These 3 Student Data Bills Could Ruin Your Kid’s Life
Sorry, but I don’t happen to believe that lifelong surveillance and surveillance-based manipulation of my choices should be the price of a public education.
For years, I researched and wrote about the State Longitudinal Database Systems (SLDS) here in Oklahoma and across the nation (here, here and here), warning that these ill-advised legislative efforts to codify “transparency and accountability” in public schools would end up creating what could only be considered a national database.
In 2013 I testified before our state legislature on the dangers of SLDS, which are a system of interconnected state data streams that flow into a giant federal data river collecting information starting when small humans enter the public school system. Sorry, but I don’t happen to believe that lifelong surveillance and surveillance-based manipulation of my choices should be the price of a public education. Nobody needs his preschool discipline records following him for life because some data company in cahoots with the government—well beyond my control—wants to plunder education records to make a buck.
The arguments I used then remain valid today: there is no way to provide either the bureaucracy-driven “transparency” or “accountability” government officials now desire for public education without collecting countless data points of information on nearly every facet of a student’s life. Of course, that is exactly what schools do today: collect endless reams of data.
Sorry, but I don’t happen to believe that lifelong surveillance and surveillance-based manipulation of my choices should be the price of a public education.
For years, I researched and wrote about the State Longitudinal Database Systems (SLDS) here in Oklahoma and across the nation (here, here and here), warning that these ill-advised legislative efforts to codify “transparency and accountability” in public schools would end up creating what could only be considered a national database.
In 2013 I testified before our state legislature on the dangers of SLDS, which are a system of interconnected state data streams that flow into a giant federal data river collecting information starting when small humans enter the public school system. Sorry, but I don’t happen to believe that lifelong surveillance and surveillance-based manipulation of my choices should be the price of a public education. Nobody needs his preschool discipline records following him for life because some data company in cahoots with the government—well beyond my control—wants to plunder education records to make a buck.
The arguments I used then remain valid today: there is no way to provide either the bureaucracy-driven “transparency” or “accountability” government officials now desire for public education without collecting countless data points of information on nearly every facet of a student’s life. Of course, that is exactly what schools do today: collect endless reams of data.
