That’s how business works.” Haimson had a
different point of view: “Schooling isn’t a business. These people need to recognize that
when you do business with a school, there’s a higher standard. We shouldn’t let them get
away with ducking their responsibility like that”
20
.
Act I: The Rise of inBloom
At the same time that Leonie Haimson was organizing localized resistance to the
Shared Learning Infrastructure, the SLC was busy re-branding itself. Nine states –
including New York – had signed on to be pilot sites for the SLI, and as the development
phase of SLI’s platform moved into beta release, SLC’s board of advisors began to feel
that their organization had moved beyond Michael Horn’s notion of providing advice.
Andrew Rotherham and I discussed this change.
Rotherham: So, even though we had this infrastructure we were piloting, we still
felt like we were primarily engaged in providing a support service, and with the
success we were having with SLI, it seemed like maybe SLC should be a different
kind of beast entirely. SLC was an LLC, and some of us thought that maybe we
had outgrown that.
LaFave: Sorry, what’s an LLC?

20
Quote from an interview I conducted with Haimson.
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71
Rotherham: [laughs] Oh right. Okay, well an LLC is a way of organizing a firm
that really emphasizes the owners. A lot of mom-and-pop law firms are LLCs, for
example. And there are tax advantages to an LLC too, as long as it stays relatively
small.
LaFave: But SLC was growing.
Rotherham: SLC was growing, yes, and we thought that the disadvantages of
running it as an LLC was starting to outweigh the advantages. So some of us –
mostly Michael [Horn] and I, because we were most familiar with the business
side of things – some of us started talking about moving away from LLC and
towards incorporating.
LaFave: And incorporating is…
Rotherham: It’s just another way of organizing. You have to be marginally more
transparent, which has upsides and downsides, but there are tax advantages for a
larger firm, and the management structure changes.
LaFave: Changes how?
Rotherham: You hire managers. CEOs, CFOs, COOs, you know.
“It was a huge change, but it was time.”
21

SLC’s board would change from being a group of advisors who made direct
decisions about SLC’s growth to a group of directors who hired managers to make the
decisions for them. Rotherham’s characterization of the change – emphasizing tax
advantages – downplays how significant the shift would be, and how incorporating would
change SLC’s positioning in the market. Michael Horn was more sanguine on this point:

21
Quote from Michael Horn.
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72
It was a huge change, but it was time. We needed to incorporate in order to keep
growing and consolidating market share. Stacey [Childress, from Gates] was on
board from the start, and everyone else came around pretty quickly. We had to
change the kind of people we had on the board too, and that altered SLC’s culture
to a great extent. But it was the right decision, and the market seemed to agree.
The change rolled out during the autumn of 2012, culminating in the hire of Iwan
Streichenberger, a prominent education technology executive who had previously served
in a managerial capacity with Houghton-Mifflin, Edusoft, and the education consulting
firm Promethean, as well as acting as a division head for l’Oreal and Vivendi-Universal,
as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) on 26 November. SLC’s legal counsel had filed the
paperwork to create “inBloom, Inc.” as a corporation in the state of Delaware effective on
1 June, 2012, but SLC did not cease to exist until the new corporate office opened in
Atlanta in January of 2013. InBloom’s incorporation date as a “foreign nonprofit
corporation” in Georgia is dated 23 January, 2013. These two filings allowed inBloom,
Inc. to be physically located in Georgia while taking advantage of the more forgiving
corporate tax code in Delaware, a widespread tactic in private industry.
In the time between Streichenberger’s hiring and the start of operations in
January, SLC/inBloom’s board had radically changed: only Stacey Childress from the
Gates Foundation and Michael Horn remained from the original advisory board. The new
board featured Bob Wise, the former governor of West Virginia and a passionate
supporter of education reform; Gene Wilhoit, lauded as an “educational hero” for his
championing of “the need for this country to better prepare all students for life beyond
high school” (Council of Chief State School Officers, 2012), who left his position as
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73
president of the Council of Chief State School Officers in June of 2012 to be inBloom’s
Chief Financial Officer (CFO); Sharren Bates, inBloom’s new Chief Product Officer
(CPO) and previous program officer at the Gates Foundation; Peggy Brookins, a
prominent exponent of student assessment who had spent a significant amount of time
working for the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers
(PARCC); and Michele Cahill, an employee of the Carnegie Foundation, as the board’s
secretary. Although the Gates Foundation remained the largest funder of inBloom, the
decision had been made earlier in 2012 to invite more investment from both the non-
profit and for-profit sectors. The largest of these new funders was the Carnegie
Foundation, which added nearly $15 million to the Gates Foundation’s $85 million, and
earning one of Carnegie’s vice presidents – Michele Cahill – a position on inBloom’s
board. It is worth noting that none of these people were new to either education
technology or private industry in general. Wilhoit and Streichenberger had both been
involved with technological innovation in education – both of them via their work with
Edusoft – and the Gates and Carnegie foundations both spend a significant amount of
their respective missions working with education agencies and entrepreneurs. Michael
Horn was a prominent advocate of technological “disruption” as a market force and
investment strategy, identifying education services early on as an industry in need of
disruption in his 2008 book Disrupting Class. The entrepreneurial outlier on the board
was Peggy Brookins, but, through her involvement with digital assessment platforms, her
technological expertise made her a natural for a firm like inBloom.
That inBloom’s c-suite represented three of the eight seats on the board is
representative of a long-standing trend in corporate governance (e.g. Lorsch & Young,
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74
1990; Rechner & Dalton, 1991), whereby a firm’s managers are also some of its
directors. As I have previously argued, this creates a potential conflict between what is
best for the firm’s stakeholders – the safeguarding of which is the fiduciary responsibility
of the board – and what is best for individual managers from the c-suite. Although not
explicit in any of the decisions that inBloom’s board made, this tension forms an
important subtext for many of the conversations that happened in the board room.
One such conversation came early on, when Michele Cahill approached Iwan
Streichenberger about a possible phase-two pilot site for the SLI. Cahill recalled the
conversation:
I had come to see Iwan in my capacity as secretary of the board, and to express
some of the concerns that people on my end, at Carnegie, had over the phase-two
rollout [of the SLI]. I’d seen the applications that some of these districts had sent
us, and one of them – I won’t say which, but it was a small district, not much in
the way of funding – looked really good to me. It seemed like it would be great
for us, because it was small, and we [the board] had been having conversations
about how to manage the expansion into smaller sites. So I brought the
application to Iwan’s attention, I said, you know, hey, this one looks really good, I
think we should look at little harder at this, and his perspective was that it wasn’t
worth the investment, that there wouldn’t be a very good return. That he didn’t
think we had the time to spend on a smaller contract like that. It was
disappointing.
Reacting to a similar conversation that she had had with Streichenberger, fellow board-
member Peggy Brookins had a similar perspective:
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75
These smaller contracts that Michele [Cahill] and I were trying to bring to Iwan’s
[Streichenberger] attention kept getting knocked down because of this idea that
we wouldn’t get much of a return from them. But from where I was coming from,
I didn’t think that “getting a return” was the point. InBloom was a nonprofit, so…
what does return matter?
I asked Brookins to clarify what she meant by suggesting that inBloom was a nonprofit,
and she was very explicit. “We weren’t out to make money, we were out to improve
instruction in schools. Who cares about getting a return in a situation like that?”
Streichenberger’s conception of what “return” can mean was somewhat different.
He suggested that, for him, the concept of return on investment was broader than just
financial considerations.
When we were looking at those early applications and trying to figure out where
we would expand, yes, the idea of ROI [return on investment] was very important
to Sharren [Bates, inBloom’s CPO] and I, and we wanted to safeguard the long-
term viability of inBloom. That means that we needed to generate revenue, even if
“profit” was less important to us. But our programmers and developers were also
investing time – which is always zero-sum – and we weren’t a huge company, we
didn’t have unlimited resources in any sense of the word. We wanted to make
sure we were getting a return on our, what shall we say, temporal investment.
In time, the board members reached a compromise, choosing to enter into contractual
relationships with several medium-sized school systems, with the promise that once the
SLI “got out of beta,” inBloom’s portfolio would begin to include smaller districts as
well as the large ones. Significantly, this compromise was still predicated on
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76
Streichenberger and Bates’ collective position that inBloom should focus on large
systems. “Expansion was our priority, and we thought that Iwan and Sharren knew best
how to manage that expansion, so we went along with their plan,” said Michael Horn.
“We decided to hold back on the smaller contracts until phase three.”
This decision-making dynamic – with the more education-focused board members
ceding judgment about business decisions to Streichenberger, Bates, and, to a lesser
extent, Wilhoit – held for much of inBloom’s early expansion, and it served the firm well.
InBloom’s managers consolidated the loose agreements that SLC’s advisory board had
made with Louisiana, Colorado, and Illinois, adding them to the firm contracts that
already existed with Massachusetts, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, Delaware, and
New York.
The popular press – both unwittingly and on purpose – helped inBloom move
forward with its expansion. Many examples of enthusiastic coverage for inBloom’s SLI
exist, of which a piece penned by TechCrunch’s Rip Empson (2013) is most
representative. Under the headline “With $100m from the Gates Foundation & Others,
inBloom Wants to Transform Education by Unleashing Its Data,” Empson discusses the
then-present state of education technology by calling it “archaic,” and representative of
“a broken system.” By contrast, inBloom’s products and vision are “honorable,”
“ambitious,” and “a rising tide for all boats” in the education technology industry’s long-
term project of realizing the “monetization potential” in various educational niches.
“We had been reading quite a bit about inBloom in the press,” Dan McMinimee
told me. “What they were doing sounded exciting, and we knew that Colorado had
contracts with them, so we volunteered, eagerly, really, to be one of the districts that tried
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77
them out.” McMinimee was (and continues to be) the superintendent of the Jefferson
County Schools – known colloquially was JeffCo in its community – a district in
suburban Denver. JeffCo became one of inBloom’s phase two rollout sites, testing what
was to be SLI’s final round of beta adjustments. McMinimee sais that, “It was really
exciting. I’m still excited about it, in fact, even though things didn’t work out for them.
The product they put on the table was a really, really good one.” McMinimee’s
excitement about inBloom’s product hearkens back to Michael Horn’s assertion that
firms like inBloom are capable of reimagining classroom instruction as a place of
individualized student achievement. Like inBloom’s managers, McMinimee was excited
enough about the SLI that he was unable to imagine the objections that stakeholders
might have to sharing student data with private contractors. In the above quote, he
demonstrates that he is still unable to bring his own expectations in line with those of
stakeholders; evidently, he would contract with inBloom again if given the chance.
“… the press handled everything on its own.”
22

On the management side, inBloom was consciously taking advantage of the
positive attention it had received. As the contracts for the SLI’s second pilot phase fell
into place, inBloom leveraged the popular attention to create momentum for its product
line. Gene Wilhoit was in no way a newcomer to the world of private contracting in
education; in his capacity as executive director of the Council of Chief State School
Officers, he oversaw the rollout of the Common Core and “stimulated state action to
improve data systems,” and eventually became the executive director of the National
Center for Innovation in Education (Prichard Committee, n.d.). Between those two jobs,

22
Quote from Sharren Bates.
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78
Wilhoit was inBloom’s CFO, and, when discussing the relationship that inBloom had
with the press, he put it this way:
Iwan [Streichenberger] and Sharren [Bates] were both very excited about all the
attention we had been getting, and Michael [Horn] was too. And the rest of us,
who came really from schools, were excited too, but we didn’t really know what
to do about having it [the positive press] out there. But it helped when we were
talking with the leaders – superintendents, principals, those folks – because they
already knew who we were. We didn’t have to do much in the way of educating
the educators because of what they had read or seen.
And because of the sheer quantity of positive attention inBloom had gotten, the board left
constructing inBloom’s brand to the press. Sharren Bates:
We didn’t have to tell anybody about who we were or what our product was. Iwan
would give interviews that weren’t even really about us, more that they were
about the education data market on the whole. The assumption was that everyone
listening or watching or reading or whatever else already knew about inBloom,
because that’s what it felt like. We didn’t do any advertising; I always felt that our
product spoke for itself, which it did, and then that the press handled everything
else on its own.
Both of these quotes showcase a fundamental misunderstanding of how the
market for student data would work, what inBloom’s place in that market was, and
provide yet another example of the inability of inBloom’s management to imagine how
their behavior would be interpreted by stakeholders. From the perspective of Bates and
Wilhoit, the press had provided everyone with all the information they needed, and there
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was no need to make any further arguments about the SLI. But from stakeholders’
perspective, that inBloom was choosing not to advertise itself or its services was seen as
evidence of its sinister motives. Diane Ravitch (2012):
We still haven’t heard anything from [inBloom] about what they’re doing or why
they’re doing it, and what their plans are for the data they’re harvesting from our
kids. They obviously have plans for our information. Why aren’t they telling us
what [the plans] are?
InBloom had also been relatively scandal-free during its life-cycle up to that
point, and the objections that had cropped up early on – particularly in the contracts
between SLC and NYSED that carried forward to inBloom – were largely confined to
local issues. Leonie Haimson summed up that situation succinctly, saying that her
organization “couldn’t get anybody outside New York to pay attention to what was going
on, so we had to keep fighting kind of in the dark.” Michael Horn characterized the
situation in New York as “really just kind of a thorn in our side. We knew they were
objecting to SLI, but we didn’t think it would amount to anything. For months, it didn’t.”
Or, in plainer terms, the problem with the activists in New York did not amount to a
problem for inBloom’s managers until, later on, it did.
“There were always two camps on the board.”
23

In the meantime, inBloom’s board was handling a wide variety of decisions
relating to the firm’s expansion strategy, and a prevailing form collaboration was
emerging. The members of inBloom’s board broke down their decisions into two
categories: business decisions and education decisions. They made this distinction as a

23
Quote from Bob Wise.
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way to get things done quickly; members of the board were scattered all across the
United States, and collective decision-making was an important value in inBloom’s
corporate culture. The split between the two was left over from the ways that SLC had
handled its own decisions, even though Michael Horn was the only person who carried
over to inBloom from SLC’s advisory board. “We didn’t really have any business
decisions to make when we were on the advisory board; they were all education
decisions. Things like who should SLI serve and why. Or how best to showcase our
product to education leaders and trendsetters”
24
. In that sense, one of the important
differences between SLC as an LLC and inBloom as a corporation was that the notion of
a “business decision” was something that the new organizational form “tacked on” to
SLC’s existing decision-making ecosystem when the firm incorporated and hired a CEO
and a CPO.
“I think we ended up splitting the decision-making that way because Iwan
[Streichenberger] and Sharren [Bates] needed something to do,” Peggy Brookins laughed.
“Neither of them really knew that much about education; they were from the business
world, which was something most of the rest of us didn’t know anything about.” Michele
Cahill, Carnegie’s representative on the board, agreed.
InBloom was really, seriously an organization that was nonprofit. We took that
very seriously at Carnegie, and so did Stacey [Childress] from Gates’ perspective.
But still, we wanted our product to get out there and serve students and educators,
so we needed people with expertise bringing products to market and then making
sure those products stayed at the forefront once competition began to pop up.

24
Quote from Michael Horn.
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Streichenberger, in an interview with TechCrunch, asserted that inBloom was a
nonprofit corporation specifically to keep “special interests at bay” (Empson, 2013). But
inBloom was still a business, and still needed people who could speak the language of
business with entrepreneurs in the student data market. In the same interview,
Streichenberger characterized inBloom’s platform as “a way that allows startups and
companies to create different versions of learning analytics.” This language is familiar to
people in the education technology business, but is less familiar to educators and the
people who lead public schools. “It was all very impressive when they laid it out for us,”
said Dan McMinimee from JeffCo schools. “I wasn’t sure what a lot of what they said
meant, but they told me it would work, and I believed them. And then it did! So it didn’t
really matter that I hadn’t caught some of what they said.”
“We needed to make sure we had people on board who could ‘speak business,’”
said Michael Horn. “That was a primary consideration when we brought on Iwan
Streichenberger and Sharren Bates to manage the business side.” The rest of the board
dealt with education decisions. Peggy Brookins characterized them as “… things like
what the platform should look like, what kinds of data should we be sure to integrate,
what would be most useful to educators, things like that. Michael [Horn] liked to say that
we ‘spoke education’ while Iwan and Sharren ‘spoke business.’”
“And that’s why it was great that it wasn’t just the business people telling us
about what the products would be like,” said Dan McMinimee. “They had educators too,
people that it was easier for us to relate to. We could kind of speak the same language
with them.”
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These two “camps” on the board complemented each other well, with members of
each group essentially rubber-stamping decisions made by the other. Peggy Brookins
again: “Iwan and Sharren let all of us education people make education decisions, and
then agreed to them. And we agreed to whatever Iwan and Sharren and the rest of the
business people thought was best in their realm.” Michael Horn saw himself as a bridge
between the two camps, providing feedback and facilitating communication in both
directions. “Well, I can speak both [education and business], and that was an important
function that I was able to play. There were always two camps on the board. Most of the
time they balanced each other out.”
Sometimes, however, they did not. Gene Wilhoit, inBloom’s CFO:
We didn’t always get along, no. Iwan can be stubborn, and so could Bob [Wise]
and Stacey, and then we were kind of at a standstill. Iwan and Sharren were
almost always on the same page, and Michael, Peggy, Stacey, Michele, and I
usually were. Bob usually too.
I asked Wilhoit about a specific example, and he used inBloom’s ongoing conflict with
Class Size Matters over student privacy and organizational transparency in the state of
New York.
There was a lot of trouble with New York. The rest of the country hadn’t talked
about it much at that time, but there had been some people making kind of a lot of
noise there, going back to the SLC days. And Michele and Bob and I wanted to
address some of these concerns, which Stacey did, articulating our policy about
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data security to the local press
25
, and that was important. But we wanted to
address it further, and it was Iwan’s point of view that the whole thing would go
away, and that we didn’t need to talk about it. So we didn’t, and [pause] we
should have. It didn’t go away. But we thought it was a business decision, so we
bowed out.
“... talking about the possible.”
26

Many of these business decisions were aimed at inBloom’s formal debut at the
South by Southwest festival in 2013. South by Southwest (SXSW) began as a small
music festival in Austin, Texas in 1987, but quickly rose to national prominence as a
place for innovative marketing. SXSW’s present incarnation encompasses music,
interactive media, film, and, most importantly for inBloom’s story, education. Along with
the annual ASU+GSV Summit in Phoenix, SXSW’s education sub-conference – called
SXSWEdu – has become an important showcase for education technology entrepreneurs
seeking venture capital and Series A funding, and to attract attention from the popular
press.
“SXSWEdu was absolutely essential for us; we were really very happy to have
been invited,” said Streichenberger. “It was a great launch, and we got lots of good press
from it.” The main thrust of inBloom’s low-intensity public relations strategy had been to
generate enough “buzz” around the SLI that either SXSWEdu or ASU+GSV would invite
them to make a plenary presentation at one of the conferences. Michael Horn:

