In 1974, Congress passed legislation known as the "Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act" or FERPA, in response to "the growing evidence of the abuse of student records across the nation." The law was written to protect the confidentiality of information held in a student's records. With the introduction of technology in…

As technology has leaped forward to provide valuable learning tools, parents and policy makers have begun raising concerns about the privacy of student data that schools and systems have. Federal laws are intended to protect students and their families but they have not and will never be able to keep up with rapidly evolving technology. School…

This document recommends a set of core practices, operations, and templates that can be adopted and adapted by local education agencies (LEAs) as they consider how to respond to requests for both new and existing data about the education enterprise. These recommendations reflect core best practices for: (1) managing the flow of requests; (2)…

Schools use data for different purposes, which have different degrees of impact on a student's educational experience: administrative, instructional, assessment and measurement, and optional/noneducational. To the extent feasible, parental choice policies should be structured according to the use of the data in question. Parents should have more…

The education sector is beginning to embrace a culture that values, demands and uses data to support improved decisionmaking at every level--in classrooms, at kitchen tables and in state capitols. This shift is due in large part to state policymakers' leadership over the last six years in building statewide longitudinal data systems that collect…

Parents expect school districts and schools to keep their children safe while they are in school. That expectation of safety and security also extends to the protection of their children's learning data. Therefore, it is critical that school districts and schools are open and transparent about their student data privacy practices, and that those…

This information memorandum describes three federal laws which govern public access to federal records and the treatment of personally identifiable information by federal agencies or under federal programs. It is noted that these laws generally apply only to federal agencies in the executive branch of government. The first of four major sections…