If not inBloom, then who?

Every state that accepted money for Race to the Top agreed to set up Longitudinal Data Systems to collect all the information the federal government now wants on our kids. But the only company that anyone is talking about that's doing it is inBloom, and other than a connection to BloomBoard which is apparently (at least in my district of Cheshire) only being used to track teachers, there has been no mention of data collection in Connecticut. It "has to" be done though, so who is doing it?

Well, with enough poking around I found it:

The State Department of Education (SDE), The Board of Regents for Higher Education (BOR) and the Department of Labor (DOL) are actively collaborating to implement the P20 WIN System. A cross-agency data governance structure has been formed, data sharing agreements have been approved and the technical infrastructure is being developed. The system is designed with the flexibility to expand to include connections to early childhood data, independent colleges and the University of Connecticut...

P20 WIN represents a groundbreaking approach to data sharing in Connecticut. Never before has Connecticut had a mechanism or a process for repeatedly linking unit record data longitudinally between multiple agencies...

Initially, P20 WIN will support limited sharing between the participating agencies as the system is tested during a pilot data exchange. After the pilot is complete and major functional issues addressed, there will be opportunity to plan for system expansion and enhancements.

So who is actually running the thing? The P-20 Council:

The P-20 Council supports collaboration among four sectors - early childhood, K-12, higher education and workforce training...

And who is the P-20 Council, and how was it formed?

Connecticut’s P-20 Council, originally created in 2009 by then-Governor M. Jodi Rell... is a team of stakeholders comprised of representatives in four sectors – early childhood education; elementary and secondary schools; higher education; and the workforce and business community.

The P-20 Council, as it stands today, was "re-established and reorganized" by Governor Dannel Malloy by Executive Order.

I was curious as to whether the Gates Foundation had any connection to our data collection, since they seem to be the ones that are heavily pushing it via grants to fund it all over the place, maybe because computers are needed to do all this testing, and Gates owns about 4.5 percent of the $277 billion [Microsoft] company.

So I googled "P20 WIN Gates Foundation" and came up with a guy in Connecticut named David L. Levinson, "who has been president of Norwalk Community College... since August 2004", and interestingly was "one of fifteen community colleges nationwide to receive funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for a developmental education project." Still, the reason for that funding was a lofty one. However, a relationship was forged when "in April, [2010] NCC President David L. Levinson, Ph.D. met with Melinda Gates at a private meeting for community college presidents at the American Association of Community Colleges’ annual convention in Seattle." I can't help but wonder what was discussed at that meeting since coincidentally Mr. Levinson is now one of the members of the Connecticut P-20 Council. 

I'm sure the connections go further than what I've gathered here, but I'm not going to spend more time on it right now. Sometimes my job here is not to answer the questions, but simply to raise them.