25
Childress’ statement actually came somewhat earlier in the timeline than Wilhoit seems
to have remembered, on December 12, 2012. The board was still in place, however, so
the discrepancy is, in my opinion, immaterial.
26
Quote from Iwan Streichenberger.
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I really like the GSV Summit, but of the two, for our purposes, it would have been
more of a consolation prize. Lots of good products get showcased at GSV, but the
whole world pays attention to SXSW. I mean, you got press there covering the
film and the music stuff, and then they just sort of spill over into the media and
the education stuff. SXSWEdu is like the Cannes [Film Festival] of education
technology. I guess you could say GSV is more like Sundance. It’s great, but
you’re really hoping to get into Cannes.
Given inBloom’s connections to the twin worlds of education technology and
Silicon Valley “venture philanthropy,” the invitation to SXSWEdu was not a surprise. By
early March of 2013, inBloom’s SLI had almost reached its final release version, and,
agitation in New York notwithstanding, the majority of inBloom’s attention from the
press was positive. For example, Eric Horowitz (2013) published a piece on EdSurge
under the headline “People Who Don’t Want to Collect Education Data Should Explain
Why it’s a Bad Idea” on March 9, two days after Streichenberger’s keynote address at
SXSWEdu. In it, Horowitz strongly advocated for data management systems like
inBloom’s SLI, quoting both Streichenberger and Bill Gates as a way to make the case
that student data management, saying “there’s no reason to believe the benefits of
inBloom’s project won’t outweigh the costs.”
So on the evening of March 7, 2013, Iwan Streichenberger and Bill Gates took the
stage at SXSWEdu first separately to discuss the promise of managing student data for
instruction and achievement, and then together for a sort of fireside chat. Like most of the
primary data relating to inBloom, video and text records of these speeches and the
conversation that followed are either no longer available or very difficult to find.
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InBloom’s website has been mostly deleted, and the tumblr blog that inBloom’s
programmers maintained contains nothing but dead links. Even SXSWEdu’s own archive
of materials related to inBloom have been wiped clean. A low-resolution video with
garbled audio does exist on YouTube, but it is buried there, not tagged or released by
either inBloom or SXSWEdu. The link to find it comes from a secondary source far
removed from the date of the event: Leonie Haimson’s advocacy group, NYC Public
School Parents (2016).
But Streichenberger remembers the event very clearly:
First off, it’s a huge room. SXSWEdu is a really big deal, so the space they set
aside for the big speakers is really big, and inBloom was going to be the star of
the conference that year. So: big room. Bill [Gates] was on first, and I think most
of the people there had come to see him. [laughs] I don’t flatter myself that I was
the draw. I mean, people were excited about what we were doing, obviously,
because our work was very important, path breaking, market-setting stuff. But
they came to see Bill. So he was on first, and that was great, and then I was
second, and the speech was great, the crowd was great, the point was to introduce
inBloom officially to the world, and I… or we, I guess, did that very well. It’s too
bad the video is gone
27
, because it was a great presentation, really great. And then
Bill and I sat down with Jessie [Woolley-Wilson, CEO of DreamBox Learning],
and we all had a little chat about ed tech and where it was going and, from my
perspective, what inBloom was going to be able to offer the market in terms of

27
This interview took place before I found the YouTube video, but Streichenberger’s
description of the event is a much better record of what happened there than the video.
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functionality and capabilities. DreamBox does some of this work too… so it was a
real pleasure to be sharing the stage with [DreamBox’s CEO] and Bill.
I asked Streichenberger to tell me more about what Gates, Woolley-Wilson, and
Streichenberger talked about.
Well SXSWEdu is focused on technology specifically, not on pedagogy or market
strategy, so we were very much talking about the possible. And it was a really
great conversation, because we were able to discuss the potential of what we were
doing with student data. DreamBox’s product is focused on math, problem
solving with math and paying attention to the how of students solving problems,
which plays really well with the SXSW crowd. So Jessie’s very sort of narrowly
focused on that, and she was talking mostly about that, about STEM, and the
potential there. And what was great about being onstage with her, and what Bill
took advantage of while we were all talking, was that inBloom’s product could
take DreamBox’s product and make it so that teachers could see what that data
meant by comparing it across platforms. So we spent most of our time talking
about this synergy and why it’s important for the future of education technology.
Bill really facilitated that conversation in way that only Bill can.
In his introduction of Streichenberger, Gates characterized the current “state of play” of
innovation in education to be “flat, like we have [been] for the last few decades.”
Streichenberger remembered that as well: “At inBloom, we tried to address that flatness,
and that was part of what we talked about too.”

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Act II: A Gathering Storm
InBloom’s strong showing at SXSWEdu begat further excitement in the education
technology world for the potential of student data management to significantly reshape
instruction in schools. The premise of inBloom’s suite of software solutions was simple:
make it easier for educators to compare student achievement data across platforms. In
practice, this meant closely tracking each student’s performance so that educators could
provide “individualized instruction.”
In order to understand the idea of “individualized instruction” and what it meant
for the student data market that inBloom was creating, I spoke with Richard Culatta, the
former director of the Office of Educational Technology in the United States Department
of Education. “I was at SXSWEdu the year inBloom was hot, and absolutely it was what
everyone was talking about. They defined the conversation about student data going
forward.” I asked why they were able to do that.
It was about individualized instruction, which is the holy grail of education
technology right now. What individualized instruction is, is this way of tailoring
what a teacher is doing on a given day to the exact needs of the students in their
classrooms. Simple. And powerful, too. If you could be sure that every minute of
seat time in a teacher’s class was devoted to learning exactly what each kid needs
to learn when they need it, then you can really make a difference. Which is what
inBloom was promising us, and why everyone got so excited about the scale they
were working at.
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The question that inBloom’s SLI raised was whether the close, individualized data
tracking necessary to provide this kind of instruction was worth the risk of data breach.
Some people, like Culatta, believed that it was.
It’s absolutely worth the risk, because look: what hacker out there wants to know
how little Johnny’s grasp on biology is coming along? And, even assuming that
the idea of data leakage is plausible – which, obviously, it is – this is data that
already exists in the world. There’s very little data that schools have on students
that isn’t in the phone book, much less on Facebook.
The theme of students already having personal data “in the world” was a constant one in
the conversations I had with proponents of the SLI and applications like it. The idea that
Facebook profile data comprised the whole of what might identify students was central to
this point of view. Once again, Dan McMinimee from the JeffCo schools: “we don’t have
anything in our records that you can’t find anywhere else. Our databases are secure, but
I’m not even sure they need to be, to be honest. It’s all on Facebook anyway.” In all,
seven of inBloom’s eight board members expressed data security in terms of what was
available on Facebook, as did five of the seven implementers I interviewed for this study.
Here, for example, is a representative exchange which occurred in my interview with
Greg Mortimer, Chief Information Officer of the JeffCo schools:
LaFave: So what do you think of the concerns that some people had about the
security of student data on inBloom’s platform?
Mortimer: Baseless, really. A tiny fraction of the information we have on file is
data that isn’t public knowledge. We wouldn’t have shared that data with
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inBloom anyway, but the identifying information we have in our own database
isn’t much more private than Facebook.
LaFave: Does that mean… do you think Facebook is secure, then?
Mortimer: I mean that it doesn’t matter whether Facebook is secure or not. There
are better ways to get uniquely identified student data than pouring over school
records.
Gradually, this attitude worked its way into the conversations among the members
of inBloom’s board. Stacey Childress remembered it this way:
We were very concerned about privacy, at first. It seemed like we needed to be,
right? But what we were doing with the SLI was so good and so self-evidently, to
us anyway, useful as a transformative tool for instruction, that concerns about
privacy started to be secondary to concerns about building out the platform and
making it available to schools.
Along these same lines, Bob Wise recalled a conversation he had with Michael Horn
shortly after Iwan Streichenberger’s appearance at SXSWEdu.
Michael said that some of those people in New York – Leonie [Haimson] and
Diane Ravitch, who she was working with at that time – were really worried
about privacy, and we had a good laugh about that, because what was there to be
worried about? To us, the benefits of facilitating individualized instruction far
outweighed the remote possibility that the data schools passed on to us would fall
into the wrong hands.
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Leonie Haimson, the student privacy advocate, held an opposite point of view, saying, “It
wasn’t about it [the data] ‘falling into’
28
the wrong hands. It was already there! InBloom
is the wrong hands!” For Haimson, the issue of student data privacy was just one part of a
larger concern about the state of public-private partnerships in education; their struggle
against inBloom was, for them, a righteous crusade against industrial “bad guys.”
“That’s the kind of thing we couldn’t believe people were worried about.”
29

While the management team at inBloom was preparing for their firm’s
appearance at SXSWEdu, the concerns of student privacy advocates – led by Leonie
Haimson’s group based in New York – began to coalesce around the reality that, once
student data passed from schools to inBloom, third-party vendors could access this data
as well. Stephanie Simon, a journalist working for Reuters, had begun tracking
inBloom’s rise in late 2012. “It’s the kind of story you always hope will come along,” she
said. “Everyone else [in the press] seemed to be paying attention to how exciting the
possibilities were, and nobody was asking what it might mean for kids and parents.”
Simon published her first piece on inBloom on March 4, 2013, coincidentally also the
opening day of SXSWEdu. That first article, and much of the work she did in the
following months, was focused primarily on the reactions that different groups were
having to what those groups thought the focus of inBloom’s products were. Initially, this
was about the security of data transmission. Simon (2013) quoted inBloom’s official
statement on the security of student data: “While inBloom pledges to guard the data
tightly, its own privacy policy states that it ‘cannot guarantee the security of the

28
Haimson’s air quotes were visible in the video conference.
29
Quote from Sharren Bates.
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information stored… or that the information will not be intercepted when it is being
transmitted.’”
Sharren Bates commented on Simon’s (2013) implication that data security was
something attainable:
That’s the kind of thing we couldn’t believe people were worried about. You can’t
ever absolutely guarantee the security of anything. Home security companies
don’t guarantee that your home won’t be broken into, right? They can’t. They can
just say that, with their products and the protections they’re offering, the
likelihood goes down. We were saying the same thing.
But Haimson’s group, NYC Public School Parents, argued that the only acceptable way
for student data to be transmitted and stored by vendors like inBloom was if security
could be absolutely guaranteed. I asked Haimson about this inconsistency; she stood firm.
LaFave: Tell me about how you came to that position about privacy.
Haimson: It’s kind of common sense, isn’t it? That the only way we should be
dealing with these companies is if they can be totally transparent and 100%
certain about security.
LaFave: But that’s not really possible, right? 100%?
Haimson: Doesn’t matter. That’s the standard we should expect, and what we’ve
been demanding.
“And there’s no way we could deliver on a demand like that,” said Bob Wise. “So
we just sort of brushed it aside. Because nobody else can either.” Iwan Streichenberger
agreed. “That kind of rabble-rousing, it doesn’t mean anything to the market, because our
clients – the people that make decisions about what to buy and when – understand that
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too. And our position in the market was strong in the spring of 2013.” Peggy Brookins:
“We should have seen it, though. Once things started to get bad, I said to Iwan, I said: we
should have seen it.”
“It was much more important that we go after new contracts.”
30

There were two main reasons why, in the spring of 2013, inBloom’s board
members were unable to accurately gauge the difference between what their clients
thought of their product and what public stakeholders thought. The first related to the
practice of splitting collective decisions into to “business” and “education.” The second
related to a failure of imagination.
The education faction on inBloom’s board took as its main function in April and
May of 2013 to make sure that SLI’s functionality was able to deliver on the promises
they had made when they entered into contracts with education agencies.
The focus as we rolled through phase two and into general release was making
sure SLI did what we wanted it to. I spent a lot of time checking in with
superintendents and CIOs of districts seeing what the reaction was; it was good,
by and large. We were delivering.
The above quote, from board member and representative of the Gates Foundation Stacey
Childress, contrasts strongly with Sharren Bates, inBloom’s CPO, discussing the same
period of time.
Beta was about attracting clients, making sure that people saw how good and bug-
free our platform was, and then helping them make decisions to get on board with
inBloom. We spent a lot of time talking with funders and other industry people to

30
Quote from Iwan Streichenberger.
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see what was happening in the market and trying to adjust to conditions as they
changed. We wanted to stay on top of the market, because we had created it.

This contrast is representative of the underlying disconnect that had developed between
the board’s two factions, and foreshadows the causes of inBloom’s eventual collapse. The
education faction was primarily concerned with the user experience; the business faction
was primarily concerned with expansion. These primary concerns represent the
underlying tension between the two “camps” on inBloom’s board: should decision-
making revolve around what end users – in this case educators and students – are doing
with the product, or should it be more important to focus on contracting with more clients
in order to maintain or expand market share? Or, cast in more fundamental terms, was
inBloom’s purpose to serve education stakeholders or institutional shareholders?
Navigating this tension took up most of the board members’ time. Michele Cahill
summed it up: “We had so many conversations about whether it was better to expand or
to focus on making the clients we had happy. So many. I’m not sure we ever really
resolved that issue.” Iwan Streichenberger:
But in the end, you have to expand. You can’t maintain your place in the market
without expanding. If you do that, you just end up watching everyone else get
bigger and more important and better than you are, and then you fail. So, yes, we
wanted to make sure that the clients we already had were happy with SLI, but
from the business perspective, it was much more important that we go after new
contracts.
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By focusing on this tension, board members fell prey to the other decision-making
problem: failure of imagination. Streichenberger’s decision to aggressively pursue new
contracts necessarily meant focusing on why SLI was a force for good in public
education. By choosing to emphasize the potential of their product over explanations
about security or conversations with educational leaders about the SLI’s potential
downsides, inBloom’s board began to overlook the ways that their product was being
seen by people outside the education technology industry.
Act III: The Fall of inBloom
As inBloom’s strategy for expansion played itself out, something unexpected was
happening in Louisiana. The Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) had been one
of SLC’s first partners, and had enthusiastically piloted the SLI in both its alpha and beta
releases. The state’s education system was – and continues to be – in a state of either
constant renewal or perpetual chaos, depending on the observer’s point of view (Akers,
2012). Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans in the summer of 2005, sweeping away
the city’s massively corrupt education system (Buerger & Harris, 2015) and providing an
unprecedented opportunity for private contractors to fill the void.
The influence of these private contractors flowed northward to Baton Rouge,
where the LDOE entered into a number of statewide education contracts, including one
with SLC. Like the contract between SLC/inBloom and the NYSED, the contract in
Louisiana allowed SLC/inBloom access to a wide range of student data, all tied to unique
identifiers for each student. However, unlike in New York, where students were
identified by a series of random numbers and letters, Louisiana chose to identify its
students by their social security numbers (SSNs).
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The reasoning for this choice is unclear; representatives of the LDOE declined to
be interviewed for this study. But public records indicate that the state was already using
SSNs to track its students, and the system was unchanged when it passed from public
hands into the SLI ecosystem. Louisiana is not alone in tracking its students using their
SSNs, but none of the other eight states in SLI’s pilot program shared that information
with SLC/inBloom; Massachusetts, for example, stripped its database of this kind of
information before opening it to the SLI (Watters, 2013).
More curious still was Louisiana’s decision to release student records identified
by SSN to inBloom in secret. Louisiana had used alternative means to identify a small
group of students during alpha testing of the SLI when it was administered by SLC, but
when they released the entire student population of the state – now identified by SSN – to
inBloom for pilots in SLI’s beta phase, there was no official announcement at all.
Contrast this with New York, where, owing to pressure from Leonie Haimson’s group
(and others), every element of SLC/inBloom’s activities was subject to immediate and
ongoing public scrutiny (Horn, 2014). Or compare it to Colorado, where local education
officials in pilot districts like JeffCo made routine announcements about the nature and
amount of positively-identified student data they were sharing with inBloom
31
. Neither of
these states were using SSNs to identify their students, but they chose to be transparent
regardless. Louisiana did not.
Neither the LDOE or inBloom made any statements about the nature of
Louisiana’s student identifiers at any point in their contractual relationship. This changed
when a Louisiana activist named Tom Aswell from an online anti-corruption magazine

31
Supporting content from interviews with Dan McMinimee and Greg Mortimer, both
employees of the JeffCo schools.
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called Louisiana Voice filed a Freedom of Information Act request for emails and
supporting documents from the LDOE. He received what was, from his perspective, a
troubling and lengthy email exchange between LDOE employees at various levels, and
representatives from inBloom.
Aswell’s Freedom of Information Act request uncovered 119 emails between
members of the LDOE and representatives of SLC/inBloom (among other education
technology contractors) dating back to 2011. The primary documents – available on
Louisiana Voice’s website – and Aswell’s reporting on them make it possible to trace
Louisiana’s relationship with SLC/inBloom to before the SLI was developed. During his
reporting of this story, Aswell seemed to be primarily concerned with two connected
themes: that officials from the LDOE were in various ways corrupted by their
relationships with private vendors, and that this corruption led to the sharing of sensitive
information. Streichenberger and other members of inBloom’s board maintain that there
was nothing improper or illegal about their dealings with Louisiana, and Aswell’s
analysis bears this out. But even though Aswell did not uncover any wrongdoing between
LDOE officials and representatives of inBloom, he was consistently worried about
inBloom’s involvement with Louisiana’s students. Activists in Colorado, and, later, back
in New York, would carry this concern forward as they began to slowly dismantle the
regulatory environment that had encouraged inBloom’s expansion.
“They worked for us, not the other way around.”
32

Like many members of the activist community, Aswell consistently chose to
characterize SLC/inBloom as a “front” for the Gates Foundation and a tool for the

32
Quote from Bob Wise, inBloom board member.
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exploitation of students by News Corp’s owner, Rupert Murdoch (Aswell, 2013).
Wireless Generation, the subcontractor that SLC/inBloom had hired to do the direct
development of the SLI product line, is a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, a
detail which both Aswell and Haimson found troubling. Aswell specifically traced his
suspicion of Rupert Murdoch’s involvement in education to a statement made by
Murdoch in which he identified the K-12 system as “a $500 billion sector in the U.S.”
(Aswell, 2013). Streichenberger:
Well, it is a big market, isn’t it? I mean, it is. What I don’t get is why that’s a
problem for some people. Sure, there’s money to be made there, and we
[inBloom] made some of that money, but we were providing [pause] look, we
were useful, all right? SLI was a useful product that got tarred unfairly I think
because an outside company developed it. If it had come out of some school
district’s central office staff, everybody in the country would be using it now.
Haimson:
Our position has always been that big companies like inBloom or whoever else
are making money off our kids. It’s Rupert Murdoch, for God sakes! You can’t
trust Rupert Murdoch to do the right thing. Look at what they put on Fox every
night. Terrible.
Bob Wise, however, pointed out a key distinction which seems to have been ignored by
the activist community:
Rupert Murdoch was never involved in inBloom or, as far as I know, in SLC
before I came on board. We contracted with Wireless Generation – which is a
well-regarded education technology firm, by the way – but we never took any
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meetings with Murdoch or any of his people, and I don’t think anything we did
was at all informed by Wireless Generation’s relationship with News Corp
generally or Murdoch in particular. They worked for us, not the other way around.
Still, the involvement of Wireless Generation in SLC/inBloom’s products was
upsetting for the activist and, later, the stakeholder community. In addition to concern
over Murdoch’s relationship to inBloom, activists were also nervous about the Gates
Foundation. In a representative blog post titled “Louisiana shocker: Ties between White,
Murdoch, Gates,” prominent education activist Diane Ravitch characterized News Corp
and the Gates Foundation as somehow linked.
Worst of all is the deal that John White [State Superintendent at the LDOE] made
to share confidential student data (including names and addresses, test scores and
grades and other information) to an organization created jointly by the Gates
Foundation and Rupert Murdoch’s organization Wireless Generation (Ravitch,
2013).
There is no data that links Rupert Murdoch directly to SLC/inBloom in any way other
than that he is the owner of a subsidiary firm that subcontracted with SLC/inBloom to do
software development.
“Holy missing documents, Batman!”
33

