Carol Burris, the articulate and prolific principal of South Side High School in Rockville Center, Long Island, New York, here responds to state officials about the importance of student privacy.

New York is one of the few–perhaps the only–state that has stubbornly insisted that all student data will be uploaded to the inBloom website funded by the Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, engineered by Rupert Murdoch’s Wireless Generation, and managed by amazon.com.

Parent protests have caused other states either to cancel their commitment to turn all student information over to inBloom or to put their plans on hold (hoping, perhaps, that parents will forget and the whole thing will blow over).

But in New York, state officials say that schools have always shared student data, so this is nothing new. Thus, the state has no intention of backing away from inBloom.

Burris points out that the data her school shared in the past was not personally identifiable. The state collected data on many aspects of student test scores, race, ethnicity, disability, etc., but there was no personally identifiable information.

She writes:

The collection and reporting of school data is nothing new. We used to send data on scan sheets; test scores, drop out rates, the percentage of students with disabilities, etc., were all reported in the aggregate. As technology progressed, we began to electronically send data, not in the aggregate, but by student. Students were assigned a unique identifying number so that their privacy was protected, with identity guarded at the school or district level. More data, including race, ethnicity and socio-economic status, were added to what we sent. This allowed the state to disaggregate data by student group, while still preserving anonymity.

Now that wall of privacy is shattered. Names, addresses (e-mail and street) and phone numbers are to be sent. Schools are required to upload student attendance, along with attendance codes, which indicate far more than whether or not the student was absent or present. Codes indicate whether a student is ill, truant, late to school or suspended. Details about the lives of students are moving beyond the school walls to reside in the inBloom cloud.

As a high school principal, I am worried by the state’s ever growing demands for student information. I believe that all disciplinary records should be known only to families and the school. All teens are under tremendous strain to perform — sometimes for adults, other times for peers. Some live on the emotional breaking point — others visit that point now and again. Kids make mistakes. Some make bad decisions. Others lose their temper and get out of control. Such serious infractions result in suspensions. We have to keep our schools safe, even as we are concerned about the well being of the offender.

And here is what I add to her comments:

Why does the government need to track the movement of every single citizen? Why did the U.S. Department of Education’s Race to the Top include funding for a massive database? Why don’t they care about student privacy? What is their need to know? Will student data be rented, sold, or given to private vendors to develop commercial products?

Frankly, it is hard to think of any reason for inBloom or any other massive effort to aggregate personally identifiable information about every student.

In some spooky way, this seems to mirror the same thinking that lies behind the NSA program to monitor our emails and phone calls. If someone is on a terror list, it makes sense. But it makes no sense–and it seems to me to be unconstitutional, a violation of the Fourth Amendment–for the government to assume the power to snoop on every expression. Read this blog, if you wish; read my Twitter feed. But please do not monitor my emails and telephone calls. Do not open my personal mail. And do not put my grandchildren’s data into the cloud.

The irony for me in this current situation is that in the early 1990s, when I was Assistant Secretary of Education for the Office of Educational Research and Information in the U.S. Department of Education, I used to get scores of letters and emails from parents who accused the federal government of using NAEP to gather private information about their children. The letter-writers insisted that there was a secret government storage facility somewhere in Maryland that held all this information. I wrote them back, assuring them that there was no such project, that there was no such facility.

I wonder what my counterpart is writing to angry parents now.