The Student Privacy Policy Office (SPPO) at the U.S. Department of Education (Department) performed a four-year review of a nationally representative sample of the websites of 1,504 local education agencies (LEAs) to identify whether and how these websites include information about student privacy. In each year of the study, SPPO reviewed a…

FERPA (1974) privacy laws protect undocumented Latinx learners with disabilities (ULWD) from disclosing their immigration status. The right to maintain anonymity provided by FERPA, however, potentially results in challenges in identifying and supporting the unique needs ULWD in home and school environments. Due, in part, to a lack of information,…

School-aged children spend around 1,080 hr at school each year and many of them have chronic diseases; therefore, it is imperative to include school nurses as part of the health care team. Care coordination between health care providers and school nurses is currently hindered by communication that relies on an inadequate system of fax, phone, and…

The legal and ethical use of Big Data and Learning Analytics in academic libraries has been widely debated. Analyzing large data sets has tremendous potential for libraries to implement changes that help students and prove the library's value to the university. The librarian's role in safeguarding patron privacy in a university setting where…

Ethical and legal objections to learning analytics are barriers to development of the field, thus potentially denying students the benefits of predictive analytics and adaptive learning. Jisc, a charitable organization that champions the use of digital technologies in UK education and research, has attempted to address this with the development of…

Recent efforts to change the teaching profession and teacher preparation include a number of innovations to use portfolio assessment, value added measures (VAM), accountability metrics and other corporate education reform ideas. These approaches may provoke considerable potential legal consequences. Traditional constitutional and civil rights…

Discusses the U.S. Supreme Court's opinion in Gonzaga University v. Doe, where the Supreme Court held that a person whose records were disclosed has no right to sue the institution for its violation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA). Explores the decision's ramifications for higher education, including applicable…

Discusses the history of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the Falvo and Gonzaga U.S. Supreme Court cases, and how universities might rethink FERPA in light of digital records. A discussion of Professor Lawrence Lessig's book "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" is used as a framework for discussing institutional…

Issues in the disclosure of special education student records and invasion of privacy are discussed. The article reviews what information teachers must disclose and may disclose, what information must be safeguarded, who has access to confidential information, what record of access must be maintained, and what information is not subject to…

Focuses on the last 15 years of privacy cases involving students. The cases examined cover the areas of searches, the family relationship, personal autonomy/appearance, and information privacy. (IRT)

Students clearly have a legal right to access to and privacy of their education records; but not so clear is public access to campus crime reports and AIDS-related records. Computerized records and the use of Social Security numbers as identifiers create other legal concerns. (Author)

This paper examines what exactly an educational record is. The definition of educational record is central to how the provisions of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) are laid out. In order to gain FERPA protection, a document must be considered an educational record. To set context, the paper describes FERPA as an act stating…

Congress enacted the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) in 1974 as a floor amendment to a comprehensive education statute. Until 2002, persons trying to understand and comply with FERPA were without guidance from the Supreme Court, which did not hear a single FERPA case from 1974 to 2001. In its 2001-02 term, however, the Court…

Ways that higher education institutions can improve their compliance procedures in responding to external requests for reports and information are addressed. Institutional officers must first determine how the data will be used by the external agency. By questioning how the requested information will be used, a determination can be made of what…