Education Week - February 10, 2016 - 8

DIGITAL DIRECTIONS > Tracking news and ideas in educational technology
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Partnership Boosts Data Privacy
By Leo Doran
An unusual partnership between
the American Civil Liberties Union
and the Tenth Amendment Center
is pushing states to adopt model
legislation that the organizations
argue will fill in gaps in studentdata-privacy protections.
Proposed overhauls of digitalprivacy laws, including many that
regulate relationships between edtech vendors and school districts,
were simultaneously introduced
in 16 states and the District of Columbia last month in bills based on
the model legislation.
Though the ACLU, with headquarters in New York City, and the
Los-Angeles based Tenth Amendment Center are generally seen as
being on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, they have found
common ground in their advocacy
for stronger electronic-privacy protections.
In consultation with the center-
a think tank that advocates strict
limits on federal power-the ACLU
wrote model legislation that both
organizations are urging legislators around the country to support.
Chad Marlow, the ACLU advocacy and policy counsel, said that
the parts of the bills aimed at bolstering student-privacy protections
were written to ensure that "schools
don't become a Constitution-free
zone," and that companies that want
to collect student data must first get
explicit permission.
Over the past two years, 32 states
have enacted some sort of dataprivacy law, according to the Data
Quality Campaign. Some of those

laws have been sweeping, such as
California's Student Online Personal Information Privacy Act,
which has drawn particular praise
from privacy advocates. Other laws
are much weaker, experts say.
To work around a lack of movement at the federal level over dataprivacy protections for students,
the activists and lawmakers working with the two organizations are
calculating that if they get enough
states to adopt a stricter slate of privacy expectations for vendors, companies will have little choice but to
raise their standards to a level nationally that would allow them to
work in any state.
"It would be impractical for
Google to have 50 different privacy
standards," said Anthony Romero,
the executive director of the ACLU,
during an audio press conference.

Menu of Provisions
The model bill crafted by the
ACLU is meant to serve as a menu
of data-privacy provisions from
which other groups and state lawmakers can pick and choose-meaning that each state bill can be somewhat different.
Many of the bills have a broad
focus that aims to improve data-privacy protections across society, not
just in schools. However, in states
where the ACLU and the Tenth
Amendment Center believe that
existing student-data protections
are weak, the proposed legislation
focuses on stepping up safeguards
in four specific areas:
* Parental or student consent to 
release student data for noneducational purposes or to third parties;
* Limits on information that can 
be gleaned from computing devices
loaned to students;
* Protections from warrantless 

8 | EDUCATION WEEK | February 10, 2016 | www.edweek.org

searches of students on campus; and
* Restrictions on access to student 
postings that are behind privacy
settings on social-media.
The model legislation also calls
for professional development to help
teachers familiarize themselves
with basic student-data-privacy
concepts.
Student-data protection is of special interest to the ACLU because
the group holds that K-12 students
are "extremely vulnerable to being
aggressively targeted" by companies
seeking such information to build
personalized marketing profiles,
Marlow said.
He also echoed other experts who
are concerned about certain scenarios in which students might feel
inappropriately pressured to waive
their privacy rights or risk being
barred from participating in classroom activities that require use of
ed-tech tools that aim to personalize learning.
Marlow pointed to the controversial practices of the now-shuttered
nonprofit InBloom as indicative of
another type of behavior his group
is trying to combat. InBloom drew
withering fire from critics upset
about the amount of student information it planned to collect and
share with third parties.
The Future of Privacy Forum-a
Washington-based think tank and
a co-author of the Student Privacy
Pledge, a commitment by ed-tech
companies to safeguard data-offered
a measured endorsement of the provisions in the ACLU's model bill.
The forum applauded the model
legislation's language on parentalrelease mechanisms and its calls for
teacher professional development
on basic data-privacy issues, but is
worried that an overly strict definition of "personally identifiable information" and the risk of personal

TOP PRIORITIES IN
MODEL LEGISLATION
FOR STUDENT DATA
PROTECTIONS

Getty

ACLU joins forces
with think tank

The ACLU has outlined four main areas for states to focus on
when crafting data-privacy legislation, including:
n Student Information Systems Privacy: Requiring specific
permission from parents before student data are used for noneducational purposes by a third party.
n 1-to-1 Device Privacy: Placing limits on the ability of schools
and third parties to access information about student behavior or
communications that are made on computing devices loaned to
students.
n Student

Personal Technology on Campus: Ensuring that the same
legal protections that apply to students' personal electronic devices
away from school also apply when students are on campus.

n Student Social Media Privacy: Barring educational institutions
from demanding access to students' social-media accounts, with few
exceptions.
SOURCE: ACLU and Tenth Amendment Center

legal liability for teachers who make
mistakes could undermine both the
ed-tech industry and the work of
classroom educators.

Critiquing Two State Bills
Steven Hodas, an education innovation "cluster leader" at Digital
Promise, a nonprofit group that
seeks to improve schools through research and technology, said the language in some of the bills might balance the interests of students with
the operational needs of schools and
vendors better than others.
Some of the state proposals, like
Alabama's, appear to be less concerned with the prospect of student
data falling into the hands of advertisers than with a school's right to
collect such information in the first
place, said Hodas, who emphasized
that his views on data privacy were
his own and did not necessarily reflect the organizational positions of
Digital Promise.
Hodas interpreted another section
of the Alabama bill, which would
prohibit schools or officials from
administering student surveys on
"psychological resources, mindsets,
effortful control, attributes, dispositions, social skills, attitudes, or
intrapersonal resources" as potentially interfering with some schools'
burgeoning interest in collecting information on student qualities such
as perseverance or "grit."
Another part of the Alabama legislation says that "no student data
shall be used for predictive modeling for detecting behaviors, beliefs,
or value systems, or predicting or
forecasting student outcomes." That
language could, in theory, hamper the

ability of an ed-tech company to use
data to customize classroom learning,
said Hodas.
Instead of "wishing away an entire
category of knowing" about education, Hodas said, states would be
better served by allowing companies
to collect some essential data and
then enacting strict punishments for
instances of its misuse. He said the
ACLU-backed bill proposed in Nebraska "is more familiar with how
schools actually work."
The bill includes broader exceptions
for vendors who want to use student
data to improve their products.
The variations between some of
the proposed pieces of legislation reflect the unusual coalitions behind
some of the efforts.
The Alabama bill, in particular,
was the product of a reconciliation between the ACLU's proposal
and one by the Eagle Forum of
Alabama, a Birmingham-based
nonprofit that promotes conservative causes. Deborah Love, the
group's executive director, said it
was "sad" that people are surprised
that there is such broad bipartisan
support for initiatives that "ensure
that liberty is respected in our
houses of learning."
While the ACLU and the Eagle
Forum have their philosophical differences, both Marlow and Love said
they do not expect the proposed law
in Alabama-or, in Marlow's contention, any of the bills nationally-to
hurt ed-tech companies that are already acting ethically.
The overriding goal of the legislation, according to Marlow, "is to
empower parents and kids to make
informed choices about what they do
or don't want to share."
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Education Week - February 10, 2016

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