Thread: Access to student records and who should have them?

Saw this article on Drudge today and it got me thinking.

Who Should Have Access to Student Records? - US News and World Report

Since “No Child Left Behind” was passed 10 years ago, states have been required to ramp up the amount of data they collect about individual students, teachers, and schools. Personal information, including test scores, economic status, grades, and even disciplinary problems and student pregnancies, are tracked and stored in a kind of virtual “permanent record” for each student.

The privacy proponent in me wants to say that they shouldn't be storing any information without the parents' consent, nor should it ever be shared with a 3rd party without a parent's consent. With that said, I can see, from a healthcare safety perspective why some small data points ought to be shared (vaccination records, known allergies, isolation status, etc). However, dealing with HIPAA concerns on an almost daily basis, I hesitate to extend the same type of data to things like Independent School Districts and School Boards as I think they are not sufficiently prepared for the level of workflow changes that proper sensitive data retention requires.

A very worrisome point in this story is that there is little, or no, access to this data extended to parents (and it should as they are responsible for the child) or the child (and this ought to be a no brainer that people should have access to the information being stored about them by the government - caveat except where it might hinder criminal investigations by negating the discovery process - but this is a whole other topic).

But parents and students have very little access to that data, according to a report released Wednesday by the Data Quality Campaign, an organization that advocates for expanded data use.

All 50 states and Washington, D.C. collect long term, individualized data on students performance, but just eight states allow parents to access their child’s permanent record. Forty allow principals to access the data and 28 provide student-level info to teachers.

Additionally, I think that some of the assumptions used to justify the data collection/storage are just that. Assumptions and potentially faulty ones at that. Such as:

if many students’ test scores are jumping in a specific teacher’s class, odds are that teacher is doing a good job.

This could also indicate that the teacher is not teaching the students at all either and just helping them prep specifically for the test(s) -- it's happened before.

teachers can use the data to see where a student may have struggled in the past and can tailor instruction to suit his needs.

This could be a valid tool/use but would need oversight from some body to ensure that the teacher(s) was adhering to existing standards, otherwise the child might succeed in the one class due to the specialized lesson but fail utterly in the next due to being ill prepared in a general sense.

But overall, I think that this might be the worst reality of the storage of this data in relative secrecy:

“When you have a system that’s secret [from parents] and you can put whatever you want into it, you can have things going in that’ll be very damaging,” says Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “When you put something into digital form, you can’t control where that’ll end up.”

* Bold is mine - and this is due to the ever present observable fact that the government (pick a branch, any branch) does not act in the manner of good and responsible stewards of data. They have not done so in the past and show no concerted efforts of becoming good stewards of data in the near term.

See that teacher bit where they could help a student is bullshit. I had all kinds of troubles in school cause I didnt learn the way students normally do. I know I had a file written up telling teachers about this and giving them some steps to take to help me along the way but at a parent teacher meeting my Language Arts teacher had no clue what was in it. You can give them the resources to teach better but that dosnt mean they are going to take the extra steps to help a student. They get paid 32,000 if everyone fails (perhaps not everyone) and 32,000 if everyone passes, where is the incentive to take on an extra burden?

Hmm there is a student privacy law already on the books. Do a Google for FERPA. I wonder if this clashes with it any.