On April 19, 2013, amid increasing pressure from state activist groups like
Louisiana Voice, State Superintendent of Education John White announced that the
LDOE was no longer in a contractual relationship with inBloom. Minutes after White
made the announcement, inBloom’s official Twitter account stated: “Louisiana still part

33
Quote taken from the title of a piece written by Tom Aswell.
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of inBloom community. Many inaccuracies in coverage”
34
. Although that might (or
might not) have been true on April 19, 2013, it quickly became true; inBloom had
removed Louisiana from its list of partners by the time the Web Archive crawled
inBloom’s website on May 23, 2013
35
. Because the end of inBloom’s contract with
Louisiana is the clear tipping point for inBloom’s long-term viability, I specifically asked
members of inBloom’s board about where the decision to cancel the contract came from:
Can you tell me about how some of the contracts came to be cancelled? Like in
Louisiana, for instance? Streichenberger’s response was cagey. “Yeah, I’m not going to
talk about that. Sorry.” Michael Horn was more forthcoming, but also was not interested
in being specific: “The contract was voided, that’s all I can say.” Even Stacey Childress,
representative of the Gates Foundation, declined to give a specific response: “We were no
longer in a relationship with Louisiana after the, after the contract was cancelled.”
One of the documents that Tom Aswell obtained from the LDOE was a formal
letter sent to inBloom’s CEO from John White on June 28, 2013, saying:
As you are aware, we requested that our student data be withdrawn from the
inBloom database on April 19, 2013, in order that we might take more time to
engage our students, parents, school systems, and state leadership, in a dialogue
regarding best practices in student data security and storage practice. All data was

34
The official inBloom Twitter account, @inBloomEdu, has been deleted and so cannot
be directly cited, but the content of this tweet was independently cited by both Tom
Aswell (2013) and Mercedes Schneider (2013).
35
As I discussed in Chapter 3, it is not possible to directly access a deleted website, but
the Web Archive makes it possible to view “snapshots” of a website that no longer exists,
organized by the date that the Archive took the picture. Here, it is not possible to be
certain of the exact date that inBloom’s relationship with Louisiana ceased.
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removed at that time, and, for all practical purposes, all agreements were
concluded (White, 2013).
But there was another letter, also obtained by Aswell and posted on Louisiana Voice,
dated June 17, 2013 from Streichenberger to White. I quote it at length here to illustrate
inBloom’s internal position on using SSNs to identify students.
I am writing, pursuant to section 8.2 of inBloom’s Services Agreement with the
state of Louisiana, to formally conclude our relationship and terminate our
agreement…. In ending our relationship, I want to reiterate some facts that have
been subject of discussion between us and about our work together. As you know,
the contract between inBloom and Louisiana explicitly prohibits the storage of
student social security numbers (SSNs) unless there are extenuating
circumstances, and an amendment of the contract is signed by both parties. We
understand that you inherited Louisiana’s practice of using SSNs and that many
states and districts across the nation are in similar situations and grappling with
this issue now. During the course of planning for implementation in Louisiana,
the inBloom team engaged in discussions with state personnel regarding how the
state might transition from the use of SSNs to randomized student I.D. numbers.
As we worked through this issue and to support the state’s Course Choice
program, it came to inBloom’s attention that Louisiana was nevertheless
uploading student SSNs to its secure storage space on the inBloom system
(Streichenberger, 2013).
Note the discrepancy: White’s letter suggests that Louisiana terminated the contract
between the LDOE and inBloom, saying “…all agreements were concluded” (White
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personal communication to Streichenberger, 2013). But Streichenberger opens with the
suggestion that inBloom terminated the contract with the LDOE, saying “I am writing
to… formally conclude our relationship….” (Streichenberger personal communication to
White, 2013). The authors are engaging each other under the terms set forth in Section
8.2 of inBloom’s standard service agreement, here deployed in Louisiana, but used in
essentially unchanged form in inBloom’s other markets. Section 8.2c, presumably the
sub-section of 8.2 to which Streichenberger referred, states that:
… either party may terminate this Agreement immediately upon written notice to
the other party if the party reasonably believes such other party is intentionally
violating its obligations hereunder with respect to Confidential Information or
otherwise uses the SLI Service in violation of Data Privacy and Security Laws,
the Data Privacy and Security Policy or FERPA (inBloom, 2013, p. 10).
So the question remains: what happened in Louisiana? From the evidence I have
presented here, there are two possibilities. First, the LDOE affirmatively terminated its
relationship with inBloom because activists and stakeholders became concerned about the
LDOE sharing SSN data with a private vendor, and the state took action to protect its
citizens. Alternatively, inBloom and its board of directors affirmatively terminated its
relationship with the LDOE because Louisiana was, unbeknownst to inBloom, uploading
SSN-identified student data to the SLI. Officials at the LDOE declined to be interviewed
for this study, creating a causal gray area in the case. That none of the parties are
interested in discussing what happened means that it will likely not be possible to draw
specific policy recommendations about best practices surrounding how education
agencies should interact with private contractors while sharing student data. The closest
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to a concrete discussion about the chain of causality in Louisiana I was able to extract
was this oblique reference made by Gene Wilhoit:
The board talked through a lot of those decisions as things started to go south on
us. Louisiana, New York, we wanted to be sure that we could keep expanding,
and we talked about that a lot. But I can’t say any more about Louisiana
specifically, no.
The ambiguity of how the relationship between inBloom and the LDOE ended is
significant because it stands as an early example of how the members of inBloom’s board
and members of the stakeholder and activist communities talked past each other.
Streichenberger told me that:
So I said that I can’t say anything about how things ended in Louisiana, I can say
that we were confused by what happened next. Or at least I was, and Bob [Wise]
and Gene [Wilhoit] and probably Michael [Horn] were too. Because we made
statements at the time about how we were taking steps to ensure that the data
would remain private. It just seemed like nobody was listening.
Diane Ravitch:
That’s just a Band-Aid though. A little boy with his finger in the dyke. The cat
was out of the bag in Louisiana, so they had to say something about how they
were going to keep the data safe. But you can’t keep it safe, that’s just how the
internet or the cloud or whatever works. It’s just not possible. None of the school
systems that were doing business with inBloom should have been allowed to do it
in the first place.
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Blanket statements like this one makes the data privacy seem black-and-white: either
schools should be allowed to share this data, or they should not. Advocates of sharing and
not-sharing both make statements like Ravitch’s, but both perspectives miss the nuance
of the issue. In some cases, it seems reasonable to take the risk that personal (but not
sensitive) data like home addresses could be leaked in order to boost high school
graduation rates. In others, the risk of disclosing truly sensitive data like SSNs, blood
type, or immigration status, the risk seems unreasonable. The way forward is dependent
on reconciling the two extremes and developing a clear view of when and why various
forms of student data can – or cannot – be shared.
“We understood from the beginning that people might get kind of jumpy…”
36

Educators and activists elsewhere in the country had been watching the events in
Louisiana unfold. For education leaders in places like JeffCo, there was a very real
concern that they might also have to cancel contracts of their own. “I was paying very
close attention to what happened down there [in Louisiana] because of the role the public
played in bringing attention to the downsides of sharing data with a company like
inBloom,” said Jeff McMinimee, superintendent of the JeffCo schools. “You might be
aware of how our community likes to get involved in the management of our schools. So
it was a real concern for us.” McMinimee went on to describe to me last year’s turmoil on
the JeffCo school board, where parents successfully ousted three of the five board
members through a recall election in which forty percent of registered voters participated.
The three board members who were recalled represented a market-oriented, parent-
choice-based perspective – McMinimee called them “conservatively-informed” – towards

36
Quote from Greg Mortimer.
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school reform, and, among other issues, they worked to “privatize, charterize, and
voucherize” JeffCo’s schools while simultaneously weakening the local teachers’ union
(Layton, 2015). “All of that happened after we cancelled our agreement with inBloom, of
course,” McMinimee said, “but the three board members who got recalled joined the
board in 2013, and they took a real interest in the project.”
A key difference between Louisiana and JeffCo was the degree of transparency.
Greg Mortimer, JeffCo’s CIO, summed up the district’s approach: “We understood from
the beginning that people might get kind of jumpy about the kind of data we were sharing
with inBloom, so we wanted to be sure everyone always felt informed. I think we did a
good job with that.”
Michael Horn agreed:
Colorado is a much more, boy what can you say, a much more I guess politically
engaged state than Louisiana? People pay much closer attention to everything that
happens there than in Louisiana, I think. On our end, all the processes we went
through were exactly the same, but on their end, in JeffCo specifically, they were
much more transparent, and I think it served them pretty well.
InBloom rolled out a late beta version of the SLI in the JeffCo schools in the
spring of 2013, around the same time that the SLI was being withdrawn from schools in
Louisiana. McMinimee again:
The reaction was really positive at first, and you know, like I said before, I think
inBloom’s product was super useful and needed really, and so obviously the
teachers liked it, and my admins did too. Really good all around. But Louisiana
isn’t that far away from here, right? And our stakeholders here really pay
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attention. And some of them, apparently, were paying attention to what was
happening in Louisiana, because right around the end of school that year, Greg
[Mortimer] started fielding a lot of questions about the SLI.
Diane Ravitch had been working with Leonie Haimson to reach out to parents in
Colorado. “I already knew a lot of those people because of my work with the Common
Core,” Ravitch told me. “And we thought that what inBloom was doing was really close
to the Common Core issue in a lot of ways. Same invasion of privacy and private sector
involvement.” Haimson outlined the strategy for Colorado:
Diane and I wanted to really get the word out about inBloom, because we beat
them in Louisiana, which surprised us because of the political situation down
there, and then we thought that people in Colorado would be receptive to our
message, which they were. So what we wanted to do first was to raise awareness
about Rupert Murdoch and Bill Gates and what they were doing to kids and
families there, and then we wanted to give people who were as worried as we
were the kinds of tools and information they needed to make some positive
change in their communities.
The “tool” that Ravitch and Haimson supplied to interested stakeholders in JeffCo
was primarily advice on how to leverage the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to gain
access to documentation that they considered to be “actionable.” Ravitch:
Actionable information is anything that the public can use to shed light on
whatever seems like it might be in the shadows. So it’s things like contracts – that
was the big one for the fight against inBloom – but also like emails or letters, and
then even things like board minutes and district memos. Anything that points to
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hey, these people are doing something really wrong to our kids and making
money on it.
“Because,” added Haimson, “that’s the thing that gets administrators and
superintendents and school board members to pay attention. When you make people
realize that there are people making money off of kids.” Dan McMinimee elaborated:
Right, that’s the direction they came from. That Rupert Murdoch was making
money off the backs of kids. But remember: we didn’t, JeffCo didn’t pay inBloom
anything. We were piloting their system for free. Rupert Murdoch didn’t make
any money off us.
Stacey Childress:
I thought that was really confusing, that the conversation in Colorado started to be
about Rupert Murdoch and Bill Gates making money. I mean sure, Rupert
Murdoch might make money through Wireless Generation, if you’re being
generous about how people make money, but Gates is a foundation. What we do is
never about making money, and if we’re being honest here, Bill [Gates] isn’t
trying to make any more money; he’s got plenty.
“InBloom fit into the story they were already telling themselves.”
37

Over the summer, as the strategy set forth by Haimson and Ravitch moved
forward, parents in Jefferson County became more and more concerned about – and
involved in – the arrangement between inBloom and JeffCo. Dan McMinimee:
In schools, you know there’s going to be trouble when something that’s been
going on during the school year hangs over into summer. Most people – you

37
Quote from Greg Mortimer.
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know, parents, kids – most people stop thinking about school as soon as June rolls
around. But the people who were worried about inBloom kept at it all summer
long. And those parents, they had just a ton of information and they were so on
message, it made us think that maybe we had misunderstood our own contract
[with inBloom].
Greg Mortimer tied the growing controversy over JeffCo’s use of the SLI to what he
called a “mature issue” – resistance to the Common Core.
It was a lot of the same people that we had seen opposing things like testing for
the Common Core. A lot of the opt-out people. I think they saw it all as the same
issue, you know: people who don’t know about what their kid needs coming in
and telling them things that they were ready to disagree with. InBloom fit into the
story they were already telling themselves.
Sharren Bates, inBloom’s CPO, brushed aside the connection between the SLI and the
Common Core.
Do I think the people who were protesting us in Colorado thought that we were
part of the Common Core? Without a doubt, yes. But that’s ridiculous. That’s not
what our product was about, and it never was. People didn’t – and I think this is
something that just came up again and again – people just didn’t take the time to
understand what we were trying to do. They just pigeon-holed us as a typical evil
corporation. Which, obviously, I disagree with that characterization.
But the connection remained in the minds of Jefferson County’s activist
community, and the issue came to a head at a school board meeting on August 22. The
board organized the meeting to deal specifically with the issue of inBloom’s relationship
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with the district’s student data (Groves, 2013). To facilitate the discussion, the board
invited members of the Colorado State Board of Education, Sharren Bates from inBloom,
and representatives from two separate data-privacy advocate groups. The discussion was
“spirited,” with a large group of parents on hand to discuss the issue with the panel of
experts (Groves, 2013).
Also attending the meeting was a representative from a group called the Data
Management Advisory Council, a subcommittee of the JeffCo board made up of parents
and educators tasked with making recommendations about the future of JeffCo’s
involvement with inBloom. Greg Mortimer, JeffCo’s Chief Information Officer:
Yeah, that group was interesting. I wasn’t asked to be on it, so, you know, that
seemed kind of strange to me but that’s how these things go when the political
process starts. But anyway the board had asked them to make what they called a
“stop or go” recommendation based on a security review that they had contracted
out. And that was ridiculous in my opinion, a real waste of taxpayer money,
because you knew that whatever the review said they were going to want to
cancel the contract. The writing was on the wall.
The content of this meeting provides a concrete example of how differently the
two sides perceived inBloom’s role in schools, and how neither side could imagine how
their opponents could reach the conclusions they had. Sharren Bates:
I just couldn’t believe it. There were people there who were talking about college
readiness and students getting prepared for jobs, which is so beyond anything that
our products could ever do, it was just like, where do you people come up with
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this stuff? And some of the people who were really vocal were the same people
we had worked with to get the contract off the ground. It was unbelievable.
Dan McMinimee:
Things got really heated, to be honest with you. I was there, but the conversation
wasn’t really about anything I have control over – that’s all up to the board, you
know – so I was mostly just watching, and wow. One of our board members,
Laura Boggs, I remember her being really frustrated about the whole thing. I’m
not sure why; she was one of our point people when we started talking with
inBloom. Maybe she didn’t realize quite what the SLI was going to be.
The exchange between Laura Boggs and Sharren Bates provides a useful example for
understanding how one member of inBloom’s board and another member of the
stakeholder community talked past each other.
Sharren Bates: We don’t mine or disclose student data. The school district is in
control of who can see information.
Laura Boggs: I can’t imagine if we aren’t in control of that. If we allow inBloom
to decide the resources, you have taken our job and parents’ jobs away.
Sharren Bates: But you are in control of the data. That’s what I’m saying.
Laura Boggs: I just don’t know. You’ve taken that control away from us. It’s
troubling.
In the video recording of this exchange, the exasperation on both sides is clearly
evident. Laura Boggs declined to be interviewed for this study, but Sharren Bates
remembered it clearly.
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So, so frustrating. It was just a series of non sequiturs, with me saying that they
had all the control and her telling me how awful it was that we had taken their
control away. But that’s typical of the kinds of arguments we started to get into
around that time with parents and educators.
“… just a cascade of failure…”
38

On September 19, the JeffCo school board voted to allow parents to opt out of
having their children’s data shared with and stored on inBloom’s platform. Amy Rogers,
recording secretary of JeffCo’s board, described the policy change in the minutes from
that meeting:
After listening carefully to the concerns of some JeffCo parents who believe the
Classroom Dashboard
39
is not the right choice for their child, the district
announced it will work to create an opt-out provision for all parents who feel the
tools to be developed don’t meet their family’s needs. The superintendent
provided additional clarification on this announcement to the Board of Education:
as inBloom is storage for our data and analytics, families will have the same
services they have now (Rogers, 2013b, p. 4).
I asked McMinimee what he meant by his clarification.
I was just trying to clear up that same misunderstanding. InBloom wasn’t doing
anything for us that we weren’t already doing ourselves; they could just do it
better. So I was saying that if parents wanted to opt out, that would be fine, but
there was nothing about inBloom’s service that was any different from what we

38
Quote from Greg Mortimer.
39
The SLI went by many names in many places, so I have chosen to refer to it as the SLI
throughout this chapter. In JeffCo, the SLI was called the Classroom Dashboard.
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were doing before inBloom came along. And the subtext is that if you opt out,
you’re being kind of crazy.
Agitating for the creation of an opt-out provision is a familiar approach for
opponents of the Common Core, and, as Leonie Haimson put it, opting out is “a great
way to undermine any of these intrusive regimes. Enough people opt out, and you’ve got
to change the system. It works.” That is, in fact, what happened in JeffCo. Greg
Mortimer:
As soon as we announced the opt-out, it was just a cascade of failure. You know.
It started small with just the families who had been at the meeting, but then it
snowballed, and it didn’t take long for the opt-out group to be thirty, forty percent
of the students in the district. And at that point, it’s untenable.
Less than two months later, at a school board meeting on November 7, 2013,
inBloom’s contract with JeffCo was back on the agenda. Marty Reames, “concerned
parent” and member of the board’s Data Management Advisory Council, made a brief
presentation regarding the council’s findings on the security of the SLI (Laverty, 2013).
The Data Management Advisory Council, an ad hoc committee formed by the school
board specifically to make recommendations on the future of JeffCo and inBloom in the
form of “stop or go,” delivered the council’s verdict: stop. Greg Mortimer: “And it was
like a hard stop, too. No messing around. Marty was very clear on that point: they wanted
us to be done with inBloom.”
In the time between the board’s decision to create an opt-out provision and the
meeting on November 7
th
, Jefferson County held its contentious recall election for
members of the school board. Three of the five sitting members were successfully
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recalled, with the new members slated to be sworn in at a special meeting of the board on
November 21
st
. Dan McMinimee:
They were lame ducks, it was a lame duck session. So you would think that they
would have wanted to cement the work they had done with inBloom before the
new members came in and took it apart, which is what the election was mostly
about. They went with public sentiment, though, which was kind of refreshing.
You actually got the feeling that they cared about what was happening and
wanted to be responsive to it.
Following Reames’ presentation, the board voted unanimously to “sever relations” with
inBloom (Rogers, 2013a). “So that was it. We moved on to finding other ways to manage
the data, but inBloom wasn’t going to be a part of that strategy anymore,” said Greg
Mortimer.
InBloom took action quickly, with spokesman Adam Gaber issuing a statement
thirty minutes after the board’s vote but before the end of the meeting.
Over the last several years, JeffCo has worked hard to put the right pieces in place
to begin to transform teaching and learning in its classrooms. While not a silver
bullet, inBloom was a critical part of this strategy, and today’s decision threatens
to unravel all the hard work and progress made to date.
“[InBloom] could have said the sky was blue, and [activists] would have demanded
to know why [inBloom] wouldn’t admit the color of the sky.”
40

