A controversial $100 million student data collection project funded by the Gates Foundation and operated by a specially created nonprofit organization called inBloom is shutting down after failing to achieve its goals.

After most of the original state partners with inBloom withdrew their support, the final straw was the recent decision by the New York state legislature to stop participating in any project involving storing student data in the manner that inBloom was planning. The data were to be stored in a data cloud that would hold incredibly detailed data points on millions of school children with the stated mission of allowing education officials to use the information to target educational support.

Activists led by New York’s Leonie Haimson, head of Class Size Matters, as well as educators and parents raised alarms that there was no guarantee that the information could be stored securely with a 100 percent guarantee and that a great deal of the data being collected was too personal. There was also concern that third parties could access private information though inBloom officials denied it.

In a message on the inBloom website, Chief Executive Officer Iwan Streichenberger blamed the failure of the initiative not on inBloom itself but rather on critics who offered “mischaracterizations” and “misdirected criticism” of the effort and the inability of inBloom officials to realize how difficult it would be to build public acceptance.

Here is the complete text of the message on the inBloom website, from Streichenberger: