NYC Public School Parents: State Longitudinal databases: Tracking students from birth to the workforce and beyond

NYC Public School Parents: State Longitudinal databases: Tracking students from birth to the workforce and beyond:

State Longitudinal databases: Tracking students from birth to the workforce and beyond

Yesterday, this piece on the collection and sharing of large amounts of personal student data by states was posted  as “The astonishing amount of data being collected about your children.” at the Washington Post AnswerSheet.  It is also posted at our Student Privacy Matters website.  If you are interested in the issue of protecting your children against this sort of data collection and tracking, please join the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy.  thanks, Leonie

By Leonie Haimson and Cheri Kiesecker, Parent Coalition for Student Privacy 

Remember that ominous threat from your childhood, “This will go down on your permanent record?” Well, your children’s permanent record is a whole lot bigger today and it may be permanent. Information about your children’s behavior and nearly everything else that a school or state agency knows about them is being tracked, profiled and potentially shared.

During a February 2015 Congressional hearing on “How Emerging Technology Affects Student Privacy,” Rep. Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin asked the panel to “provide a summary of all the information collected by the time a student reaches graduate school.” Joel Reidenberg, The Center on Law & Information Policy Fordham Law School Director, responded:

“Just think George Orwell, and take it to the nth degree,” Reidenberg said. “We’re in an environment of surveillance, essentially. It will be an extraordinarily rich data set of your life.” 

Most student data is gathered at school-via multiple routes; either through children’s online usage or information provided by parents, teachers or other school staff. A student’s education record generally includes demographic information, including race, ethnicity, and income level; discipline records, grades and test scores, disabilities and Individual education plans (IEPs), mental health and medical history, counseling records and much more.

Under the federal law known as FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, if medical and counseling records are included in your child’s education records they are unprotected by HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act passed by Congress in 1996). Thus, very sensitive mental and physical health information can be shared outside of the school without parent consent.

Many parents first became aware of how widely their children’s personal data is being shared with third parties of all sorts when the controversy erupted over inBloom in 2012, the $100 million corporation funded by the Gates Foundation. Because of intense parent opposition, inBloom closed its doors in 2014, but in the process, parents discovered that inBloom was only the tip of the iceberg, and that the federal NYC Public School Parents: State Longitudinal databases: Tracking students from birth to the workforce and beyond: