What privacy protections are there when states share data with the testing consortia or with the feds?
This year, the issue of student privacy and data sharing has become a huge issue throughout the nation, partly because of the uproar over inBloom Inc., but also as the US Department of Education has pushed states into adopting the Common Core standards and aligned exams, facilitated the widespread disclosure of children’s personal data to third parties without their parents’ consent through weakening FERPA, and track kids from preK onwards through state longitudinal data systems.
(Please check out this important story today – about questions surrounding NY state’s longitudinal data tracking system called P20.)
The danger that the federal government may be interested in collecting this data itself has aroused additional concern among parents and privacy advocates. We noted in an earlier blog post how the agreement between the US Department of Education and the Common Core testing consortia, PARCC and Smarter Balanced, has the same exact clause:
The Grantee [the testing consortium] must provide timely and complete access to any and all data collected at the State level to ED [the US Dept. of Ed] or its designated program monitors, technical assistance providers, or researcher partners, and to GAO, and the auditors conducting the audit required by 34 CFR section 60.26.
After Joy Pullman of the Heartland Institute and others drew attention to this clause, many parents became even more opposed to their state’s participation in the Common Core testing programs. In order to allay their fears, the Data Quality Campaign, which is funded primarily by the Gates Foundation, undertook a public campaign to convince parents that the feds have no intention of collecting personal student data.
More recently, an EWA webinar featured Jim Shelton, among others, Deputy Secretary of the US Department of Education and formerly of the Gates Foundation, who
