Hatch, Markey Urge Student Privacy Act Passage

benefit of students and not for any unknown means,” Hatch and Markey wrote. American schools increasingly outsource to private companies the work to retain and process educational records, they said. A study from Fordham Law School’s Center on Law and Information Policy found that student data shared with companies ranges from grades, test scores and attendance records, to whether a student has a disability, family relationships and Social Security numbers, without any privacy protections, they said. Parents are largely unaware schools send their child’s data to a private company for analysis, and parents who do know rarely have the ability to correct faulty information, Hatch and Leahy said. It’s time to update the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act, they said. “We create safe zones around school playgrounds to protect children from outside dangers in the offline world,” and it is “just as important that we safeguard students’ personal information in the online world so that kids can grow up and learn in a secure environment where strangers cannot track, target or make judgments about them that could hurt their prospects for a bright, productive future,” they said.