The loss of JeffCo was a heavy blow to inBloom’s portfolio. In the weeks that
followed JeffCo’s decision to leave inBloom, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia,

40
Quote from Peggy Brookins.
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Illinois, Kentucky, and Delaware joined Colorado and Louisiana in cancelling their
contracts with inBloom. By January of 2014, only New York was left. Peggy Brookins:
We [the board] didn’t understand what happened. Or at least I didn’t, and there
was a meeting we all took in I think it was January of 2014 where we discussed
how we had gone from piloting in nine states to just one in such a short amount of
time. And nobody could figure it out. The business people saw it as illogical, and
the education people understood the concerns about privacy but were kind of
dumbfounded that people couldn’t see the potential of what we were trying to do.
The meeting to which Brookins referred took place as a video conference on January 9,
2014, and its purpose was to form a consensus on how to move forward. Gene Wilhoit
remembers it:
There was a real sense that we had gone in the wrong direction, that we… that our
decisions had led us to a dead end. The ed [education] folks thought we should
reach out to schools more, maybe try and talk with some administrators and some
teachers, see if we could get the ball moving in the other direction. But Iwan and
Sharren and Bob [Wise] thought we should stay the course and jut focus on
delivering a superior product to the folks in New York, and like usual, that’s the
direction we went.
Iwan Streichenberger remembers the meeting as well:
As CEO it’s my job to make the tough decisions about how to move forward with
the company I’m running, so deciding what to do after JeffCo was my call, and it
was my view that we should keep moving forward in New York, and then try and
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pick up the pieces after the public saw what a great product we were bringing
online there.
Sharren Bates:
And we knew it was going to be tough, because NYC Public School Parents and
Class Size Matters had been really working against us, at that point for two years,
so we knew we had our work cut out for us, but we really thought that the strength
of the product was going to win out. It really was a superior product, and look
what’s out there now: people doing the same thing we were doing, but nobody
cares because they can’t hang it on Rupert Murdoch. It doesn’t make any sense.
So inBloom’s board moved forward with more engagement in the implementation
process as it moved forward in New York. Leonie Haimson’s two advocacy groups, NYC
Public School Parents and Class Size Matters, had been working to change the regulatory
environment in which the contract between the NYSED and inBloom had been signed.
Kathleen Moorhead, Executive Director for Data Systems and Education Technology in
the NYSED had been overseeing the SLI’s roll-out from the school side, and was paying
close attention to the arguments that Haimson and, later, Ravitch were making.
Those of us who work in state departments of ed are in a tough place, right? Part
of the job is to make decisions about what we think is going to be right for
students, but then also part of the job is to listen to stakeholders and take the
public’s opinion into account when we’re making those decisions. With inBloom,
that was especially hard, because all of us at NYSED could really see how good
the product was, but parent groups were really focusing on the downside and
focusing attention of the legislature on it.
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The attention that Haimson and Ravitch had been focusing was largely the result of a
lawsuit against the NYSED that Class Size Matters had filed. As inBloom’s board was
meeting to discuss how to move forward in New York, New York’s attorney general
announced that the NYSED had moved back the date on which it would transfer student
data to inBloom’s system. Instead of the end of January, the date was now “no earlier
than April 1” (NYC Public School Parents, 2016). Leonie Haimson:
Yeah, that was great when they said that. It’s what we wanted. We were turning
the tide against inBloom, so it was great when they moved back the date, because
we knew that if we could get them to delay that long, it would give us just that
much longer to get the law changed. Of course they tried to make it seem like it
wasn’t us who had made it happen, but we had. It was us.
In its announcement, the NYSED had cited a delay in the development cycle with
inBloom, but that appears to have not been the case, per a Twitter exchange
41
between
Haimson and Sharren Bates:
@leoniehaimson: … NYSED claims delay due to “contractors behind schedule”;
was inBloom behind schedule?
@sharrensharren: … Our dev backlog is public & shows no current tech delays.
Again, Leonie Haimson:
So you’ve got the same thing going on in New York that they [inBloom] did in
Louisiana. The government guys say one thing, and inBloom says something else.
Doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in their ability to be honest about privacy, does
it?

41
The ellipses in these quotes replace a list of Twitter handles in both the original tweet
and Bates’ reply which are not relevant to the case.
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Sharren Bates drew a different conclusion from the exchange:
We weren’t behind, so my best guess is that it was somebody else. New York had
several different contracts going at the same time. It wasn’t us. Did Leonie tell
you that? Typical. She just won’t get over the idea that we were part of some kind
of conspiracy.
As in Louisiana, though, this type of discrepancy gradually ate away at the
public’s trust, and by February, things in New York began to move very quickly. On the
7
th
, the New York supreme court dismissed a lawsuit filed by Class Size Matters against
the NYSED which asserted that inBloom’s SLI platform constituted an illegal breach of
student privacy, clearing the way for New York to share data with inBloom. Three days
later, on the 10
th
, state education Commissioner John King announced that:
…the State has delayed the launch of data dashboards related to inBloom to allow
SED [State Education Department] to work with legislators to address concerns
about data security and third party providers used by the State and districts (New
York State Education Department, 2014b).
On the 20
th
, the NYSED announced that, even though it has delayed the launch of
inBloom’s systems, it will nevertheless release student data to inBloom no later than July
1, 2014 (Zimmer, 2014). Eight days after that, on February 28
th
, the New York state
legislature held a hearing in New York City to look into inBloom’s data security
protocols. The legislature had held several hearings prior to the one on February 28
th
, but
none of them had been attended by any representatives of inBloom. Leonie Haimson:
It was like we couldn’t get them to take us seriously enough to even come to a
hearing. And the legislature was no help, you know, they didn’t subpoena
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anybody. But finally, at that last hearing, inBloom sent somebody up from
Atlanta. Virginia Bartlett.
Virginia Bartlett had been appointed inBloom’s Chief Privacy Officer in
September of 2013, in response to JeffCo’s opt-out provision. Bartlett was not a member
of inBloom’s board (and declined to be interviewed for this study), but was nevertheless
tasked with managing the increasingly urgent requests from legislators and private
citizens with concerns about data privacy. Sharren Bates:
We brought Virginia onboard to help us field privacy issues and also to help
people realize that we did take privacy seriously, and that we were listening to our
clients and the concerns they had. And she did a great job; she’s still doing
privacy work, I think. But like I said before, you know, it turned out to not be
enough. She did go to the hearing in New York, though.
Along with Bartlett, Peggy Brookins testified on behalf of inBloom, saying:
With inBloom, each state or district has its own independently secure safe deposit
box, and the customer controls what’s in the box and who gets the key to the box.
Contrary to claims, inBloom is not building a national database. Information
about New York state students loaded into inBloom is unreadable to inBloom as
stored, and is deleted when the student graduates or our contract is terminated,
whichever comes first (Spector, 2014).
Bartlett reiterated Brookins’ testimony, adding that inBloom is “just a connection that
makes two things talk to each other” (Spector, 2014). Brookins remembers testifying at
the hearing: “It was just more of the inBloom-is-evil conspiracy hoakum. They didn’t
believe any of what we said. I still don’t understand why.”
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Allison White, a parent who strongly opposed inBloom’s involvement in New
York, read out the text of a petition signed by more than 5,200 New York parents at the
hearing. In part, it reads:
I will not allow my children to go to a public school if this is approved. I will
protect my children's privacy and private information like medical records which
are protected by our government already. I expect our government to be
forthcoming about their intentions and inform us (the public) of matters that
impact our children and ourselves. I will not allow the government to take away
my parental decision making choice. STOP THIS EDUCATIONAL FARCE!
Our children are not employees, they are not commodities, and they are not
owned by the government or special interest groups! This unnecessary intrusion
into their lives needs to stop. Parents and children should not lose their rights to
privacy. These rights MUST be Protected. I'm completely opposed to any sharing
or storage of student data for the OBVIOUS and valid reasons listed in this
petition (White, 2014, emphasis in the original).
At her request, I read this quote from the petition back to Peggy Brookins, who laughed.
What do you say to people like this? I had just said that the only people who
could access the information were people who essentially had access to the
information already. It’s like what Sharren had to deal with at JeffCo. People just
weren’t listening to us. We could have said the sky is blue, and they would have
demanded to know why we wouldn’t admit the color of the sky.

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“InBloom was done.”
42

The following week, on March 5, 2014, Haimson’s strategy paid off with the New
York State Assembly passing Assembly Bill A8929. A8929 was a broad piece of
legislation designed to halt the implementation of what the stakeholder community
considered to be elements of the Common Core State Standards, containing provisions
for opting out of testing, preventing teachers from being evaluated based on student
performance, and, in section 12.1, a prohibition on sharing student data with private
vendors. Although written in more general terms, it was clear to the stakeholder
community that the law was intended to hamper inBloom’s roll-out of the SLI. Leonie
Haimson: “I like to call it ‘the inBloom law’. Cut the legs right off them.”
Two parts of section 12.1 are important for understanding what happened to
inBloom in the wake of this legislation’s passage. First, that the NYSED is no longer
allowed to provide “personally identifiable or de-identifiable information to any third
party vendor” (emphasis mine). Not only can data tied to a specific student not be shared,
data that was once identifiable but which had been since been stripped of any identifiable
information cannot be shared either. Sharren Bates explained to me why this hurt
inBloom:
So our product was designed to do two things. First, it was meant for educators –
and by that, I mean mostly teachers, but other school personnel too – for teachers
to be able to see information relating to that kid right now. If you can’t figure out
which data points came from which student, that information is useless. Okay, but
also the other thing we designed the SLI to do was to make it possible to

42
Quote from Michele Cahill.
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aggregate large amounts of student data to give a holistic picture of all the
students using an application, which you can use to see if one application is better
than another for whatever your use is. To do that, you strip out each student’s
information and look at, say, a class’s information as a whole. Without being able
to do those two things, our product is meaningless.
The second part of section 12.1 which hurt inBloom prohibits the transmission of
any kind of student data to a third party “for the purpose of collecting, storing, and/or
organizing student data or information in order to provide access to such data or
information to third party vendors operating data dashboard solutions.” Recall that one of
the ways inBloom marketed the SLI was characterizing it as a “dashboard” for viewing
student data. Again, Sharren Bates: “And then there was a part about making sure that
vendors using a dashboard were specifically prohibited. Which, let’s be honest, was
aimed at us. It was very disappointing.”
Iwan Streichenberger was even more direct: “that piece of legislation was a de
facto bill of attainder in everything but name for inBloom. It would have been more
honest to call it ‘The inBloom Law’.” Bills of attainder are pieces of legislation which
declare a person or group guilty of a crime and specify a punishment for that crime, most
often without a trial. Section 12.1 of A8929 is not, strictly speaking, a bill of attainder –
legislation of that type is specifically banned in Article I of the United States
Constitution, as well as in the constitutions of all fifty states – but it is narrowly-tailored
enough to mean that inBloom was going to be unable to operate in the state of New York.
In the words of Michele Cahill, after the passage of A8929, “inBloom was done.”
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The rest of the month of March was no kinder to inBloom and its subcontractors.
On March 10, 2014, New York’s Common Core Implementation Panel (2014) released a
report which, among other recommendations, called for ending the state’s relationship
with inBloom. On March 31, 2014, the Assembly passed a budget bill which further
restricts inBloom’s ability to function by prohibiting any state agency from releasing any
student data – identifiable or otherwise – to “a data dashboard operator for use in a data
dashboard” (New York A08556D §60). Two days later, on April 2, 2014, Stephanie
Simon, the reporter who originally drew attention to inBloom’s business model in 2013,
reported that the NYSED had directed inBloom to delete all of New York’s student data;
the Journal News quoted the announcement directly: “As required by statute, we will not
store any student data with inBloom, and we have directed inBloom to securely delete
the… data that has been stored” (Stern, 2014). In the same article, Leonie Haimson is
quoted reacting to the announcement: “InBloom is just the most egregious example of the
widespread problem of excessive data collection and sharing of personal student data by
the state, districts and schools — without parental consent, in the name of personalized
learning.” InBloom’s spokesman Adam Gaber issued inBloom’s official response:
We respect New York state's decision to provide additional local control, and for
also addressing privacy. At inBloom we continue to believe that our technology
has the unique ability to empower teachers in ways that can dramatically improve
learning for students (Stern, 2014).
With the withdrawal of inBloom’s last remaining client, Iwan Streichenberger
said that, “the only thing left to do was to try and make sure all of our people would go to
better homes.” Gene Wilhoit remembers the final board meeting:
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So we got together one last time and voted to wind things down. Bill [Gates] was
in on the meeting too, just as an observer, because he’d liked the project so much.
It was a sad atmosphere. It’s not like we wouldn’t see each other again, but it was
the end of something we all thought was important, innovative. I think we were
all sad to see it go.
Michael Horn was circumspect:
I’ve served on other boards for companies that went under, it’s just part of the job.
But when you really believe in the product and the people, and we were really
trying to make things better for kids, for the country, you get pretty down about
the company going out of business.
When I asked Iwan Streichenberger about why the board made the decision to
shut down, he said, “Have you seen the statement we released on the last day?” I said I
had. “That’s really all there is to say about it.”
Streichenberger’s frustration with the way the public saw inBloom’s business
model is clearly evident in his press release (inBloom, 2014). “Students, teachers and
parents deserve the best tools and resources available, and we cannot afford to wait.” He
continues:
It is a shame that the progress of this important innovation has been stalled
because of generalized public concerns about data misuse, even though inBloom
has world-class security and privacy protections that have raised the bar for
school districts and the industry as a whole.
The use of technology to tailor instruction for individual students is still an
emerging concept and inBloom provides a technical solution that has never been
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seen before. As a result, it has been the subject of mischaracterizations and a
lightning rod for misdirected criticism. In New York, these misunderstandings led
to the recent passage of legislation severely restricting the education department
from contracting with outside companies like inBloom for storing, organizing, or
aggregating student data, even where those companies provide demonstrably
more protection for privacy and security than the systems currently in use.
We stepped up to the occasion and supported our partners with passion,
but we have realized that this concept is still new, and building public acceptance
for the solution will require more time and resources than anyone could have
anticipated. Therefore, in full alignment with the inBloom Board of Directors and
funders, I have made the decision to wind down the organization over the coming
months.
In the end, “winding down” inBloom only took three weeks; the offices of inBloom were
empty by the time its lease was up on April 30, 2014.
Epilogue: InBloom Wilts, the Industry Shrugs
In the weeks and months that followed inBloom’s demise, multiple accounts
appeared in media outlets describing how inBloom came to close. Some, like Stephanie
Simon’s last piece on inBloom (2014), cast the story as a David-and-Goliath narrative in
which plucky parents destroyed a faceless corporation; her piece ran under a cartoon
depicting superhero parents saving a child from a Lovecraftian multi-tentacled beast (see
Figure 4.1).

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Figure 4.1. Cartoon from Stephanie Simon’s piece on inBloom’s failure (2014). Armed
parents save a child from a surveillance serpent.

Others, like board-member Michael Horn’s post mortem from the December,
2014 issue of Forbes magazine, focused on the lessons that other education technology
firms could take from inBloom’s collapse. Horn cited external reasons for the failure:
Some of the external reasons include the fact that inBloom entered the education
conversation during an intense time of broader concerns around privacy, thanks in
large part to events involving the National Security Agency, which fostered an
environment of suspicion around privacy and motive; concerns and suspicions in
certain corners around the Gates Foundation’s investments to improve education,
as well as the fact that Wireless Generation, now owned by Rupert Murdoch’s
News Corporation, helped build the product; that inBloom’s customers and
partners—states and school districts—did not have the proper policies in place
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around data and privacy nor did they have a deep enough understanding of what
inBloom was doing to explain it to their communities (and inBloom did not help
them out enough in these regards, as it sought to remain “just a vendor”); and a
narrative that tied inBloom to concerns around the Common Core, assessments,
and the use of data in teacher evaluations.
And internal ones as well:
InBloom did plenty to hurt its cause as well, including a lack of a clear business
plan initially with wildly optimistic assumptions around adoption; a poor
understanding of the external political climate into which it was entering; an
inability to explain in clear language what inBloom was and was not and why the
solution it was offering mattered—and to know when to use different narratives;
poor execution, as it needed to work far more intensely to win new customers, as
well as to build support for its solution with its existing customers to experience
speedier implementation and proof of concept; and repeated bad PR moves early
on that created confusion among a large number of constituencies in the education
world—from school districts to vendors to community groups—and added to the
narrative that inBloom was complicated and scary.
This last point is, in my estimation, central. InBloom’s directors failed to
affirmatively control the narrative that grew up around inBloom’s products, allowing
activists like Leonie Haimson to craft an opposing – and widely appealing – viewpoint.
Bob Wise characterized it this way:
It was sad. You know. We all really believed in the product, but we got
railroaded. I mean, none of the things that any of the people who worked against
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us were true, and I think they knew that all along. And you know what the thing
is? There are plenty of other people doing exactly what we were doing, and
nobody cares.
Indeed, at the ASU+GSV Summit I attended in April of 2015, thirty-eight student data
management startups were seeking Series A funding from venture capital funds, with an
additional twenty-four already-funded student data companies on hand to interact with
purchasers representing a wide range of education contractors and agencies. The student
identity market is one that is both vibrant and profitable (Burch, LaFave, & Smith,
forthcoming), and inBloom’s collapse did nothing to halt its expansion.
But the firms that have been successful in this market segment – Knewton,
DreamBox Learning, and others – have been much more transparent about their practices,
and much more active in placing themselves within a positive narrative framework.
Andrew Rotherham, former member of the SLC advisory board and current president of
an education technology consulting firm called the Bellwether Group, told me that
“telling a story about your product that makes you a hero who cares about kids is
definitely the way forward now, and I think a lot of that is because of what happened to
inBloom.”
But perhaps the best way to sum up what happened to inBloom is the phrase used
by Iwan Streichenberger, Michael Horn, Stacey Childress, and Gene Wilhoit:
“It got away from us.”

