How the feds are tracking your kid
Would it
bother you to know that the federal Centers for Disease Control had been
shown your daughter's health records to see how she responded to an
STD/teen-pregnancy-prevention program? How about if the federal
Department of Education and Department of Labor scrutinized your son's
academic performance to see if he should be "encouraged" to leave high
school early to learn a trade? Would you think the government was
intruding on your territory as a parent?
Under
regulations the Obama Department of Education released this month, these
scenarios could become reality. The department has taken a giant step
toward creating a de facto national student database that will track
students by their personal information from preschool through career.
Although current federal law prohibits this, the department decided to
ignore Congress and, in effect, rewrite the law. Student privacy and
parental authority will suffer.
How did it happen? Buried
within the enormous 2009 stimulus bill were provisions encouraging
states to develop data systems for collecting copious information on
public-school kids. To qualify for stimulus money, states had to agree to build such systems according to federally dictated standards. So all 50 states either now maintain or are capable of maintaining extensive databases on public-school students.
The
administration wants this data to include much more than name, address
and test scores. According to the National Data Collection Model, the
government should collect information on health-care history, family
income and family voting status. In its view, public schools offer a
golden opportunity to mine reams of data from a captive audience.
The
department's eagerness to get control of all this information is almost
palpable. But current federal law prohibits a nationwide student
database and strictly limits disclosure of a student's personal
information. So the department has determined that it can overcome the
legal obstacles by simply bypassing Congress and essentially rewriting
the federal privacy statute.
Last April,
the department proposed regulations that would allow it and other
agencies to share a student's personal information with practically any
government agency or even private company, as long as the disclosure
could be said to support an evaluation of an "education program,"
broadly defined. That's how the CDC might end up with your daughter's
health records or the Department of Labor with your son's test scores.
And you'd have no right to object - in fact, you'd probably never even know about the disclosure.
Not
surprisingly, these proposed regulations provoked a firestorm of
criticism. But on Dec. 2, the Department of Education rejected almost
all the criticisms and released the regulations. As of Jan. 3, 2012,
interstate and intergovernmental access to your child's personal
information will be practically unlimited. The federal government will
have a de facto nationwide database of supposedly confidential student
information.
The
department says this won't happen. If the states choose to link their
data systems, it says, that's their business, but "the federal
government would not play a role" in operating the resulting
megadatabase.
This denial
is, to say the least, disingenuous. The department would have access to
the data systems of each of the 50 states and would be allowed to share
that data with anyone it chooses, as long as it uses the right language
to justify the disclosure.
And just as
the department used the promise of federal money to coerce the states
into developing these systems, it would almost certainly do the same to
make them link their systems. The result would be a nationwide student
database, whether or not it's "operated" from an office in Washington.
The
loosening of student-privacy protection would greatly increase the
risks of unauthorized disclosure of personal data. Even the authorized
disclosure would be limited only by the imaginations of federal
bureaucrats.
Unless
Congress steps in and reclaims its authority, student privacy and
parental control over education will be relics of the past.
Emmett
McGroarty is executive director of the Preserve Innocence Initiative of
the American Principles Project. Jane Robbins is a senior fellow with
the American Principles Project.
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