<p>There are plenty of privacy laws regarding student information, starting with FERPA. I believe that there has been lots of discussion about them in connection with this project, and that everyone involved is comfortable that they are not violating privacy laws. </p>
<p>Whether they are right or not, I don’t know. I don’t mean to belittle privacy concerns here. Clearly they exist, and the fact that people have been sensitive to them doesn’t mean that reasonable people might not disagree about where the critical lines are that can’t be crossed. I am sure that the system being built includes substantial protections against unauthorized access to personal information, but no system is perfect.</p>
<p>I don’t know whether it is true, by the way, that information like a social security number is included, although it probably has to be in order to distinguish students with the same names.</p>
<p>As I understand it (and my understanding may be imperfect), the point of the project is to give teachers real-time access to individualized information about a student’s educational progress and needs, and to curricular material that would be personalized to the student, as part of an overall set of goals to enable highly individualized instruction within a classroom setting, to reduce the educational disruption that occurs when students change teachers and schools, and to have a fair way to evaluate school, curriculum, and maybe teacher performance that takes account of the actual students in a school, not merely their demographics. The “access” that outside contractors are expected to have to the data is not to market anything to the students or their families, but to deliver individualized instructional material to a student’s teacher on request, and also for evaluating the effectiveness of schools, curricular materials, etc.</p>
<p>By way of full disclosure, my interest in this derives from two relatives, one of whom is somewhat involved in this project, and another of whom has at times been very engaged in dealing with the inadequacy and “silo” problems of education data systems, and the harm that causes both to children’s education and to attempts to improve schools and other educational systems.</p>