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CHAPTER V
Findings & Discussion

InBloom’s story is one of conflict, competing institutional logics, and eventual
capitulation, all stemming from board members’ misunderstandings about the market in
which their firm operated. The data I presented in Chapter Four lays these shortcomings
bare, and shows that inBloom was doomed from the beginning. The board members’
unswerving belief that the utility of the SLI was plainly evident to all the parties involved
meant that they were unable – and unwilling – to change inBloom’s expansion strategy in
response to shifting market conditions. Although there are moments when
Streichenberger and the rest of inBloom’s board could have “turned back,” they
consistently ignored the signs that their firm was gradually but inexorably failing. This
was largely due to competing logics that the “business” and “education” factions on the
board inhabited and enacted, in both cases unaware that the twin logics of markets and
education were coming into conflict.
Schools generate a significant amount of student data, much of which is stored
using proprietary file types which cannot be readily compared to other forms of data. But
educators need to make these comparisons if they are to make full use of the applications
that their agencies have made available; if they cannot make sense of student data, both
the opportunity to improve instruction and the expenditure of taxpayer money have been
wasted. InBloom stepped into this void, attempting to address the problem, and this study
has been similarly concerned with the problem presented by today’s student data
ecosystem. The research problem I have addressed here is how can data management
firms balance the needs of students against the needs of their shareholders.
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In order to do this, I have combined the literature on the behavior of corporate
boards with the literature on institutional logics to generate a lens through which to view
and analyze inBloom’s story. I argued that board members grapple with institutional
logics in three key ways. First, they navigate the internal and sometimes competing logics
that are represented by the interests – both personal and institutional – of boards of
directors (e.g. Wood, Bandura, & Bailey, 1990). Second, they work within the constraints
of external logic conflicts as they make decisions that impact the external stakeholders
who interact with their firm’s products (e.g. Besharov & Smith, 2014). They finally use
the information they have gathered in the previous two stages to make judgments and
decisions that play out inside a larger political context, a landscape which brings with it a
set of consequences attached to the actions of institutional actors like the members of
inBloom’s board (Friedland & Alford, 1975).
In order to investigate the real-world implications of this literature, I designed an
embedded (Stake, 1995; Yin, 2013), qualitative (Maxwell, 2013), and ethnographic
(Agar, 1996) case study of the decisions that inBloom’s board of directors made, and how
those decisions led inexorably to the firm’s failure. I conducted interviews, reviewed
documents, analyzed videos, and searched the Internet to construct a narrative of
inBloom’s story, and I presented that narrative in Chapter Four.
I will present the findings that grew out of inBloom’s narrative here. My findings
cover three main areas: findings related to the institutional logics at play in both the board
and activist communities, findings related to the social context in which inBloom existed,
and findings related to the decisions that the board members made as they reacted to
conditions created by the previous two areas.
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First, I found that competing and conflicting logics were largely responsible for
the behaviors that led to inBloom’s failure, and that these logics can be separated into two
groups, both external and internal. Externally, the logics that govern the free market and
underpin the ways that firms interact with their clients came into direct conflict with the
logic of communities and underpin the attitudes and modes of interaction that education
stakeholders used to come together. Internally, board members experienced logic conflict
when they split themselves into two co-existing factions: the business group and the
education group. The business group, which included inBloom’s CEO and its Chief
Product Officer, made decisions relating to the inBloom’s business model and client-
facing dealings, and were chiefly governed by the logic of that business. The education
group, which included Peggy Brookins and Stacey Childress, made decisions relating to
the ways that inBloom’s products were meant to be used in school, and were chiefly
governed by the logic of schooling. Neither group believed that these logics were in
conflict, but inBloom’s story suggests otherwise.
Second, I found that the social context in which inBloom was created, grew to
dominance, and withered away was largely bound by inBloom’s (in)ability to craft
compelling narratives and present them to stakeholder communities. InBloom made the
case for its existence to two primary constituencies: the venture capital community in the
form of the Gates and Carnegie foundations (among others), and the stakeholder
community in the form of educators, parents, and privacy activists.
InBloom’s managers presented themselves to the venture capital community in
education technology as masters of an emerging technological paradigm that would
radically re-make instruction. InBloom’s products would do this by harnessing the data
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that students were already generating – coupled with the identifying information that
schools already possessed – and packaging it in such a way that it could be easily
analyzed by educators. The SLI was a “silver bullet” that would improve outcomes for
students all over the country, and, by so doing, increase the overall productivity of the
United States economy. This was understandably appealing to venture philanthropists
43

like Bill Gates and the managers of the Carnegie Foundation. Over time, this became the
story that inBloom told itself about itself, creating a self-reinforcing narrative that
prevented its managers from understanding the impact their firm was having on
stakeholders.
For those stakeholders, the social context and narrative was significantly different.
When inBloom presented itself to stakeholder groups, it used the same story and strategy
that had worked so effectively with the capital community. But rather than seeing the SLI
as a way to improve instruction, the stakeholder community saw it as yet another in a
growing list of ways that private industry was invading public education and profiting off
the hard work of teachers and students. More than this, activists like Diane Ravitch and
Leonie Haimson saw inBloom’s data management model as an alarming invasion of
privacy and fit inBloom and the SLI into the ongoing story of “evil corporations”
destroying public education through standardized testing in the Common Core and the
broader project of neoliberal education. Ultimately, it was this narrative that dominated
the policy conversation and drove inBloom out of business.
My third general finding leads on from the narrative and social context problem:
that inBloom’s managers suffered from a failure of imagination, and were unable to

43
For more on the role of venture philanthropy in public education and the
disproportionate impact it has had on education policy, see Saltman, 2010.
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conceive of the possibility that the stakeholders’ counter-narrative might supplant their
own in the minds of parents and policy-makers. This failure came about in an atmosphere
of competing logics in the boardroom, with some managers applying the logic of
community while others acted under the logic of capitalist markets. The members of
inBloom’s board were seldom aware of this conflict, even as it resulted in a more or less
constant environment of “talking past” each other as one group “spoke education” with
the other group, who “spoke business.” If inBloom’s managers had been able to better-
control the narrative that sprung up around their firm, the SLI might still exist and
inBloom might still be the primary provider of data management services in schools.
In this chapter, I provide a summary of my findings, beginning with findings
relating to institutional logics. I continue on to discuss social context findings, and finish
with findings related to inBloom’s decision-making practices. I conclude with a
discussion of my findings.
The Logics at Work on inBloom’s Board
As I indicated above, there were significant and ongoing instances of competing
and conflicting logics that shaped inBloom’s managerial environment. While not all of
these conflicts resulted in adverse outcomes at the firm level on their own, the volume of
the conflicts proved too much to bear, and inBloom collapsed under their weight.
Logics in Conflict
I found that conflicts and competition sprang up around three main forms of
institutional logic: market/business logic, community logic, and the logic of education
and schooling.
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Market logic. Thornton and Ocasio (2008) conceptualize the logic of capitalist
markets as being dominated by forces that encourage expansion and the pursuit of profits,
both of which are balanced against principles of supply and demand. This is an analytical
structure that goes back at least as far as Adam Smith (2014/1776), and one which
simultaneously encouraged and constrained the members of inBloom’s board.
InBloom’s managers valued rapid expansion, driven by the desire to dominate the
student data management market. Even though inBloom (and its predecessor, SLC) was a
not-for-profit corporation, other modes of influence drove inBloom’s managers to seek
large sources of revenue for the firm. This came in the form of entering into large
contracts with education agencies that were both large, as in the states of Louisiana and
New York, and small, as in the JeffCo schools. Market logic requires “success” to be
measured in this way; even if a firm does not seek out profits, the generation of revenue
in excess of operating expenses is a driving force behind expansion. InBloom’s managers
needed the firm to be successful in this way to satisfy the institutional investors which
had brought inBloom into being. The motivations behind seeking inBloom’s material
success were manifold: seeking a return on investment, desiring for the firm to be seen as
dominant across a range of dimensions, and bringing in enough money to continue the
firm’s rapid expansion and the development of new products.
This type of expansion and its accompanying logic resulted in inBloom’s
managers valuing growing the company over providing the kind of transparency that
stakeholders expected. Time and again, inBloom’s managers had the opportunity to
frame the firm’s expansion in terms of student success or educational improvement, but
they did not. For example, when JeffCo parents protested against the implementation of
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the SLI, inBloom could easily have used the opportunity to discuss how the SLI was
beneficial for educators, perhaps by discussing their product’s connection to
individualized instruction. Instead, they allowed their opponents to frame the SLI as an
invasion of privacy, and management engaged stakeholders on that basis. The privacy
dispute was one that inBloom could never win; as I showed in chapter four, nobody
involved in the student data industry believes that data can ever be fully secured.
Although inBloom’s board was factionalized, they nevertheless operated as a
single unit when interacting with the external environment. One way this unity
manifested itself was through their valuing of the SLI’s success over the experience of
inBloom’s client base. That is, they valued their products more than their users. Market
logic facilitates the kind of rapid expansion that inBloom enjoyed early on, but the
market for education services is not the same as, for example, the market for auto parts,
or even the same as inBloom’s analogs in non-educational digital technology. By
allowing the logic of capitalist markets to “win” competitions against the other logics that
constrained inBloom, its managers virtually guaranteed inBloom’s failure. Not because
markets are “bad” in general – markets are essentially value-neutral circumstances – but
because the education market is special. As Diane Ravitch told me, “Schooling isn’t a
business. These people need to recognize that when you do business with a school,
there’s a higher standard.” Whether they are for- or not-for-profit, firms working in this
space ultimately serve two masters: the usual accountability to shareholders and investors
in addition to managing their institutional role of working to improve the lives of
children. Like the healthcare industry, the education market is predicated on the idea that
firms must consistently and transparently work for the success of students, and hold that
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success to be at least equal to generating income for the firm. In practice, this means that
players in this space must carefully manage the ways that they are seen by their
stakeholders as well as their shareholders. InBloom’s managers failed to recognize this
as they aggressively expanded without addressing stakeholders’ growing lists of
concerns, a reality which is particularly puzzling, given their long-term involvement in
education and education technology.
Community logic. Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury (2012) frame community
logic as the opposite of market logic. The logic of community as an institution rewards
solidarity and prizes the collective over the individual, which is to say that the needs of
the many outweigh the needs of the few (Roddenberry & Bennett, 1982). Activists
invoked community logic when they began to work against inBloom’s expansion, and
consistently articulated their collective position as actions their community was taking
against a group of individual outsiders. Activists were so successful in employing
community logic that education leaders and policymakers eventually began casting their
responses to inBloom in the terms of the activists’ community-driven narrative.
One key implication of this approach to collective action was the insistence that
opposition to inBloom was a litmus test for stakeholders who opposed alleged invasions
of privacy in general. For the activist community, student data privacy was more
important than the utility of the SLI, a position which consistently confused inBloom’s
managers. The logic of the market emphasized utility over privacy; the logic of the
community emphasized privacy over utility. Because actors operating within the
institution of community are bound to encourage and employ solidarity-building
strategies – which the activist and stakeholder community did, very successfully – they
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are able to craft narratives which appeal to other members of the community.
Overcoming narratives like these can be difficult, especially when the inBloom’s
stakeholder community was already opposed to the kind of work that inBloom proposed.
Community logic and its accompanying narrative was already deeply entrenched when
the SLI came online; by the time inBloom’s managers recognized the power of that
narrative, it was too late.
Along these same lines, the activist community explicitly valued the user’s
experience over the success of the product. For people like Leonie Haimson and, later,
people like Dan McMinimee at JeffCo, the perception of the SLI was more important
than the product itself. Even though the SLI and its various “dashboard” applications
were easy to use, that ease was less important than the reaction that the users had to the
underlying mechanisms by which the SLI did its work.
InBloom’s end users were looking for a digital solution to what was essentially an
analog problem: how best to manage the data their students generated. Dan McMinimee
was interested in helping his teachers make more informed decisions about how to work
with the students in their care. This is community logic in its most basic form;
McMinimee made choices aimed at helping other people. Whether or not he benefitted
personally from those choices was secondary, and based on his conversation with me, his
understanding of the larger student data market was minimal at best.
At the same time, inBloom’s expansion strategy as authored by Iwan
Streichenberger and Sharren Bates was to move forward with SLI’s rollout regardless of
the reactions of stakeholders. InBloom’s board ignored early objections from activists in
New York to implement the SLI in Louisiana. In Louisiana, they brushed privacy
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activists aside to implement the SLI in Colorado. They began to pay attention to
stakeholder concerns after inBloom’s contracts with Colorado were cancelled, but still
held fast to their collective belief that the public would eventually “see the light” and
accept the SLI for what they thought it was. All of these decisions were centered around
an idea first set forth by Streichenberger and supported by external actors like Bill Gates
at SXSWEdu: that it was essential for inBloom to expand quickly in order to effectively
dominate the student data market. This is market logic in its most basic form; inBloom’s
managers made decisions aimed at securing the continued operation of their firm.
These logics were directly in conflict, but they did not need to be. The most
successful players in the education sector secure market-share by making managerial
decisions that benefit their firms and the people whom their firms serve; balancing the
needs of these constituencies is the central managerial concern for education services
firms. So it was not important to inBloom’s end users that the SLI was a successful
product, or that it came to be widely-used. Instead, inBloom’s users valued what they
perceived to be their own privacy concerns over the SLI’s success. As I argued in the
previous chapter, whether or not these concerns were grounded in the reality of the SLI
was immaterial. The product was not important; the users were.
Education logic. Here, I depart from Friedland and Alford’s six institutions
(1991) and Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury’s 2012 list of seven to propose an eighth:
the institutional logic of education. If institutional logics as defined by Thornton and
Ocasio in 1999 are “the socially constructed historical patterns of material practices,
assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules by which individuals produce and reproduce their
material subsistence, organize time and space, and provide meaning to their social
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reality” (p. 804), and if the family and community are institutions (Friedland & Alford,
1991; Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, 2012), then the institution of education fits this
definition as well. Education exists as a social construct which has been gradually defined
and re-defined over time to fit local circumstances much in the way that markets, the
state, the family, democracy, and religions have. The ongoing attempts of the American
federal government to regulate and re-work its public education system is largely a
process of manipulating education’s set of material practices to reflect a changing set of
values and beliefs. And, if we are to believe Bourdieu’s (1973) and Coleman’s (1990)
arguments about cultural and social capital, then education’s central enterprise is the
(re)production of subsistence and organizational practice.
The logic’s application in the story of inBloom represents what I argue is the
critical question at the center of schooling. Which is more important: that the system
functions more efficiently, or that the system safeguards the rights of students? This is
education’s inherent tradeoff, vividly played out in the story of inBloom. The SLI was
designed to help education function more efficiently at the (perceived) expense of
students’ reasonable expectation of a right to privacy. When activists like Diane Ravitch
and Leonie Haimson reacted to inBloom’s relationship with the Gates Foundation and
Rupert Murdoch, their primary concern related to students and families being able to
manage their own identifiable data. While it was true that the SLI needed access to
personal data such as age, test scores, and some form of personal identification in order to
be effective, it was also true that the systems inBloom had in place to safeguard this data
were no less secure than those used by banks, or, as many of the people engaged in this
study pointed out, by Facebook. The stakeholders’ argument was that efficiency was
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secondary to the expectation of privacy, and that, as Haimson said, “It wasn’t about it
[the data] ‘falling into’
44
the wrong hands. It was already there! InBloom is the wrong
hands!” The stakeholder community believed that students’ privacy had already been
violated by the SLI’s presence in schools; that inBloom’s products might be able to
improve instructional efficiency was so distant a consideration that none of the
stakeholders I interviewed for this study mentioned it, even when questioned closely
about the ways they understood the SLI.
Because the education agencies which contracted with inBloom already possessed
the data that they shared with inBloom, and that the transmission to inBloom involved no
new data, inBloom created a value proposition for districts that serve the institutional
logic of education. The analysis of the data being offered by inBloom would help
practitioners organize their material practice with an aim to improve the subsistence of
students. This brings education logic into conflict with market logic, even as it peacefully
co-exists with the logic of community: prioritizing rapid expansion over the organization
of educational practice was problematic for education leaders and stakeholders, and this
problematization found its expression in the late-period conflicts between the members of
inBloom’s board.
The Result of Competing Logics
In the end, market logic and its accompanying material practices became the
dominant paradigm within which inBloom operated. Despite repeated attempts of
Brookins, Horn, Childress, and other members of the education faction to steer inBloom
towards a more moderate expansion strategy, Streichenberger and Bates successfully

