The newly formed Parent Coalition for Student Privacy releases letter to Congress urging them to strengthen student privacy protections.
You can find the letter here (pdf) and below; and press release here.
July 23, 2014
Dear member of Congress:
We write on
behalf of a broad coalition of parents across the country to urge Congressional
review of emerging threats to student privacy rights and to request legislative
action to address significant shortcomings in current law. Specifically, we are
alarmed about ill-thought-through federal policies that, instead of providing
safeguards against non-consensual disclosure and downstream uses of children’s
personally identifiable information, actually promote policies in which a
child’s highly sensitive personal data is disclosed to third-parties for
purposes that go well beyond reasonable educational uses and deny parents the
right of notification or consent.
First, we
respectfully urge Congress to hold hearings on why the U.S. Department of
Education has abdicated its historic role as the guardian of educational
privacy rights. In responding to interest groups that included Big Data
enthusiasts, influential foundations and their grantees, and educational
technology firms, the Department has re-interpreted (and, in
effect, unilaterally amended) the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of
1974 to nullify many of its most important privacy protections. This radical
re-invention of FERPA is at the root of much of the data free-for-all that has
resulted in massive amounts of personally identifiable student data being
collected and divulged to third parties, including for-profit vendors.
As the
controversy over one such third party, inBloom, has revealed there is a wide gap between the view
of most parents that they should be able to control access to their children’s
personal information to protect their privacy and safety, and the perspective
of various governmental agencies and private corporations that are intent on
collecting and using that data without informing parents or providing them with
the right to consent.
The inBloom
data-mart, funded with $100 million from the Gates Foundation, sought to capture
records of millions of children to enable the creation of a market in
technological learning tools that would utilize and data-mine this information
in name of “personalized learning.” Parents mobilized in opposition because
they justly feared that the transmission and storage of their children’s most personal
data on data clouds, as well as inBloom’s stated intent to provide it to a
large number of for-profit vendors, was both a security and a privacy threat.
We are
pleased to say that parental concerns and protests won the day over the poor
judgment of state and district education officials, resulting in inBloom being driven
out of business. But sadly, many other vendors seek to take inBloom’s place or
to sell their wares directly to schools and districts with inadequate
protections for security or privacy, and very little respect for parental
rights.
Second, we
respectfully urge Congress to review privacy and security practices of the
multiple state longitudinal data systems created in direct response to various
federal programs in recent years. These data systems are designed to
collect, store and share an increasing amount of children’s personal
information among a variety of state agencies and to track students over time without
sufficient oversight and protections for privacy.
Finally, we respectfully urge
Congress to review and strengthen both FERPA and Children’s Online Privacy
Protection Act (COPPA), to roll back the harmful provisions of the 2009 and
2011 FERPA regulations, and to update both laws
in light of new and unforeseen threats to privacy rights. Particularly with the
growth of the educational technology industry, there has been a huge push to
expand the access to personal student data with little or no federal restrictions
to slow down this trend. We are dissatisfied with the recommendations of the
recent White House report on privacy that evades most of the important issues
and simply asserts that any student data disclosed to third parties should be
used only for “educational purposes.” This generic statement is far too vague
to be reassuring.
The push for greater access to educational data is motivated
by the desire of the educational technology sector to develop new products and
grow their market, as well as by advocates who claim that big data will
revolutionize education. We believe parents—not school
officials—should be in charge of deciding whether or how much of their
children’s information may be shared with vendors. The benefits of big-data and
data-mining software in the area of education are still highly hypothetical and
cannot be used to justify the massive amount of personal data that is being
collected and shared with third parties without parental knowledge or consent.
Many parents do not want their children to spend hours more each
day in front of a computer and do not believe that the model of mechanized
instruction that is being promoted can deliver true personalized learning. We
certainly do not want our children’s disability, health and disciplinary
records shared widely with third parties.
We believe that any legislation should uphold the following
principles:
• Minimize
the collection by governmental agencies of highly sensitive student data and
their ability to share this data with third parties;
• Maximize
the opportunities for parental notification and consent;
• Except in
very limited circumstances, restrict non-consensual access to personal student
data to education authorities and roll back the 2012 “authorized
representative” loophole, by which nearly anyone can be designated as an
authorized representative of officials entitled to its access;
• Mandate strict security provisions for
the storage and transmission of personal student data, regular audits, and the
training of education personnel about the need to maintain robust privacy and
security provisions;
• Ensure
that the law is enforceable, including but not limited to the ability of the
federal government to impose fines and families to sue if their children’s
privacy is violated.
We urge you to open up a dialogue with parents as soon as
possible. Since inBloom’s demise, much has been written about the importance of
including parents in the debate over how to protect their children’s privacy
yet very little has been done to involve them in the discussion. We thank you
for your leadership and stand ready to work with you on this important issue.
Signed:
Leonie Haimson,
Executive Director, Class Size Matters, co-chair Parent Coalition for Student
Privacy
Rachael Stickland,
founder, School Belongs to the Children (CO), co-chair Parent Coalition for
Student Privacy
Diane Ravitch,
President, Network for Public Education
Dora Taylor,
President, Parents Across America
Julie Woestehoff,
Executive Director, Parents United for Responsible Education
Cassie Creswell, organizer, More Than a Score
(Chicago)
Lisa Rudley, Director of Education Policy, Autism
Action Network, co-founder of NY State Allies for Public Education
Josh Golin,
Associate Director, Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood
Emmett McGroarty and
Jane Robbins, American Principles Project, Washington, D.C.
SOS Oregon
Lisa Guisbond,
Executive Director, Citizens for Public Schools (MA)
Robin Hiller,
Executive Director, Voices for Education (AZ)
United Opt Out
Lourdes
Perez, HispanEduca
Change the Stakes (NYC)
Northeast Indiana
Friends of Public Education
Helen Gym, Parents United for Public Education, Philadelphia, PA.
Julia Sass
Rubin, co-founder, Save Our Schools NJ
Jean Ann Guliano, Parents Across Rhode Island
Ilana Spiegel on behalf of SPEAK (Supportive Parents, Educators and Kids) for Cherry Creek (CO)
Deb
Mayer, Great Schools for America
Danielle Arnold-Schwartz, Suburban Philadelphia Parents Across
America
Melissa Westbrook, Seattle
Schools Community Forum, Student Privacy Now
Mary
Battenfeld , QUEST (Quality Education for Every Student) Boston
Deborah Abramson Brooks, New
York parent, attorney, and children's privacy advocate
Kris Alman, privacy advocate,
Oregon
Lee P. Barrios, M.Ed., NBCT,
privacy activist, Louisiana
Amy DeValk and Stefanie Fuhr,
founders of Voices for Public Education (CO)
Sheila Resseger,
Coalition to Defend Public Education (Providence, RI)
Jose A. Soler, co-coordinator
of SE Mass and RI Save Our Schools Coalition
Lisa Shultz, privacy advocate, Oregon
Colleen Doherty Wood, co-founder, 50th No More
(FL)
Joy
Pullmann, Managing Editor, School Reform News