Dive Brief:
- The Strengthening Education Through Research Act, which will affect the structure of education research at the Institute for Education Sciences, passed the Senate in December — and though another version of the bill passed the House in 2014, Education Week reports concerns raised under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act might be to blame for a stall.
- Student privacy rights advocates have been outspoken in their view that FERPA needs to crack down on big data in ed, strengthening protections for students and families.
- The overlap between SETRA and FERPA isn't huge, however, and education experts are divided on linking SETRA's slow crawl forward to activists working for stricter FERPA revisions.
Dive Insight:
A Data Quality Campaign report noted that much of the concern around student privacy and data collection could be assuaged with effective communication and transparency. "People don’t understand what [FERPA and COPPA] do," Kristin Yochum, DQC's director of federal policy initiatives, previously told Education Dive. "They believe what people tell them they do, because nobody’s going to dive into these laws."
The big data debate has a long history filled with controversy. Still, FERPA, was originally passed in 1974 and contains key provisions around the use of student data. It specifically states that a vendor contracted for a specific purpose can only use data collected for that purpose, and it prohibits the commercial use of student data.