44
Haimson’s air quotes were visible in the video conference.
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argued for the prioritization of market-based thinking and strategizing over the logic of
education.
Market logic and board decision-making. As inBloom expanded into new
markets, the considerations demanded by the logic of education fell by the wayside. In
Louisiana, inBloom accepted student data identified by SSN, even though its stated
policy was to discourage the use of SSNs to identify students. In the JeffCo schools,
inBloom’s managers chose to work more closely with JeffCo’s administrators than with
the school board that eventually cancelled inBloom’s contracts. People like Dan
McMinimee appreciated the presence of educators (and their accompanying logic
perspective) in negotiations with inBloom, but when the negotiations were complete,
market logic once again took over. This is not to say that McMinimee was misled. Rather
that Streichenberger and Bates successfully employed education logic to secure JeffCo’s
contract, and then backed away from the transparency and privacy considerations
inherent to that logic in order to return to the market logic of their expansion strategy.
This balancing act is not uncommon in organizations; managers and workers
often make context-specific decisions by applying the constraints of the institutional logic
they judge to be the most applicable (Delbridge & Edwards, 2013). Approaching
decision-making in this way is the primary way by which organizational actors navigate
conflicting logics within their organizations (Lamont & Molnar, 2002). Murray’s (2010)
findings suggested that conflicting logics are inherently unstable when they overlap, and
inBloom’s collapse replicates this finding. Even though education and market logics
competed on inBloom’s board, one of them was bound to win out in the end, and the
selection – both purposeful on the part of Streichenberger and Bates and unwittingly on
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the part of Horn, Wise, Brookins and others – of market logic led directly to
organizational collapse.
Community logic and policy change. The flipside of the board’s market logic
was the community logic under which activists and stakeholders operated. Haimson’s
Class Size Matters in New York was initially a small player in inBloom’s story. Diane
Ravitch’s blog, while widely-read by the anti-reform community at large, was also
proportionately less-influential at the beginning of the fight. In other states, resistance to
inBloom and the SLI was likewise isolated and uncoordinated, allowing inBloom’s
managers to feel safe in ignoring the concerns that the various groups raised. Wilhoit’s
assessment that Streichenberger thought “the whole thing would go away” is evidence of
this thinking. Obviously, the problem did not go away.
Over time, activists were able to successfully and independently invoke
community logic to bring the stakeholder community in line with the aims of the anti-
inBloom community. By invoking community logic and its accompanying emphasis on
working for the common good, activists placed inBloom into the larger anti-Common-
Core and opt-out movements. This in turn allowed the community to mobilize additional
pre-existing resources to oppose inBloom, and begin to shift the policy conversation in
their favor. It is much easier to convince a group of policymakers that their constituents’
children are at risk than it is to convince them that rapid expansion into new education
technology markets is an important policy priority.
This represents a seminal moment in the extramural logic conflict between
inBloom’s ascendant market logic and the entrenched logic of the stakeholder
community. Policymakers in Louisiana themselves engaged in community logic (through
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the bureaucratic logic of the nation-state) when they shifted education policy away from
inBloom and the SLI, as did the school board members in JeffCo when they cancelled
their contracts. And ultimately, the community-logic driven public hearings that led to
actual legislative change in New York brought about the failure of the already-battered
inBloom.
A Third Way
As the literature I reviewed in Chapter 2 suggested, there is a “third way” for
organizations like inBloom to resolve internal logic conflicts. Rather than having logics
exist side-by-side (cf. Reay & Hinings, 2009) or having logics in competition (cf.
Haveman & Rao, 2006), organizational actors can come together to co-create a new,
hybridized logic that leverages the advantages of the competing logics while casting aside
the less-desirable elements (cf. Murray 2010).
InBloom is an example of an organization which suffered from conflicting logics,
ultimately succumbing to market forces and a changing political landscape as a result of
its managers “choosing” the wrong logic for inBloom’s context. Market logic triumphed
over community and education logics to the detriment of the firm. But it is no more likely
that a firm driven by victorious community or education logics would have succeeded
where inBloom failed; the education services market is littered with failed altruistic
firms.
Instead, inBloom’s managers could have worked together to fuse market logic
with community logic and the logic of schooling to create something new. It would be no
small feat to find a path where the logic of communities that intersects with market
logics, but successful firms like Geo Listening have managed to bring multiple
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competing logics together to create a long-lasting, stable business model (Smith, 2016).
Although inBloom’s managers would likely have created a locally-defined hybridized
logic that made sense to them, it is possible to imagine a model that worked proactively
with members of the activist community to create a set of privacy protocols that would
have safeguarded student identities while still making the platform useful. Even setting
aside the possibility that prominent activists like Diane Ravitch and Leonie Haimson
would never have been mollified by inBloom’s potential concessions on the issue of
privacy, it may not have mattered: if the parents had been satisfied, Ravitch’s call for a
class action lawsuit would probably have fallen on deaf ears.
Hybridization is not always the most successful way to resolve institutional logic
conflicts, but in a case like inBloom, where management allowed their competing
interests to “win” and “lose” – itself a form of embodied market logic – a “third way”
might have made a meaningful difference in outcome for the firm.
The Role of Social Context
The logic conflicts responsible for inBloom’s collapse played themselves out
against a backdrop that was socially-constructed. The social landscape in education
technology circles between January of 2013 and April of 2014 encouraged inBloom’s
managers to present their firm’s brand in a very specific way. They presented one
narrative to their funders in the Gates and Carnegie Foundations, and, when they
bothered to at all, a different narrative to the public.
The Gates/Carnegie Narrative
The Gates Foundation’s mission is very specific: “… to ensure that all people—
especially those with the fewest resources—have access to the opportunities they need to
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succeed in school and life” (Gates Foundation, n.d.). In service of that mission, Gates
provides funding to organizations which are able to effectively convince its funding
division that they will be able to encourage personal success. This was the task of
SLC/inBloom as they sought the initial large grant from Gates, and inBloom’s managers
crafted a specific narrative about the SLI that was designed to elicit their desired response
from the Stacey Childress’ team at Gates.
The story they told was about individualized instruction. As I have discussed in
previous chapters, the promise of innovative education technologies to provide every
student with an individualized learning plan is one which a large number of technology
firms have been and currently are trying to deliver. InBloom was one of these firms, so
the pitch was about staking out a position in the market and providing material that would
persuade the Gates Foundation to invest.
The utility of the SLI and its relationship to individualized instruction was self-
evident to members of the Gates Foundation, so all that remained was to “prove”
inBloom’s ability to rapidly scale up its product and contract portfolio. Because of
Childress’ longstanding relationship with SLC, developing this part of the narrative was
relatively easy: Childress already understood the expansion strategies that SLC’s
advisory board had begun to develop. In this respect, securing private funding, even at
the unprecedented level of $87 million, was almost a foregone conclusion.
Providing a convincing narrative to the public proved much more difficult.
The Public Narrative
Where the narrative that the managers of inBloom presented to their funders and
other members of the education technology community was concrete, the narrative they
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presented to the public was vague. InBloom’s mission statement provides a representative
example of this opacity:
[InBloom] is an independent, non-profit organization whose mission is to provide
a valuable resource to teachers, students and families, to improve education. We
solve a common technology issue facing school districts today: the inability of
electronic instructional tools used in classrooms to work in coordination with (or
“talk to”) one another (inBloom, n.d.).
All of this is true and is an accurate assessment of the SLI, but the statement is so
sweeping as to be useless to concerned parents and activists. InBloom’s management
should have known better.
Like the private messaging, the public messaging leaned heavily on the idea that
individualized learning was the way of the future and that implementing products like the
SLI was the only way to conjure that future into being. This way of presenting the SLI
relied on two key assumptions. First, that individualized instruction – as conceived by the
education technology community generally and inBloom in particular – was an important
goal of public education. And second, that the deployment of technology in the service of
individualized instruction was an unalloyed public good.
To paraphrase Richard Culatta’s perspective from the previous chapter,
individualized instruction is the best – and maybe the only – way to improve student
achievement beyond the incremental gains provided by advances in pedagogical practice.
But for the public, the idea that something like “individualized instruction” means
tracking the behavior of their children is an unacceptable tradeoff.
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It is because of this misunderstanding that Iwan Streichenberger and his team of
managers failed to imagine the ways that the public would see their firm. The SLI was
essentially a digital version of the kinds of pen-and-paper tracking that schools have been
doing since the idea of schooling was invented, and that is how the SLI’s developers saw
it: a technological advancement that made a mundane task obsolete. InBloom’s managers
failed to articulate this perspective to the public in a way that stakeholders would find
acceptable. Instead, they dismissed early calls for transparency from groups like Class
Size Matters in New York, and doubled down on their solution-based narrative. This
strategy only made the SLI seem more like a solution in search of a problem to the
stakeholder communities that had expressed privacy-based concerns.
In practice, this meant that inBloom spent very little time justifying its product
and business model to the public. Many of the activists I spoke with for this study felt
that inBloom had done nothing at all to present the SLI to the people. In JeffCo, for
example, even though the school board went out of their way to be transparent, parents
still felt shut out of the process. In Louisiana, the state’s involvement with inBloom was
presented to the public as a fait accompli.
InBloom’s strategy in Louisiana is particularly instructive in this respect.
InBloom had presented very little to Louisiana’s public before journalists broke the SSN-
tracking story there. And then, after the story broke, the only action inBloom took was to
re-iterate its privacy policy: we don’t warehouse any data in our servers, and we’d rather
states not use SSNs to identify their students. This was not comforting for parents who
believed – wrongly – that their students’ identities were being locked away in a server
farm in Georgia.
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InBloom did take care to respond to the concerns of Class Size Matters and NYC
Public School Parents in New York, but only after the group had successfully sued
NYSED and obtained inBloom’s contracts with the state. InBloom’s response to the
concerns of stakeholders in New York was better than it was in Louisiana, but the
messaging remained the same: the data was secure, it was not being sold, and the SLI was
what was best for kids. The management team even went so far as to create a new high-
level position and title – the Chief Privacy Officer – believing that the problem with their
messaging was that the main concern of the activist community was that inBloom was
not doing enough to safeguard their data. But the your-data-is-safe narrative that
inBloom’s managers had hoped would change the minds of activists was far too targeted,
missing the larger argument that stakeholders wanted to have.
The conversation the activists wanted to have was about the encroachment of
private interests on public education. For them, the idea that inBloom was violating the
privacy rights of children was a symptom, not a cause. This fundamental disagreement
about the role that inBloom played is thrown into bold relief by what the same group of
activists have been doing since inBloom’s fall. Many of them have continued to be
involved with privacy issues while others have turned their attention to other issues. All
of them, however, have remained active in advancing the privatization-is-bad argument,
most obviously by opposing the implementation of the Common Core and its
accompanying testing regimes.
InBloom’s managers did not recognize that they were a part of this narrative, and
so attempted to craft a public narrative around a different set of priorities. Like many
others involved in high-level efforts to reform public education, inBloom’s managers saw
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themselves as “good guys,” even while Haimson was calling them “bad guys.”
InBloom’s mission was to create and distribute products that would, in their view,
strengthen the role of teachers and positively impact student achievement. On the surface,
then, inBloom was not a privatizing force in public education. But on a deeper level – the
one on which the activists were acting and continue to act – the very fact that inBloom
was a private firm meant that its involvement in education was specifically geared
towards stripping away public control of the school system. These two points of view are
irreconcilable; either inBloom absolutely was not involved in privatization or it
absolutely was.
Slow to Change
When change came to inBloom’s messaging, it came slowly. So slowly, in fact,
that the eventual strategic changes the board made were too late to prevent organizational
collapse. Board members viewed the appointment of Virginia Bartlett to the newly-
created post of Chief Privacy Officer (CPO) as an olive branch to the activist community,
a way to prove to concerned stakeholders that inBloom was serious about protecting
student privacy.
The idea that a firm might need a CPO was just beginning to gain currency in the
spring of 2014. While it was not uncommon for corporations to have top-level managers
with titles like Chief Security Officer (CSO) or Chief Information Security Officer
(CISO), these positions were primarily concerned with creating internal protections of
proprietary information and data. In the case of inBloom, a CSO might have been tasked
with ensuring that data relating to the development of the SLI remained in-house, and
might have put safeguards in place to make it more difficult for independent hackers or
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competitors to gain access to the SLI for the purposes of developing a product of their
own.
This was not Virginia Bartlett’s role. InBloom’s CPO was tasked with presenting
inBloom’s privacy policy to the public in a convincing way. In this respect, Bartlett
played a role analogous to the White House Press Secretary; the job was to articulate
board policy, not to play a role in crafting new approaches to safeguarding student data.
This is an area where a different strategy would likely have paid off. If Bartlett had been
able to appear before New York’s congressional hearing on inBloom and discussed the
ways that she had been able to improve inBloom’s security or the role that she was
playing in changing the way that inBloom did business, the public might have reacted
differently than they did.
But even if Bartlett’s role had been a more active one – and if she had been able
to articulate her role more completely to New York’s stakeholders – the strategy change
would have come too late to stave off disaster. InBloom continued to roll out the SLI
without any changes after its failure in Louisiana. The time to make a public strategy
change was in the brief period between Louisiana’s cancellation and the board meetings
at JeffCo in Colorado. There again, inBloom’s managers displayed characteristic
decision-making inertia. The education faction on the board trusted the business faction
to make the right decisions; the business faction trusted the education faction to present
the SLI effectively to education leaders. Neither of these hoped-for conditions
materialized, a state of affairs which the board should have recognized but somehow did
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The Politics of inBloom
One way to understand how all of this played out is to cast inBloom’s story as a
political narrative involving missteps stemming from misjudgment of the social climate
in the United States. Friedland and Alford defined political participation as “those past or
present activities by private citizens and private or public organizations and groups that
are more or less directly aimed at influencing the selection of governmental structures
and personnel, and the actions they take or do not take” (1975, p. 430, emphasis in the
original). By this definition, inBloom’s management was collectively and individually
participating in the political process, and, by extension, their actions were political ones.
Instrumentality. In addition to mishandling the ways that institutional logics
were combing an competing in the board room, inBloom’s managers were also
misjudging the political climate in which their firm was operating. This led to concrete,
instrumental actions with long-lasting effects. For example, the decision to put out a press
release in Louisiana suggesting that inBloom did not choose to have student data
identified by SSN pass through its software, but that it had done nothing illegal, was a
political one. The calculus was that it would be best not to be seen bowing to protesters
because the self-evident utility of the SLI would eventually win the day. This was, of
course, a catastrophic mistake, leading to political action being taken against inBloom in
JeffCo and eventually in New York.
The activist community, led by Ravitch and Haimson, were also political actors,
themselves making strategic decisions based on the evolving political context of the
debate. The motivations behind these political actions were somewhat different than
those that drove inBloom’s management, but in the end, the outcomes were the same.
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Ravitch and, to a lesser extent, Haimson, was a well-known figure in the anti-testing
movement that had initially sprung up around the No Child Left Behind standards
regime. In the time since the initial flare-up surrounding NCLB, Ravitch has been able to
amass a political credibility of sorts among those to whom her message of governmental
overreach appeals. The data I presented in Chapter 4 indicate that a subset of Ravitch’s
supporters have been – and indeed still are – willing to oppose any issue of Ravitch’s
choosing. This choice process is, of course, a political calculation, and Ravitch’s choice
to pursue inBloom after labeling the SLI “identity theft” was a political move with long-
lasting effects.
By ignoring Ravitch and Haimson’s objections to the SLI, inBloom’s
management was making a series of politically-motivated choices that flowed from their
misunderstanding of the education services market. That is, Streichenberger, Bates, and
the rest of inBloom’s board did not fully comprehend the nuances of education politics,
with disastrous results for their organization.
Symbolic action. As political actors operating in a political context, the actions of
inBloom’s managers also had symbolic weight. The appointment of Virginia Bartlett as
inBloom’s Chief Privacy Officer provides as useful example of the symbolic nature of
inBloom’s political actions. By the autumn of 2013, it was clear to inBloom’s
management that they would need to take concrete actions to mollify the anger that had
sprung up around the SLI, especially as congressional hearings got underway in New
York. To that end, Streichenberger appointed Virginia Bartlett to the position of Chief
Privacy Officer, a symbolic “peace offering” to the activist community. See, the
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appointment seemed to say, we do care about privacy. We’ve hired somebody to look
after the data.
Virginia Bartlett did indeed become a symbol for inBloom, but not in the way that
its managers had intended. Instead of assuaging the concerns of privacy advocates,
Bartlett’s appointment came across as a cynical move, a sort of re-ordering of deck chairs
on the Titanic. Symbolic political actions can succeed or fail, largely based on the degree
to which community members react to the symbolic offering (Collins & Hanneman,
1998). Here, Bartlett-as-symbol failed because the body of political actors that Ravitch
and Haimson had assembled did not believe in the symbol. Of course, it is unlikely that
any symbolic action undertaken by inBloom’s management so late in the game would
have been successful, but, to the board’s credit, they tried anyway. It just proved to be too
little too late.
Confused Decision-making
The data I have presented here suggest that the board’s inability to see that
Louisiana’s exit was the beginning of the end for inBloom. Their failure to recognize and
respond to changing market conditions dictated by the shifting social conflict meant that
the fate of inBloom was sealed the day Streichenberger sent his letter to John White, the
head of the LSOE. The inability of the board to make effective decisions in this shifting
context was down to two related conditions: a lack of imagination, and a failure to
recognize the role of competing logics.
A Failure of Imagination
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Part of board members’ failure to understand what was happening beyond the
walls of the board room was that they were, almost by necessity, committed to the
changes that the SLI would make possible in public education.
True believers. In a very real sense, the board members were uniformly “true
believers,” and, as such, were susceptible to the problem of groupthink (Hart, 1990; Janis,
1982). They believed that their firm was an innovative one, and came to see its
innovative nature as a justification for its righteousness in the market. This way of
thinking is circular: innovation makes a firm better-able to respond to market conditions,
which in turn drives further innovation. This belief has been widely embraced in the
technology sector in general (e.g. Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2012) and in education
technology in particular (e.g. Simon, 2014).
But belief in innovation alone is not something upon which to build a business
strategy. InBloom’s directors also believed strongly in the ideal of individualized
instruction, and the ability of their product to deliver Richard Culatta’s “holy grail” to
schools. Over time, the board members began to believe so strongly in the necessity of
individualized instruction in schools – and the ability of their own product to realize the
idea’s potential – that it becomes impossible for them to see the SLI in any other way.
Even after inBloom’s collapse, many of those involved in the SLI and its accompanying
clients, including JeffCo’s Dan McMinimee and inBloom’s Michael Horn, continue to
hold this belief.
Too big to fail. Along these same lines, board members came to believe that the
social capital that went along with the financial capital provided by their two main
funders would protect them as things began to fall apart. After all, how could a firm with
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$80 million in funding from the Gates Foundation fail? The Carnegie Foundation is as
heavily invested in education initiatives as the Gates Foundation, and both organizations
suffered a significant setback in terms of institutional prestige when inBloom collapsed.
InBloom’s story shows that a firm’s funding base is no less a predictor of long-term
viability than the prominence of its investors. InBloom was not able to protect itself from
mounting criticism by falling back on the goodwill of Gates and Carnegie. Whatever the
content of private conversations between inBloom and its investors in the spring of 2014,
both the Gates and Carnegie Foundations had publicly distanced themselves from
inBloom’s struggling management.
Another dimension of the imagination failure is the idea that firm as large and
influential as inBloom at its peak was too important to fall by the wayside. There were
several smaller firms offering student data management at the same time as inBloom, but
they were mostly confined to competing with each other for the scraps left behind after
inBloom concluded its contracts with big players like the states of New York and
Massachusetts. InBloom dominated the student data management market to such an
extent that they came to define what it meant to be a part of that market. Valerie Simon
(2014), an education technology journalist with the Associated Press referred to the
student data management market as “the inBloom niche.” Like Rockefeller’s Standard
Oil before it was broken into pieces by the nascent Securities and Exchange Commission,
inBloom was the industry’s prime mover. Its managers could not imagine that a firm of
their size could do anything other than grow larger.
In essence, inBloom’s board of directors thought that they would be protected
from the gathering storm of protest and objection by their funders and their size. They
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were not. Even powerful education technology interests like the Gates Foundation cannot
circumvent the bedrock principle of public education: that it exists to serve the public
good.
Crippled by Competing Logics
The board’s decisions that facilitated the failure of imagination existed under a
trio of conflicting logics, as I have described above (see Figure 5.1). Market logic defined
the decisions relating to expansion, community logic defined the decisions relating to
interactions with the public, and education logic defined the ability of inBloom to exist
and constrained its ability to survive.

Figure 5.1. Map of logics and their results. Logics inform decision types, which
collectively lead to a managerial symptom, eventually leading to organizational collapse.
This is not the only way that logics can inform outcomes, but, in the case of inBloom, this
is how the process unfolded.

