Blog

Your Education Road Map

Politics K-12®

ESSA. Congress. State chiefs. School spending. Elections. Education Week reporters keep watch on education policy and politics in the nation’s capital and in the states. Read more from this blog.

Federal

House Education Panel Debates Student-Data-Privacy

By Benjamin Herold — January 30, 2018 1 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

Congress is still wrestling with a basic question: How to use educational data to improve schools, without further jeopardizing student privacy?

That was the subject taken up by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, in a 90-minute hearing on “Protecting Privacy, Promoting Policy: Evidence-Based Policymaking and the Future of Education.”

Should any bipartisan clarity ever be reached, there could be significant implications for ongoing attempts to update or rewrite federal student-data-privacy laws, as well as for proposals on the Hill to codify into law recommendations issued last fall by the Congressionally appointed Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking.

But the takeaway from Tuesday’s hearing--or at least from the expert witnesses assembled to offer their insights--seemed to be that there’s a still ways to go.

“There are no silver bullets that make data useful for good purposes but [immune to] privacy violations,” said Georgetown law professor and privacy expert Paul Ohm, a member of the Congressional commission.

Want more? Check out the rest of this post at Digital Education.