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Innovation Without Compromise: Using AI to Support Schools While Protecting Student Privacy
By Alan Gottlieb
Introduction
Like every organization in education and beyond, Bluum is exploring how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used effectively and responsibly to strengthen our work as a school support organization and, in turn, help our partner charter schools and school systems address some of their most pressing challenges. We are fortunate to work with outstanding national and Idaho partners who are helping us navigate this rapidly evolving landscape and discover what is possible.
Our focus is intentionally on the operational applications of AI rather than on how it should influence teaching and learning, either today or in the future. That is not Bluum’s area of expertise. We believe decisions about how AI can best support classroom instruction and student learning should be led by those closest to students every day: teachers and school leaders. We are also keen observers of the work being done in this space by well-regarded reseachers like Jared Cooney Horvath and Eric Hanushek.
What excites us is the potential for AI to help schools solve problems that have long been difficult, time-consuming, or expensive to address. This is especially important for smaller schools and school systems that often lack the resources and technical expertise available to larger organizations. If used thoughtfully, AI has the potential to level the playing field by putting powerful new tools into the hands of educators and school leaders.
Over the coming weeks, we will share three stories highlighting how Bluum is working with innovative educational leaders, technology experts, and finance professionals to develop practical AI-powered solutions to challenges facing our partner schools. These stories are not about replacing educators or their professional judgment. They are about giving them better tools, better information, and more time to focus on what matters most: helping students learn and succeed.
Our first story, written by Alan Gottlieb, explores how an innovative Illinois school superintendent, working with Bluum and Idaho school leaders, is using AI to transform student assessment data into timely, actionable information for teachers and school leaders—all while protecting student privacy. It is a fascinating example of how a relatively simple idea, combined with ingenuity and new technology, can help solve a longstanding challenge for schools.
We hope you find these stories as fascinating, perplexing, and full of possibility as we do.
-Terry Ryan
Part 1: Using AI to evaluate student learning
Danny Woestman, an Illinois school superintendent who builds data tools in his spare time, recently built Bluum a polished dashboard of public test results for its partner charter schools.
School leaders who piloted the dashboard found it useful, but asked if it could be taken one step farther. They wanted tools that would help them use their own students’ test scores to decide what to reteach and which teachers needed help.
That meant working with records on individual students, and sending them to an AI platform raised legal concerns. Duncan Robb, Bluum’s chief strategy officer, who oversees the project, said the question was how to build such tools “while not violating right to privacy laws by student information going up into AI platforms.” The main law at issue is FERPA, the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which protects student records.
“So that was hard,” Robb said. “We were kind of scratching our head and didn’t really see a way forward.”
In mid-September, Woestman found one. He realized that AI did not need to see any student data as he built the tool. It only needed to know how the state’s data files were laid out. The result is an app that runs entirely on a school leader’s own computer.
“It doesn’t take the data that you use and upload it to a cloud anywhere,” Robb said. “It does all the calculations right there on your computer, provides you with reports that are actionable, but doesn’t violate FERPA.”
“And that was a game changer,” he said.
A barrier for small schools
Josh Noteboom, chief academic officer of the Sage International Network of Schools, a charter network in Boise and Middleton, said privacy is “often the barrier for us” when it comes to AI.
“One of the fears was that the AI itself, whatever model we were thinking about using, would be learning from information about our kids, and that obviously turns people off,” Noteboom said.
Money made the problem worse. Large districts can buy enterprise versions of AI products that come with privacy protections. Sage, a two-school network, cannot. “We don’t have the ability to buy an enterprise solution and make sure that we’ve done everything we need to protect it,” Noteboom said. “So we sometimes are relying on free models and the support of other people.”
But with student records, he said, “we can’t, in good conscience or ethically, use the free models.”
As a result, schools like Sage were shut out. “It was stopping us from accessing some of the emerging features we’re seeing when we use AI-driven tools,” Noteboom said.
A file that stays put
The tool Woestman built is a single HTML file, the same format as a web page. It opens in a browser but does not connect to the internet. A school leader downloads test results from the state’s testing portal as a spreadsheet, just as before, and loads them into the tool, which produces charts and reports.
“You could do that even with the internet unplugged or Wi-Fi turned off,” Robb said.
In other words, AI wrote the code, but it never sees the students. “I’m just using AI to code the platforms. I’m not using AI to interpret data,” Woesteman said in a recent interview.
Noteboom said the approach ended the privacy debate at Sage. “It just removes entirely the conversation about who’s seeing this. Is it feeding an AI model? Is it going to get out in the public? Are we inappropriately sharing information? That is all gone,” he said. “What a huge relief for the school.”
