My first brush with professional journalism — and with violations of student privacy — came when I was a sophomore at Yale. It was 1999, and George W. Bush, a Yale alumnus, was running for president.
A writer for The New Yorker cold-called my dorm room looking for students who might have access to Bush's records. By sheer coincidence, a friend of mine who worked in the dean's office had, out of curiosity, lifted W's transcript from the files. A Deep Throat-style handoff was arranged, anonymity assured, and the candidate's grades ran in the magazine. They were mostly C's.
Today, getting ahold of the transcript of a VIP — or any student — would require less in-person skulduggery and more clever computer searching. That's because student data has largely moved online in just the last few years. It's being collected and distributed at unprecedented scale, from the time that toddlers enter preschool all the way into the workforce.
And that shift is forcing policymakers and legal experts to improvise new policies and procedures aimed at protecting the privacy of young people. Critics fear the misuse of student data by hackers, marketers, and most worryingly, by the government authorities who themselves are collecting it.
In March, New York became the first state to make it someone's job to oversee this vital issue, creating a position called Chief Privacy Officer in the Education Department. The job description? "Establishing standards for educational agency data security and privacy policies." Translation: providing the state's 698 school districts and over 500 colleges and universities, as well as state agencies, with uniform approaches to managing — and protecting — student data such as test scores, transcripts, health information, even dates of birth, racial or ethnic standing, and Social Security numbers.
In that same legislation, New York became the last state to pull the plug on InBloom. The project was supposed to create a shared infrastructure for storing student data and making it available to educational software developers, but it had to shut down after drawing the ire of privacy advocates.
Student data used to be the pet cause of a small group of lawyers and activists. Now, in part because of the InBloom controversy, it's gaining broader attention. This year, 82 bills in 32 states have been introduced that somehow address student privacy.
But what, exactly, is new here? How worried should you be as a parent? And what are the remedies?
Read more at NPR: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/04/28/305715935/what-parents-need-to-know-about-big-data-and-student-privacy