The proposed NSA-like national database for student data: Moneyball for kids
For anyone who has ever filled out a college application, or scholarship or grant application, you know the incredible amount of personal information these forms require. What if there was a massive database that combined and shared not only all of that personal information, but also answers from surveys you took over the years, social media posts you made, information normally kept protected and isolated in agencies like the Social Security Administration, Health and Human Services, HUD, IRS, and the US Census Bureau. This kind of database, linking (and sharing) data across agencies, with a profile on each individual citizen is something that countries like China has, but it is not legal in the US, currently.
This database is about to happen, not for you parents, but for your kids, starting with students in college.
(The focus of this blog will be on the push for a national higher ed database, but we remind you that there is also a push (Student data systems unite!-2010) and recently re-fueled by Bill Gates’ 2016 Priorities, which outlines the need to link k12 data with higher ed data, creating a national database. MEW wrote about this and another commission on collecting, ranking student emotions here. Gates is lobbying to create a national student tracking database on k-12 children, which is currently banned.)
History behind the push for a national unit-record database
There has been a push to create this type of database to track and link student data across agencies for years, and has always been rejected due to privacy or cost concerns. However, this year, a special commission, (created by the passage of this law, HR1381–jointly sponsored by Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), and signed by President Barack Obama on March 30, 2016), has convened for the purpose of lifting the ban on this national database, that they refer to as the student unit record. For background on the push for a national student database/unit record, see this 2013 HigherEd publication where they hoped to lift this ban and link the data, with a previous bill:
“The previous version of the bill called for stitching together state longitudinal databases in order to better track students — a project that some observers said would be technically The proposed NSA-like national database for student data: Moneyball for kids – Missouri Education Watchdog:
