The Obama administration is encountering a lot of resistance to its efforts to help states build robust education and employment data systems. The anti-information forces are mainly comprised of a three-part coalition of hard-left privacy advocates, hard-right anti-government and privacy advocates, and the Washington, DC higher education lobby, which pretends to be a privacy advocate but is actually opposed to the creation of information that might make it easier for policymakers to hold them accountable for how they spend the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars they receive every year. While the Bush administration–particularly former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings–also pushed hard for better data systems, one decision made fairly early in Bush’s tenure is continuing to cause problems. As Paul Basken reports($):
Aimee R. Guidera, the Data Quality Campaign’s director, said the group had been waiting for the department’s legal strategy but has now decided to go ahead and “tell states what they should be thinking about.”One of the most formidable legal obstacles, Ms. Guidera said, is a 2003 memorandum in which William D. Hansen, then deputy secretary of education, told state education officials they could not share student data with their states’ labor agencies.