Moving ahead with the plan. The expansion plan as devised by Streichenberger
and Bates represented the dominance of market logic in a space which could have been
Institutional
Logics
Decision
Types &
Constraints
Cause Result
Organizational
Collapse
Failure of
Imagination
Expansion Market
Public
Relations
Community
Existence &
Suvivability
Education
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more co-representational. Because inBloom was a not-for-profit enterprise, the strategy
of rapid expansion to capture market share was largely an unnecessary one. Dominating
its market could easily have been a secondary concern; why not focus on providing a
valuable, transparent, and looked-for service to a small number of school districts and
expanding in a slower, more considered way instead? For-profit firms seek sustained
competitive advantages and market dominance as a way to ensure their long-term
viability, but inBloom’s funding was not in danger and its product was an important one.
There was no real need to expand as rapidly as inBloom did, but Streichenberger and
Bates both had significant experience working with for-profit education technology
firms, and they brought those management styles with them. When they prioritized
expansion over transparency, they opened themselves up to the attacks which inevitably
came from stakeholder constituencies all over the United States.
Failure to express concerns. Education leaders in places like JeffCo and
Louisiana could have shared their stakeholders’ concerns with inBloom’s management,
but they were also blinded by the SLI’s self-evident utility. Likewise, the education
faction on inBloom’s board could have pressed their concerns more concretely to the
business faction, but the clash of logics made those interactions – when they happened at
all – largely unproductive. InBloom’s late period, starting from Louisiana’s contract
cancellation and ending with inBloom’s collapse, is defined by actors sharing concerns
with others who agreed with them and failing to press those concerns to larger, more
contested groups. People like Peggy Brookins, who expressed increasing frustration with
the lack of communication between inBloom and its clients to me in our interview, did
not share their frustrations with other members of the board. These concerns were
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expressed to me in terms of community logic – what can we do, what should we have
done – a perspective which was lost in conversations among the board at large.
Too little, too late. As the curtain fell on inBloom, members of the education
faction began to express themselves in terms of the logic of education, making statements
about safeguarding the public good in the face of organizational collapse and talking
about what was best for students. This type of messaging would likely have been
attractive to people in the activist community – if not to Ravitch and Haimson themselves
– but by the time Streichenberger and Bates were ready to cast their decisions under
different types of logic, the damage had already been done. The clash of logics which
defined inBloom’s decision-making had taken its course.
Or was it? There are alternative explanations for why inBloom’s managers were
unable to respond to the concerns of their client base. I have argued that inBloom’s
collapse came about largely because its directors were unable to control the narrative that
sprang up around the firm’s product, and that this fundamental failing on the part of the
directors made it impossible for them to control the damage that they had unintentionally
done to their own brand.
But other hypotheses for the reasons behind inBloom’s collapse exist. For
example, it may have been that inBloom’s managers failed to consolidate their first-
mover advantages, leading to inBloom’s failure at the hands of its competitors. In this
scenario, the failing of inBloom’s board is not about controlling the narrative surrounding
inBloom’s brand, but rather about inBloom’s competitors being more responsive to
changing market conditions than inBloom. The managers of Knewton – inBloom’s
largest competitor at the time of its collapse – may have seen what inBloom’s managers
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did not, and changed Knewton’s product line to better-reflect the desires of education
stakeholders in an attempt to “head off” the privacy concerns that were plaguing
inBloom.
If this were true, it would make inBloom’s failure a conventional story about the
power of the free market to eliminate firms that fail to understand something fundamental
about the market they serve. But this reading of inBloom’s story fails under closer
scrutiny for three key reasons. First, the market that inBloom’s inhabited both during its
rise and its fall was not crowded. InBloom’s early success was largely due to the fact that
no other firm was offering a product like the SLI. InBloom had no meaningful
competition for clients, so it would not have been possible for inBloom’s collapse to be
the result of free-market competition.
Second, the firms that were working on similar “dashboard” products in 2013 and
2014 had purposely chosen not to bring them to market until after inBloom’s SLI was out
of beta release. Andrew Rotherham, a former member of SLC’s advisory board and
current education technology consultant, told me that the firms that would have been
inBloom’s competitors had adopted a wait-and-see approach to dashboard applications
because they saw what inBloom’s managers did not: that privacy issues were at the
forefront of the public’s objections to these products. This means that the firms that
would have competed for market-share with similar products affirmatively withheld them
while their managers watched inBloom’s story unfold. As a result, the data market was
largely competition-free in the spring of 2014; inBloom dominated the student data
market not because it was “the best,” but because other options had yet to come online.
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And finally, Michael Horn’s own narrative about inBloom’s collapse – published
in Forbes in December of 2014 – tells us what happened. InBloom did not collapse due
to pressure from competitors. Rather, inBloom collapsed due to pressure from the public
and to mismanagement from within. Even if meaningful competition had existed – which
it did not – inBloom’s managers would still have lost control of the narrative surrounding
the SLI, and inBloom’s brand would still have been irreparably damaged by its managers
collective negligence.
The Meaning of inBloom’s Collapse
My central argument – that inBloom was mismanaged at the highest level due to
an inability to control its own narrative – is supported by both my data and my findings.
But what do these findings mean? What does it mean to not control a firm’s narrative,
and how does that impact the firm’s longevity and ability to effectively compete in a
crowded market? And, most importantly for inBloom’s case, what were the specific
pitfalls, and how could they have been avoided?
Ignoring Past Experience
All of inBloom’s directors had previous experience in the education technology
market. Some of them – Streichenberger, Horn, Wilhoit, Bates – had been involved in ed
tech for more than a decade. They believed that this experience uniquely equipped them
to make effective managerial decisions as they grew their business; they were wrong.
Instead, the long experience and deep understanding that many of the managers had
developed over time led them to profoundly misread the larger context within which the
student data market exists. They believed deeply in the necessity and utility of the SLI
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because many of them had played key roles in developing the types of software that the
SLI could aggregate and analyze.
By being so invested – sometimes financially as well as mentally – in education
technology’s promise to remake instruction in the 21
st
century, they failed to see that the
public’s perception of education technology had shifted. The notion that government
agencies might be looking over the shoulders of parents and educators was completely
foreign to the context in which many of inBloom’s directors were trained and gained
early managerial experience. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, digital connectedness
seemed like a way to overcome many of society’s intractable problems. But by the time
of SLC/inBloom’s founding, public scandals surrounding domestic surveillance by the
federal government had made the public much less willing to allow data to be stored in
private hands. Ironically, public schools are governmental agencies; the data that parents
had hoped to keep out of government hands was in fact already the property of “the
government.”
Regardless, public perception of the manipulation and storage of data had
changed from a panacea to a cause for concern, and inBloom’s directors failed to take
into consideration that shift. It is unclear whether or not they even saw that a shift had
taken place. My data indicate that they did not, which is their principal failing as stewards
of their firm’s interests.
What this means in practice is that there were multiple points at which inBloom’s
board could have “turned back” and averted the firm’s collapse. These points are clearly
visible in hindsight, but managers with experience running large firms should have been
able to spot them. At the outset, they could have been clear with the public about what
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the SLI could and could not do, and they could have crafted a narrative which could have
forestalled activists’ baseless concerns about identity theft and the intrusion of private
industry into the lives of children. But they did not.
When they entered into a contract with the state of Louisiana which allowed the
LDOE to identify students by their SSNs, inBloom’s managers could have foreseen the
concerns of stakeholders and declined to accept data identified in that way. People all
over the United States are reluctant to share their SSNs with any organization,
government or otherwise, and while inBloom’s privacy policy staked out the position that
being in possession of records identified by SSN was legal, they could easily have
changed their data policy to reject those identifying methods. If it was too late to make
that change with the state of Louisiana, inBloom’s management could have easily made
the change a part of their contracts moving forward. But they did not.
When JeffCo cancelled its contract with inBloom after a protracted struggle with
angry parents and confused members of JeffCo’s school board, inBloom’s directors could
have recognized that future conflicts with concerned parents and activists would play out
in similar ways. The arguments leveled against the SLI in Colorado were not new, and
the failure to respond to those arguments with anything other than exasperation would
come back to haunt them when the same arguments cropped up six months later in New
York. That the SLI seemed to be a platform designed to extract sale-able data from
children (it was not), that Rupert Murdoch was controlling the ways that inBloom’s data
was used (he was not), or that the SLI was part of the Common Core (it was not): these
arguments were all incorrect, but they gained traction nevertheless. The board of directors
could have viewed JeffCo as a learning experience and paused their expansion strategy to
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refocus public attention on the value that the SLI offered to districts and students. But,
because of the conflicting logics which defined and constrained their decision-making,
they consistently chose the path that would lead to the dissolution of their organization.
InBloom’s managers were intelligent, dedicated professionals with extensive
backgrounds in the worlds of technology and education, but when they came together to
run a business, they were unable to see that nearly every decision they made was a
misguided one. Some of those decisions were guided by market logic, others by
community logic, and still others by education logic; all of these logics conflicted with
each other, leading inBloom’s managers to make confused choices that ultimately led
them astray. They could have worked these conflicts out if they had recognized them. But
they did not.
Plugging Into Existing Narratives
InBloom’s board of directors also failed to take into account that the SLI would
necessarily be seen as a part of the Common Core roll-out. The SLI was categorically not
connected to the Common Core – its development had begun years before, under the No
Child Left Behind accountability regime – but because its adoption coincided with the
beginning of parent resistance to the Common Core, the two were seen as one. As with
other elements of management’s failing, this was likely because the board knew that their
product was not part of the Common Core. This was self-evident to them, and they
assumed it would be self-evident to everyone else.
In reality, the deployment of a product like the SLI represented the worst fears of
opponents of the Common Core. Here was a product that had been privately developed
with funding from corporate interests that depended on data generated by children in
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order to work. These three elements are indeed true: SLC/inBloom was not connected to
any public agency, it was funded by contributions from the Gates and Carnegie
Foundations, and the SLI’s service agreements set forth conditions under which student
data could be gathered and shared. That none of these elements are (or should be)
worrying to parents and activists was immaterial; for activists and parents, the SLI’s
invasion of privacy was self-evident. That management’s and activists’ ideas of what was
“self-evident” about the SLI were polar opposites made a clash inevitable.

Figure 5.2. Bill Gates’ face as shown on a blog called “Rather Expose Them,” a website
which presents critiques of perceived liberal politics from an evangelical Christian
perspective. Notice that Gates’ eyes have been altered to appear goat-like and demonic.

InBloom typified the “evil corporation” that opponents to education privatization
so often invoke (see Figure 5.2), so it was not just the effective organizing strategies of
Haimson and Ravitch that turned the tide against inBloom – although those strategies
were indeed formidable – but rather that there was already a narrative infrastructure in
place. All that remained to organize protests against inBloom was to show that inBloom
was part of a larger set of trends that parents already found repugnant. InBloom’s
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management failed to recognize this when they attempted to present themselves to the
public, instead emphasizing how important sharing student data was, and how useful their
product was going to be. Characterizing inBloom in this way amounted to handing Iwan
Streichenberger and the rest of inBloom’s board a rope, which, through their ongoing
refusal to address inBloom’s role in the perpetuation of this narrative, inBloom’s
directors used to hang themselves.
Technology, Organizational Form, and Long-Term Viability
InBloom’s collapse has not had an appreciable impact on the student data
management market. Many firms that were founded before inBloom and provide similar
services to the SLI still exist, and the market for student data continues to grow. None of
these firms are as large as inBloom at its peak, and none of them are as well-funded, but
that they still play an important role in education technology is an important post-script to
inBloom’s story. If the goal of the activist community was simply to “take down”
inBloom, then their struggle was successful. However, if the goal was to alter the student
identity market and make it untenable for education technology startups, then the struggle
was a colossal failure, and, more than that, a waste of time and effort.
Not all student data management firms are as vulnerable to stakeholder objections
as inBloom was. Platforms like the SLI still exist and their use in schools continues to
grow and spread, but the firms developing these applications are small, operating “under
the radar” as Andrew Rotherham put it. The market is now defined by smaller players
and low-profile venture capital, but the end result is the same. There are no news
organizations reporting on firms like Knewton, dreambox learning, or 2U, so organizing
resistance to their business model is more difficult; Haimson and Ravitch no longer
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consider protests against the idea of student data management to be an effective use of
resources.

Table 5.1
Relationship Between Organizational Form and Technology
New Organizational Form

Old Organizational Form
Novel Technology e.g. Not-for-profit, private
funding, private
governance; public
education services

e.g. Sole proprietorship or
publicly-traded firm;
innovative search solutions
or approaches to commerce
Accepted Technology e.g. Distributed ownership;
mass/personal
transportation

e.g. Publicly-traded firm;
the production of
automobiles
Note. Firms in the upper-left quadrant are the most likely to draw attention from the
public because of their doubly-innovative nature.

This is likely because of a conflict between the development of novel technology
and its relationship to innovative organizational forms (see Table 5.1). Firms operating
under older, more established organizational forms are free to pursue innovative
technological solutions with relatively little market risk. These are firms like
Google/Alphabet, which develop new technologies but which exist as publicly-traded and
traditionally-governed corporations. Likewise, firms using established technological
solutions but developing them using new organizational forms are able to rely on the
public’s view of the older technology to avoid a backlash in the market. These are firms
like Uber, whose use of established cellular technology to drive a distributed, contract-
based workforce has avoided large-scale protests from the public. And of course, old
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organizational forms with old technology are of very little concern to anyone in the
activist community; nobody protests Ford’s cars.
But firms like inBloom, which develop novel technologies and administer them
with new organizational forms, draw the attention of concerned stakeholders because of
the all-encompassing novelty presented by these firms. InBloom had an innovative
(although not entirely new) solution to the data analysis and management problem at the
core of schooling. They also had an organizational form which was not familiar to most
members of the protesting public: a privately-funded, privately-held, not-for-profit
corporation which nevertheless extracted revenue from public agencies. Many in the
activist community assumed that inBloom was turning a profit on the backs of students;
many others believed that Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch had “bought” access to
sensitive student data. Neither of these assumptions are true, but, for members of the
activist community, that did not matter. They were suspicious of both inBloom’s
technology and its relationship between governance and funding. Conspiracy theories
abounded, but inBloom collapsed before any of its managers could present a convincing
counter-argument.
Circling back to the example of Knewton being a potential competitor for
inBloom provides a useful illustration of how firms can reduce their exposure to risk by
leveraging their placement within the quadrants in Table 5.1. In 2014, Knewton was
developing a dashboard application of its own, but, as I discussed above, Knewton’s
managers purposely held their product back, choosing instead to observe the market’s
reaction to inBloom. This strategy effectively allowed Knewton to move from the top left
of Table 5.1 to the bottom left. Taking the long view, Knewton’s dashboard is just as
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“new” as inBloom’s SLI, but by shifting its product’s release date six months into the
future, Knewton was able to take advantage of Moore’s Law
45
. The pace of innovation in
digital technology moves so fast that the public begins to see a product that existed for
less than a year to be “old” if the product has developed over several iterations. So by
waiting until the fall of 2014 to release its dashboard, Knewton took advantage of the fact
that public had largely moved beyond its shock at inBloom’s approach to data sharing.
Although Knewton is much smaller than inBloom was, it has taken inBloom’s place as
the primary player in dashboard-style student data visualizations and analysis.
Firms like Pearson also occupy the other quadrants of Table 5.1. Pearson is a
large, for-profit, publicly-traded education services firm – the largest in the world – and
depending on the product line, it exists in either the top right or the bottom right quadrant
of Table 5.1. Pearson works with truly old technology in the form of textbook
publication, but it also develops innovative digital tools for educators. The digital tools
are more controversial than the ink-and-paper tools, but Pearson is not in danger of
collapse. Even taking into account its billion-dollar misstep with the Los Angeles Unified
School District, there was never any possibility that Pearson would fold. In many ways,
Pearson is the firm that inBloom was trying to be; Pearson actually is too big to fail. If
Pearson shut down today, millions of students all over the world would feel its loss, and
no competitor exists that would be able to pick up the slack. Even though Pearson is often
targeted by anti-privatization activists, their arguments fail to gain traction because
Pearson’s organizational form and the brand it supports is so familiar. Retirement funds

45
Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles every
two years. This observation has been widely applied to the expansion of technology in
general as a way to understand the growth curves of new technologies. Robert E. Schaller
provided a useful discussion of the various applications of Moore’s Law in 1997.
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invest in Pearson because of its stability (Strauss, 2016). Parents may object to Pearson’s
involvement in education – its testing products are particularly controversial – but in the
end, it is the products that stakeholders protest, not the firm itself. Diane Ravitch called
for inBloom’s dissolution in 2014, but, in 2015, she only calls for Pearson to reconsider
its products. This is a significant difference.
Managers of firms existing in the top-left quadrant of Table 5.1 must recognize
that the public will be unsure of the relationship between their innovative products and
their innovative organizational forms. As with inBloom, suspicious stakeholders may try
to “pigeon-hole” such firms as part of a narrative with which the stakeholders are already
familiar. It is incumbent upon the managers of these firms to recognize these challenges
in advance and craft a narrative which anticipates and provides explanations for the
concerns that stakeholders will advance. Managers who fail to do so put the long-term
viability of their firms at risk. InBloom’s managers could have seen the need for these
kinds of pro-active strategies and crafted narratives and positive branding to allow their
firm and its accompanying technology to survive.
But they did not.

