Crazy Crawfish, a blogger also known as Jason France, used to work as a data analyst in the Louisiana Department of Education. He was recently shocked to discover that the department has released confidential student data to the research group CREDO. It even released the data of nonpublic school students.
France realized that the state released personal student data that CREDO didn’t need or use.
He writes:
“It’s only a combination of chance and persistence that I stumbled across the details of this agreement and am able to share my findings with you. How many more agreements like this are out there that are unknown to us? How poorly have they been reviewed? I can’t actually say. Someone outside of LDOE needs to review these types of disclosures (All of them) – before they happen. It is important for the public to have an accounting of both what was promised, but also what was actually delivered. Frankly, if LDOE doesn’t understand their own data, they shouldn’t be providing it to others. I also question whether they should be collecting it all or storing it for decades in the first place.”
my school district passed a board policy stating it would not honor FOIA requests that asked for information about the software the district is using…using to spy on students and teachers.
Murphy’s law of data collection:
“If data can be misused and/or abused, it will be”
The only way to “protect” data is not to collect it.
Merely saying that you will not “store” data is insufficient because once it is stored, there is no way to ensure that it will be “safe” and no way to ensure that it will be “purged”.
We’re really “shocked” that universities provide confidential student data to third parties for research? I don’t know why we would be. I assume it happens constantly. For example, the studies sometimes cited here about the relative performance in college by students who choose not to take the SAT or ACT. Those can’t be done without the university exporting confidential data to the researcher.
Not universities, pre-k – 12. Public and non-public data. Data on disabilities.
Ah, misread that. Doesn’t the same point apply to K-12 data? Haven’t researchers long been doing work based on non-public data that they’ve been given access to by states?
News today about another Dept. of Education. The woman who cleans Arne Duncan’s office joined a wage-theft complaint against federal janitorial contractors.
http://gawker.com/workers-who-clean-our-government-offices-say-theyre-bei-1696728032
Ain’t Data Shame!!!
Does anyone else smell the scent of courts, judges and juries?