15 March 2013
EDUCATION: The use of a third party company to store student information currently being adopted by some states is not only risky, but also poorly thought out.
By Isabel De La Garza, Senior Writer
A 100 million dollar database funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and some school officials, and managed by a private organization called inBloom Inc., has been created for the use of public schools as a student information bank and progress tracker. States and school districts have the ability to choose whether to input information into the database and so far nine states have promised to enter information into the system. Colorado, Georgia, Delaware, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina and Massachusetts have committed to adding in data from select districts, while New York and Louisiana will be entering nearly all student records statewide.
Student files are identified by name, address and in some cases, social security number. They have all kinds of normal academic information about attendance habits, learning disabilities and test scores to supplementary information about a student’s hobbies, career goals, attitudes toward school and even homework completion. According to federal law, school officials are allowed to use the database to store information without parent permission because it complies with privacy laws. They are also permitted to show files to any “school official”—including private organizations that have contracts with the school—with “legitimate educational interest” without parental consent as long as the data is used only for purposes allowed under contract. The school officials can also pick and choose what information to withhold but that is hardly a comfort t the parents of K-12 children in districts that are using inBloom to store data.
Districts have substantial information on students, all of which has been provided by parents, in order to allow their children to attend the school and keep them safe in the case of an unforeseen event such as a natural disaster, sports accident or allergic reaction. In this case, the information is used either to get in touch with parents, or in the case of a suspected shooter, to alert authorities so that the rest of the student body is protected. It may have some commentary from teachers about a student’s performance, but generally it has basic information about a student’s test scores, attendance, grades, learning disabilities, allergies, medications, etc. This information is also generally only made available to those school administrators and teachers that it concerns. It is not often passed on to third party companies for use in marketing educational tools and products to schools based off of student profiles.
Proponents of the database believe that allowing companies to have access to comprehensive student information will allow the companies to pinpoint what the schools need to work on and thus help students to excel in their classes by providing them with more learning tools. They believe that the documentation may allow them to spot trends in students and develop education plans and tools, which they can then sell to districts to make profit. Many educational companies are hailing the database as a “godsend.” Others point out that it is better to have all the student information in one database to make transfers between districts and even states easier in the future. On the other hand, if the districts indexed all their information and monitored it themselves, they could point out trends, which they could then use to determine future courses of action in education rather than having private companies access the millions of student profiles currently on the database and risk the information being intercepted during transmission.
Another big problem with the database is that although it promises to protect the information as best as it can, “it cannot guarantee the security of the information stored” or ensure that the “information will not be intercepted when it is being transmitted.” District databases can be hacked as well, but they generally keep student information staggered on a number of programs and paper files to ensure that not all of a student’s information can be plundered at once. However, there is no guarantee that the site will not be hacked, which has parents extremely worried. Many have began to protest and write to school officials in New York, Louisiana and Massachusetts because they fear the information will be abused.
Although the database may have good points with regards to fostering education—or making it “bloom”—by trying to personalize teaching, using information from student records as a guide is far too risky and poorly conceived. It may be more streamlined and slightly more accessible to teachers, but that defeats the whole purpose of the original district databases. The at-times frustrating disorganization was in place on purpose to try to protect student information, not to overcomplicate matters.