Making the state test useful
The tool works with the Idaho Standards Achievement Test, or ISAT. Besides the spring exam the state uses to rate schools, the ISAT system, which the state runs with the testing company Cambium Assessment and the Smarter Balanced consortium, also offers optional interim assessments that schools can give during the year.
One version, the interim comprehensive assessment, covers the same kinds of questions and content as the year-end test.
Robb said many educators have seen the ISAT as a test that does little for them. “This has the potential to take an assessment that many educators saw as not useful and turn it into something that directly informs classroom instruction, because the legwork required to take the data and analyze it is removed,” Robb said. “You’re taking something that used to take hours, and now it’s instantaneous.”
Sage is piloting the approach this year. It gave a shortened interim comprehensive assessment at the start of the school year, which helped identify students who were struggling badly. It plans to give the test again in the winter.
“We’re going to be able to very quickly see growth for kids, and be able to make decisions to go and reteach whole classes or individual students or groups of kids without having to go through the struggle and the work and the time and effort to take all that information ourselves and prepackage it,” Noteboom said.
The tool can also compare classrooms. Robb said that would let school leaders see proficiency and growth across classrooms and grades, and spot which teachers were getting strong results and which needed more support.
Many of Bluum’s partner schools, including Sage, also give MAP, a commercial test from the nonprofit NWEA that produces detailed growth reports. Noteboom said, “We’ve all loved MAP.” But MAP compares students with peers nationally and does not line up directly with what the ISAT expects.
“That’s not the same as saying, ‘I just taught this content. The kid mastered that at the same expectation that the ISAT asks for. Now I can go reteach that,'” he said. “If we can do this with ISAT, I think the potential for faster learning for kids is much higher than even using MAP.”
And if the state test becomes as useful as MAP, Robb said, schools may need fewer other tests, “meaning reducing testing time, increasing instructional time.”
Sage as the test case
Noteboom said he is “an elementary teacher at heart.” He has also been a principal in a remote rural district, led a small Boise charter school and served as federal programs director at the Idaho State Department of Education. He is in his second year at Sage.
He and Woestman have been testing the tool against the different reports schools can download from the state portal. It is not yet in classrooms. Noteboom said the remaining work is mostly gathering feedback, and that Woestman responds fast. “Every bit of feedback I give him, he can turn around very quickly,” he said. “I don’t see any reason why we wouldn’t have this rolling out next fall.”
Sage’s needs shape the tool for now, but Noteboom said he keeps other schools in mind. “While I want to make it useful for me, is it also something that’s useful for everybody else too?” he said.
Woestman is now training Noteboom and Robb to maintain and adapt the tool themselves, “so we’re not relying on him all the time,” Robb said. Robb said he did not expect Bluum to charge for it.
Robb said Bluum also plans to show the work to the Idaho State Department of Education, in the hope that the state will press its testing vendor to offer something similar. He said the department faces procurement rules and “anxiety around AI,” but that its assessment team “has been working with us on this, and they seem like they’ve been eager to learn.”
The superintendent behind the tool
Woestman, a Cincinnati native and former high school English teacher, is in his fifth year as superintendent of Warren Township High School District 121 in Gurnee, Ill., north of Chicago. As a young teacher in the early 2000s, he spent summers going door to door offering to build websites for businesses. “I’m a dime a dozen,” he said. “There’s a lot of people who just have fun learning technology and enjoy helping other people figure technology out.”
About a year ago, Woestman wanted to compare his school’s results with those of similar schools, but Illinois’s data came in unwieldy Excel files. He began feeding them to Google’s Gemini and was soon doing what is known as vibe coding: describing what you want in plain language and letting AI write the code.
The result was a public report card tool built around peer comparisons. “You should never look at your data without pulling in the context of what your peer districts look like,” Woestman said.
This spring, Woestman showed the tool to a friend, who put him in touch with Bluum CEO Terry Ryan who asked for his help.
Woestman’s first project for Bluum was that public dashboard. Robb said it was “nothing groundbreaking,” but that Woestman took the data the state uses for its official report card and “made something more useful in a fraction of the time and for a fraction of the cost.”
Woestman does the work in the evenings, sitting beside his wife, the booster club president at his district’s high school, while she plans concessions for the next football game. “I can spend half an hour at a computer and give it some good instruction, and leave, and then come back in the morning, and it’s done some pretty cool things overnight,” he said.
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Alan Gottlieb is a Colorado-based writer, editor, journalist, communications consultant, and nonprofit entrepreneur who owns Write.Edit.Think, LLC. He founded EdNews Colorado, which later merged with Gotham Schools to form Chalkbeat. He does consulting work for Bluum, an Idaho-based non-profit education group.
