Is New York state about to gut its student data privacy law?
New York state has a student privacy law, but the Board of Regents is considering whether to significantly weaken it. The post below looks at the problem in New York and elsewhere.
It was written by Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, a nonprofit based in New York City, and the co-chair of the national Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, a national alliance of parents and advocates defending the rights of parents and students to protect their data. She successfully led the battle to stop nine states from disclosing personal student data to a student database project called inBloom.
Parent Coalition for Student Privacy
ACT and the College Board were asked about comments in the story about selling student data to third parties. Their responses follow Haimson's piece.
By Leonie Haimson
The New York Board of Regents is currently considering whether to approve a radical weakening of the state student privacy law, which would allow the College Board, the ACT and other companies that contract with schools or districts to administer tests to use the personal student information they collect for marketing purposes — even though the original New York law that was passed in 2014 explicitly barred the sale or commercial use of this data.
Starting in 2014, many states, including New York, approved legislation to strengthen the protection of student privacy, because of a growing realization on the part of parents that their children’s personal data was being shared by schools and districts with a wide variety of private companies and organizations without their knowledge or consent. The U.S. Department of Education had weakened the federal student privacy law known as FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) twice over the past decade, rewriting the regulations during the Bush CONTINUE READING: Is New York state about to gut its student data privacy law? - The Washington Post
