The Maryland State Department of Education is creating a
massive database of student information, and due to the state’s acceptance of
federal stimulus money and adoption of Common Core Standards, that data
including a host of personal information may not be kept private as mandated by
the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).
When Maryland accepted American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act (ARRA) funds in 2009 it agreed to build a broad state longitudinal data
system (SLDS), and as part of its successful Race to the Top application, the
state agreed to strengthen, and enhance the capabilities of the database.
The Maryland Statewide Longitudinal Data System (MLDS)
captures and analyzes student data from preschool through high school, college
and the work force. MLDS collects more
than 400 data points on students including healthcare history, disciplinary
records, family income range, family voting status, and religious affiliation.
According to
Maryland’s
Race to the Top application the state education Department already shares
student level date with the state Department of Human Resources, Department of
Juvenile Justice, Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, and is
working on a memorandum of understanding to share data with the Department of
Labor Licensing and Regulation.
Race to the Top prioritizes how well states make student data
accessible to “key stakeholders,” which are defined as “parents, students,
teachers, local education authorities, community members, unions, researchers,
and policy makers.”
Maryland is also basing the sharing of student data on State
Stat, Governor O’Malley’s
much
ballyhooed, yet flawed performance-measuring system.
The State Education Department is implanting
10-step initiative to for MLDS enabling it to gather more student-level data,
integrate it with existing data, and make it more accessible to other state
agencies, and “stakeholders.”
Federal law forbids the creation of a national student
database, and Maryland’s MLDS enabling legislation
SB 275,
signed into law in 2010, requires the newly created Maryland Longitudinal Data
System Center to comply with FERPA.
However, the Federal Department of Education has—through regulation—found
a way to circumvent FERPA.
The new regulations allow transmission of students’ personal
identifiable information—without parental consent—to any governmental or
private entity designated by the Department and others as an “authorized
representative,” for the purpose of evaluating an education program.
Any personal student information the Department of Education
acquires can now be shared with whomever they deem an “authorized
representative” without parental approval or even notification. How many parents would be happy to have
sensitive information about their children and families made available to
“unions” or “community members” as spelled out in the Race to the Top
application?
While the federal government hasn’t directly created a
national database, they’ve coaxed the states—with billions in stimulus
cash—into creating it for them.
McGroarty and Robbins note that the two assessment regimes
aligned with Common Core are explicitly required to make student-level
assessment data available. ARRA provided
$362 million to fund two state assessment consortiums Partnership for
Assessment of Readiness of College and Careers (PARCC) and SMARTER Balanced
Assessment Consortium (SBAC). In
exchange for stimulus funds, the authors note:
..the
cooperative agreements between the Department and those consortia explicitly
require PARCC and SBAC to “develop a strategy to make student-level data that
results from the assessment system available on an ongoing basis for research,
including for prospective linking, validity, and program improvement studies; [sic]
subject to applicable privacy laws.”
With the revelation that the National Security Agency is
collecting troves of data on our Internet activity, Americans are rightly
concerned about privacy and the fourth amendment. Now, Maryland parents need to be concerned
about what data about our children our schools are collecting, and who else may
have access to it.
More below the fold.