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CHAPTER VI
Implications for Policy & Practice

So what to make of all this? InBloom’s failure represented a landmark in the
education technology market, but not turning point. Never before had a firm been so
lavishly funded, captured the faith of so many, or failed so spectacularly. The major
players in education technology – firms like Pearson, which dominates its niche the way
inBloom dominated its own – do not fail when they make mistakes. Pearson’s billion-
dollar deal with the Los Angeles Unified School District caused a small, temporary drop
in Pearson’s stock price, and significant embarrassment, but Pearson remains the largest
education services firm in the world. Its education technology division – the one
responsible for the deal with Los Angeles – was subjected to a minor managerial
reshuffling, but this was largely a matter of window-dressing to satisfy shareholders;
none of the division’s managers were let go, and the business strategy which had led to
the deal remains in place.
In Chapter 5, I argued that inBloom’s failure was down to a managerial
misjudgment of the market. The board of directors did not understand the fundamentals
of the education technology market, and consequently lost control of their brand’s
messaging while simultaneously pursuing an aggressive expansion strategy. Data privacy
and “intrusion” of private industry into public education continue to be central issues in
the policy conversation surrounding education. In this chapter, I explore the implications
of inBloom’s story for the world of policy and practice, first by discussing ongoing
privacy concerns, and second by discussing the “holy grail” of individualized instruction.
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I close by offering suggestions on the way forward for education data management in the
21
st
century.
Data Privacy
In schooling, as in American society at large, the issue of data privacy continues
to be a signal issue of our time. The convenience versus privacy tradeoff implicit in any
data sharing agreement is one which played itself out in inBloom, but inBloom’s collapse
has not brought an end to this problem in schools. Neither have the lessons that could be
taken from inBloom’s collapse – that whichever group has the clearest and most
compelling narrative will eventually emerge “victorious” – altered the ways that
stakeholders interact with education agencies.
Consider the currently-pending court case, Morgan Hill Concerned Parents
Association, et al. v. California Department of Education. A group of parents of students
with special needs suspected that their local school district in Morgan Hill, CA was out of
compliance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), but they had no
way to be certain because the school district was not obligated to share student data with
parents. The parents responded by suing the California Department of Education (CDE),
demanding that the records of their students – and their students alone – be released to
their legal team for review. On February 17, 2016, federal judge Kimberly Mueller ruled
that the state should release identifiable student data to the Morgan Hill parents and their
lawyers pursuant to their lawsuit. Less than an hour later, California State Superintendent
of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson issued a statement condemning the ruling, and
saying that the CDE has “fought vigorously to protect students’ privacy rights and will
continue that fight” (Tira, 2016). The California PTA sided with the state, and mobilized
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its considerable resources in a move to encourage California parents to communicate to
Judge Mueller that they disagreed with the ruling. On March 1, 2016, Judge Mueller
responded to pressure from protesting stakeholders, and reversed her ruling.
This case shares striking similarities with inBloom’s. A group that wants access to
identifiable student data for reasons that seem acceptable is successfully defeated by a
group of activists and governmental officials who mischaracterize the group and its data.
The education stakeholder community is so worried about invasions of data privacy by
third parties that they partnered with the state to, in effect, cover up potential negligence
or wrongdoing at the CDE. The difference between the two cases comes from the parties
involved and the direction of influence. On the one hand activists ultimately persuaded
the government to take action against inBloom, while on the other the state persuaded
activists to take action against the Morgan Hill Concerned Parents Association. Still, the
outcome is the same: misguided beliefs about student data privacy led to a potentially
adverse outcome for the students whose privacy the activists were hoping to protect.
The implication of both this and inBloom’s story for practice are twofold. First,
groups seeking access to student data – be they private education services firms or parent
advocacy groups – need to create narratives about their reasoning for data access
proactively. If they fail to do this, their opponents will create narratives for them that will
necessarily lead to organizational collapse. Second, practitioner-stakeholders – be they
policymakers, educators, or parents – need to be certain that they properly understand the
organizations and motivations against which they protest. It seems unlikely that the
California PTA would purposely advocate in favor of the state covering up malfeasance
if the PTA’s leadership properly understood what was at stake. It seems equally unlikely
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that Haimson, Ravitch, and their associated groups of parent activists would protest
against a strategy that was aimed at improving educational outcomes at both the micro
and macro levels if they actually understood what inBloom was offering schools. In both
cases, activists allowed their own pre-existing narratives to obscure the facts that were set
before them.
The Holy Grail
Individualized instruction remains, in the words of Richard Culatta, education
technology’s “holy grail.” Firms continue to develop applications which are nudging
public education in that direction, hoping to deliver on the promise that technology
offers. Some, like inBloom, were working towards this goal without the pursuit of profit;
others, like Knewton and many of the others which sprang up in inBloom’s failed wake,
are very much interested in making money. It is difficult to oppose the idea of
individualized instruction – that teachers should have the tools they need to tailor their
practice to each child’s particular need – but the practice of individualized instruction
remains controversial.
The move to “flip” instruction is a useful example of this type of instructional
controversy. In “flipped” classrooms, students are initially exposed to new material at
home, away from school, and are free to experience the new material according to their
individual tastes and schedules. Then, when the students return to school, the purpose of
the classes they attend is to help them understand the material they learned the night
before. Although a cautiously optimistic consensus has gradually emerged in the
practitioner community (Watters, 2012), the activist community remains unconvinced.
Both Diane Ravitch and Leonie Haimson have come out against flipped classrooms,
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primarily because they see classroom flipping as a way to marginalize and commercialize
teachers (Ravitch, 2014). Here, the purpose of technology is to “free up” teachers to help
students master instructional materials, rather than presenting the material to the students
and then allowing them to find mastery on their own. For practitioners, then, the flipped
classroom represents a school-based version of the upper left quadrant from Table 1 in
chapter 5: new technology informing old practice. Here, the activist community remains
suspicious of the model, but practitioners are nevertheless moving forward with its
implementation (Watters, 2012).
But the flipped classroom on its own does not necessarily lead to individualized
instruction. In order to provide that level of instructive intervention, educators still need a
way to manage, analyze, and understand personally-identifiable student data. InBloom’s
approach to data management remains the industry’s best practice. Whether they take the
form of proprietary “dashboards” like the SLI, are web-browser based like Knewton’s
product, or some other approach to visualization, all of the products that drive (or will
drive) individualized instruction rely on identifiable student data that passes into private
hands in some way. It may be that the student data market is due for a disruptive
innovation in this respect; certainly, inBloom’s story suggests that it might be possible to
satisfy the concerns of stakeholders if the data could be identified and stored in some
other way.
At present, that does not appear possible, and the activist community continues to
oppose building the infrastructure necessary to realize the promise of individualized
instruction. In essence, stakeholders are asking education technology firms to find a way
of identifying students without making them identifiable. It seems unlikely that this will
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be possible, but the first firm to solve that puzzle will almost certainly become the
dominant player in the student data market. If that can be accomplished, the road that
leads to individualized instruction will become much shorter.
Market Impacts
I have explored the disadvantages of inBloom’s collapse at some length here, but
there are advantages for schools and the data market as well. These smaller, “mom and
pop” organizations – like Knewton – wield much less power than inBloom did, and
because of that, a competitive, monopsonic market for their services has developed in the
absence of inBloom’s monopoly. Although inBloom did not charge districts for its
services in the beta phase of the SLI, it would have done once the SLI entered its
commercial release. InBloom was a not-for-profit corporation, but the price for its
services would likely have been commensurate with inBloom’s place in the market. In
other words, as a monopolist, inBloom would have been free to set any price it chose, and
the market would have had very little choice but to find the funds to obtain the services.
But without inBloom, the remaining firms have had to compete with each other
based on price. As I have suggested before, there is essentially one way to provide
management services for student data: by developing a dashboard-like interface. Or
really, by developing and selling the SLI. This means that the products on offer in this
market niche are, more or less, all the same. The remaining differentiation among the
data management firms is price. In practice, this has served to drive the price of the
service down, a disadvantage for any new or existing players in the market, but a
significant advantage for schools with a limited pool of taxpayer money from which to
draw. As the smaller remaining firms further refine their clones of the SLI, the price for
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their services will remain low, a reality which will eventually drive inefficient providers
out of the market, again leading to an advantage for schools.
So from inBloom’s point of view, all of these market impacts are “bad.” Activists
can destroy a carefully-designed product in a very short time. But in this short time,
competitors can develop products of their own and rush in to fill the void when the
monopolist falls. From the perspective of the student data market, though, these impacts
are good. More firms competing more strongly means better products and pricing for
schools, ultimately benefiting students and the stakeholders who care about their success.
By and large, efficient markets lead to satisfied consumers, and in the end, this is what
the activists had hoped for anyway. The market casting inBloom aside was, in this sense,
unfortunate for inBloom, but very fortunate indeed for schools.
The Way Forward
The collapse of inBloom has clearly illustrated that the market for education
services is different from other markets in the service economy. Firms working in this
space are tasked with managing the lives and futures of children, so in a very real sense,
these corporations are being asked to join with schools to act in loco parentis. The
education market is therefore unique, with its closest analog being the healthcare industry
and its accompanying mandate to cure the sick. But medical patients are expected to
make their own decisions as they navigate the different options for treatment. If the
patients are minors, their parents make the decisions for them, but even in that case,
responsibility and decision-making rest squarely on the demand side.
In education, students engage with an institution that has already made all the
decisions. Students and their families have very little say over which teachers will work
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with them or which schools they will attend. Families can “opt out” of the public system
by pursuing private education, but even then, most of the instructional decisions will have
been made without parental input or student consent. Recent innovations in education
technology and pedagogical practice have led to students taking a more active role in
their education, but the vast majority of the decision-making responsibility rests with the
supply side.
This puts education services firms in a curious position. They rightly see
themselves as being a part of the supply side for schools, who represent the demand side.
But, in reality, both schools and their contracted firms co-represent the supply. It is
therefore incumbent upon firms that work with schools to understand that the clients they
serve are in fact students, not schools. InBloom’s managerial strategy focused entirely on
securing new contracts with education agencies, leaving the justification for inBloom’s
services to the schools. This understanding of inBloom’s role in the market was
surprisingly naïve, given the experience that all of inBloom’s directors had in education.
In retrospect, it seems obvious that inBloom’s clients were actually students, their
families, and larger stakeholders in public education, not just school districts and state
departments of education. InBloom’s managers did not see this, so a key takeaway for
managers seeking to expand their firms’ role in education services is to keep in mind who
the clients actually are. Schools are middle-men in these transactions, mediating the
relationship between firms and their clients. InBloom’s central misstep was believing that
the clients were the schools rather than the stakeholders, a mistake which contributed to
its collapse.
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At the same time, stakeholders generally and parents particularly need to
recognize that a certain degree of data sharing is inevitable. In the introduction to this
dissertation, I suggested that education has always been a data-driven enterprise.
Teachers and schools have always had data points that they linked to students by tagging
the data with personal identifiers. We do not think of schools operating this way, largely
because the data that schools have kept on file for the last hundred years have only been
seen by school officials. But those officials are no more or less trustworthy than the
people who manage student data firms; stories of educational malfeasance on the part of
teachers and coaches are unfortunately just as prevalent as those about corporate
managers. This situation may not be ideal, but it is the reality.
So concerned parents and the activists who represent their interests should work
with education leaders and representatives from student data firms to find a middle
ground, one where schools share enough data that it will improve student outcomes but
not so much that it frightens stakeholders away. Parents find themselves embodying
William F. Buckley’s 1955 definition of conservatism: “standing athwart history yelling
stop at a time when no one is inclined to do so” (p. 2), but this position is untenable in the
long term. There is no reason why stakeholders and industry leaders could not come
together to develop a set of data-sharing “best practices” to shape the marketplace going
forward. Stakeholders have the obvious privacy concern, but the managers and
shareholders of data management firms have an equally pressing imperative to work with
activists. If corporate managers and directors fail to work with stakeholders to find a way
forward, their firms will meet the same end as inBloom.

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Conclusion
Based on the decisions that inBloom’s board made, the company was bound to
fail, but it did not need to end that way. The failure of student data management firms and
the market segment they occupy is not inevitable. As I suggested in the previous chapter,
there were many points at which inBloom’s board could have “turned back,” but their
own organizational inertia prevented them from seeing the consequences of the board’s
mistakes as they unfolded. Other firms can take valuable lessons from inBloom’s failure,
and work to be affirmatively and proactively transparent as they work with districts and
stakeholders. InBloom could have anticipated and forestalled stakeholder objections if
only its managers had worked to craft a narrative that would appeal to their firm’s real
clients: students and families.
Corporate managers must take steps to ensure that they will be able to see their
products the way their consumers do. That the SLI would be good for students was self-
evident to inBloom’s managers, but not so to the stakeholders who brought the firm to its
knees. If only Iwan Streichenberger could have recognized that simple fact, the case as I
have presented it here would have evaporated, and a story of resounding technological
success would have taken its place. Instead, Streichenberger and the rest of inBloom’s
board allowed the story to “get away” from them. They did not listen to the concerns of
their stakeholders, they did not work transparently, and they did not turn back when it
became clear that their firm was on the verge of collapse.
If only they had listened to the concerns of their stakeholders; if only they had
worked transparently; if only they had turned back when it became clear that their firm
was on the verge of collapse. If only they could have done those things, they could have
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shaped the student data market for years to come and contributed in a concrete and
lasting way to the future of individualized instruction in America’s public schools. If only
they had done all of this, schools would be a step closer to realizing the promise of
individualized instruction, and, most importantly for the people involved, there would
likely still be an inBloom.

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Appendix A
Research Questions/Theoretical Framework
Contracting/Privatization Board Behavior Logics
RQ1.1: What (if any) dynamics or
relationships existed within the top
management team of inBloom that
allowed them to leverage policy? X
RQ1.2: How did policy eventually shift
against inBloom? Why? X
RQ1.3: Who were the key actors both
within and outside inBloom who
contributed to the initial context that
allowed inBloom to come to prominence,
and why did these actors come together?
What factors contributed to their
collaboration? X X
RQ2.1: How did SLC/inBloom present
itself to institutional actors in order to
gain its “series A” funding from Gates
and Carnegie? X
RQ2.2: What was the “story” that
inBloom representatives told
policymakers, stakeholders, and potential
clients? How (if at all) did this story
change over time? Who was tasked with
“telling” this story and why? X X X
RQ2.3: What was the “story” that
activists told policymakers, stakeholders,
and contract-holders? How (if at all) did
this story change over time? Why? X X
RQ3.1: What (if any) interlocks – in
terms of relationships that existed due to
serving on the boards of other
organizations – existed between
executives at inBloom and other firms in
the student data management sector?
With other firms in education technology
generally? With firms outside the
industry? X
RQ3.2: How (if at all) did the
backgrounds of the top leadership team
impact decision-making at inBloom?
What (if any) factions existed on the
board and/or in the c-suite? What did
those factions mean? How did they come
to exist? X
RQ3.3: What drove the decision-making
at inBloom? What logics did executives
bring to bear on inBloom’s strategic
positioning? X X

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Contracting/Privatization Board Behavior Logics
RQ4.1: What (if any) other movements or
groups were the key activist actors
members of? For what (if any) other
causes did they advocate? X
RQ4.2: How did the activists leverage
inBloom’s strategic positioning and
messaging to change the political and
social environment? X
RQ4.3: What strategies did the key
players use? Was there unity in the
movement? Why (if at all) was there
unity or disunity? X X
RQ4.4: What (if any) logics informed the
organization and execution of the
advocates’ agenda? X
RQ5.1: In what ways was inBloom’s
aggressive expansion into the student
data management market similar to or
different from other firms in the same
market? X
RQ5.2: How did inBloom balance the
tension between creating strong
protections for student data against its
rapid expansion strategy? How did this
“balancing act” go wrong? X X X
RQ5.3: How do the differing perspectives
of the actors in inBloom’s story inform
their views of “what happened?” X X
RQ6.1: What (if any) other issues
underpinned inBloom's formation and
dissolution? How (if at all) were these
other issues reported in both the formal
press and inside the activist community?
Why? X X X
RQ6.2: How did inBloom executives first
build confidence in its products in order
to entice investors? How was that
confidence eroded when the tide turned? X X X
RQ6.3: How did leaders and
implementers see inBloom balance the
needs of investors/funders against the
needs of stakeholders, and what factors
contributed to the balance skewing first
one way and then the other? X X

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Appendix B
Research Protocols

Interview Protocol A
InBloom Managers

Section I: Introduction

1.) What is your name?
2.) What was your role/title at inBloom?
A.) Did you know any of the other directors before you came to inBloom? How?
3.) How did you come to work at inBloom, and what made you interested in being
involved with the firm?

Section II: Overview and Grand Tour

1.) From your perspective, what was inBloom’s place in the market?
A.) How did inBloom come together?
B.) What was missing in the education market to make inBloom competitive?
C.) Do you think any of that changed by the spring of 2014? Can you give me an
example of something that changed and why you think it did?
2.) Can you give me an example of the kinds of data inBloom was working with?
3.) Can you tell me about how inBloom chose the pilot sites?
A.) How did those decisions get made? All the managers together? Small groups?
Individuals?

Section III: Decisions

1.) Sticking with decisions, can you walk me through how another important decision got
made?
A.) Why do you think it went that way?
B.) Why did you choose that issue?
2.) How well did you all get along? Why do you think that?
3.) Who made decisions about messaging and branding?
4.) Who was the contact-person for contracting?

Section IV: Stories

1.) Tell me a little about how you feel inBloom and its platform was presented to
education agencies?
A.) Who made those presentations?
B.) What do you think was the most important thing inBloom was offering
schools?
C.) What agencies did inBloom pitch, and why?
2.) Was that presentation always the same, or did it change over time? Why do you think
that was?
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3.) What kinds of policies were in place at inBloom related to branding and telling the
story of the inBloom platform?

Section V: What happened?

1.) Why do you think inBloom had to shut down?
2.) Tell me what happened to inBloom.
3.) What could inBloom have done differently, do you think?
A.) Do you think if things had gone differently, inBloom would still be in
business?
4.) How do you think other industry players view what happened to inBloom? How do
you think they should see it?

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Interview Protocol B
Stakeholders

Section I: Introduction

1.) What is your name?
2.) What was your role/title at your agency? (If applicable)
A.) How did you come to work there?
3.) How did inBloom first come to your attention?

Section II: Overview and Grand Tour

1.) From your perspective, what was inBloom’s place in the market?
A.) How did inBloom come together?
B.) What was missing in the education market to make inBloom competitive?
C.) Do you think any of that changed by the spring of 2014? Can you give me an
example of something that changed and why you think it did?
2.) Can you give me an example of the kinds of data inBloom was working with?

Section III: Activists

1.) From your perspective, what was so pressing about inBloom?
A.) Were you specifically concerned with inBloom, or was inBloom just one of
many issues you were concerned with?
i.) What were the other issues?
2.) Tell me what you were hoping to accomplish when you chose to get involved with the
inBloom story.
A.) How were you going to do that?
B.) Who did you want to influence?
C.) How would you know you had been successful?
3.) Do you think you were successful? Why or why not?

Section IV: Stories

1.) Tell me a little about how you feel inBloom and its platform was presented to
education agencies?
A.) Who made those presentations?
B.) What do you think was the most important thing inBloom was offering
schools?
3.) What kinds of public policies do you think were in place to make inBloom’s rise
possible?
4.) What changed about those policies after inBloom’s collapse?

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Section V: What happened?

1.) Why do you think inBloom had to shut down?
2.) Tell me what happened to inBloom.
3.) What could inBloom have done differently, do you think?
A.) Do you think if things had gone differently, inBloom would still be in
business?
4.) How do you think other industry players view what happened to inBloom? How do
you think they should see it?

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Document Analysis/Reading Protocol

Date of analysis:
Title of document:
Document Source/URL:
Document Author:

Author bias/POV:

High-frequency words and phrases:

Patterns:

Themes:

Outlinks (# and target):
Backlinks (# and source):

Notes:

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Schools today use a remarkably wide range of technological tools to aid management and instruction. These tools generate a constant stream of data that educators can, in theory, use to create (or improve) individualized instruction for students. In practice, this data stream can be difficult for educators to manage and interpret, spurring the growth of a private market for student data analysis contractors. While a great deal of education research has examined the function of private firms in education markets, comparatively few researchers have looked inside the “black box” of the firm to investigate the ways that the managers of these private firms make choices and decisions that impact education policy and educator practice. In this dissertation, I use the institutional logics framework as a lens through which to examine one such contractor, a firm called inBloom, and follow its genesis, its meteoric rise, its apotheosis as the best-funded and most widely-used contractor for student data analysis, and its precipitous decline into bankruptcy, all in the space of eighteen months. I argue that inBloom failed because its managers failed to understand the difference between the education market and other markets, largely due to an ongoing and unacknowledged conflict between the logic of capitalist markets and the logic of communities. In light of this failure, I offer recommendations for best practice on both the school and the contractor side of education privatization.

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Asset Metadata

Creator LaFave, Andrew L. (author)

Core Title The logic of mining student data: corporate education reform, stakeholder activism, and the fate of inBloom

School Rossier School of Education

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Urban Education Policy

Publication Date 07/11/2016

Defense Date 05/05/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Education,OAI-PMH Harvest,privatization

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Burch, Patricia (committee chair), Mayer, Kyle (committee member), Polikoff, Morgan (committee member)

Creator Email alafave@usc.edu,drew.lafave@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-267441

Unique identifier UC11281225

Identifier etd-LaFaveAndr-4538.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-267441 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-LaFaveAndr-4538.pdf

Dmrecord 267441

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights LaFave, Andrew L.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA