[Young-friends] FCNL: Should Big Brother Be Your Study Buddy?

[Guest guest]

Should Big Brother Be Your Study Buddy?

 

 

 

“If you attend a college or university, please immediately send your race or

ethnicity, financial aid information, the number of classes you are taking,

whether or not you are living on campus or with your family, and any varsity

sports you play. When you=re done doing that, please also send all of the

information listed here on page 74 (http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2005/2005160.pdf -

see note below about PDF files) if you ever want to enroll in college.”

 

 

 

Under a new federal proposal being championed by the Department of Education=s

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), any college or university you

ever attend in the U.S. would be required to submit this personal information

about you to the federal government. The data is slated to be stored

indefinitely.

 

 

 

Why does the government want to collect and store all this information about

you? To ensure students= privacy and evaluate the performance of colleges and

universities, the Department of Education currently collects aggregate

statistics from schools. The Department of Education claims that collecting

information on a student-by-student basis, rather than aggregate numbers, would

help evaluate the performances of these institutions of higher education.

Switching to a student unit record system, however, raises significant student

privacy concerns:

 

 

 

* The potential exists for misuse of personal student information by government

agencies. For example, the National Directory of New Hires, designed as a

registry of workers who re-enter the workforce, has been accessed and misused by

other government agencies to track parents who fail to pay child support or who

owe non-tax debt, despite privacy assurances.

 

 

 

* The system is vulnerable to identity theft, arising from a concentrated

storage of the very information necessary for such illegal activity.

 

 

 

* Who will be responsible for collecting student unit records from colleges and

universities around the country? Will the government subcontract private

companies, some of which have recently experienced security breaches, to collect

personal student information?

 

 

 

* NCES database records will be stored indefinitely, creating the potential of a

lifetime federal profile of individuals not involved with, or suspected of, any

crime.

 

Congress has previously prohibited creating a national database to track

students. When it created the No Child Left Behind Act (PL 107-110), Congress

specifically refused to create such a database for K-12 students, according to

The Campus Privacy Letter from the Council on Law in Higher Education

(http://www.clhe.org/campusprivacy/cplv1n1.pdf - see note below about PDFs). Why

would it therefore be acceptable for Congress to create a federal database on

college and university students?

 

 

 

 

 

Furthermore, despite the Department of Education=s claim that “information about

individuals may never leave NCES,” this assertion is wrong. Section 508 of the

USA PATRIOT Act permits the Attorney General to apply for a special court order

to obtain any “reports, records, and information (including individually

identifiable information) in the possession” of NCES that are relevant to a

terrorism investigation or prosecution. A final report of the student tracking

proposal feasibility study was sent to Congress on March 21, 2005. NCES

officials have indicated that they will not implement the proposal without

congressional approval, which would require weakening privacy laws and

appropriating funds. Amending the Higher Education Act reauthorization bill

would be the most likely method for Congress to enact the student tracking

proposal. FCNL and other privacy advocacy groups have grave concerns about this

proposal because of the many unanswered privacy concerns that it raises.

 

 

 

You can keep your information private by stopping this proposal from being

enacted in several ways!

 

 

 

1) If your representative is on the House Education and the Workforce Committee

(http://edworkforce.house.gov/members/109th/mem-fc.htm) or your senator is on

the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee

(http://help.senate.gov/committee_members.html), contact him or her and say that

you don=t want your privacy invaded by the Department of Education=s new student

tracking proposal. If you don=t know who your representative and/or senators

are, click (http://capwiz.com/fconl/dbq/officials/). Your members of Congress

want to hear from you about this controversial proposal!

 

 

 

2) Write a letter to the editor of your school newspaper or your hometown

newspaper exposing the privacy concerns raised by the Department of Education=s

tracking proposal.

 

 

 

3) Contact Chairwoman of the Department of Education, Margaret Spellings (by

clicking on http://www.ed.gov/about/contacts/gen/index.html?src=gu and then

clicking on the web form in the middle of the page or by calling 202-401-3000),

and Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, Grover

Whitehurst (grover.whitehurst or 202-502-7442), and tell them that you

don=t want the government indefinitely collecting and storing your private

information from college.

 

 

 

4) Forward this email to your friends so they can do something to protect their

privacy rights!

 

 

 

Please visit the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities=

website (www.naicu.edu/HEA/UnitRecord.shtml) for a comprehensive list of student

newspapers and other periodicals that have decried the Department of Education=s

student tracking proposal.

 

 

 

Contact Jeanne Herrick-Stare at jeanne if you have any questions about

this proposal.

 

 

 

* To access PDF files you will need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader on your

computer. If you do not have this free program you can download it from Adobe's

web site: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

 

 

 

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______________________

 

Friends Committee on National Legislation

 

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phone: (202)547-6000 * toll-free: (800)630-1330

 

 

 

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