A Stitch in Haste

The government never met a database it didn't like:

A proposal by the federal government to create a vast new database of enrollment records on all college and university students is raising concerns that the move will erode the privacy rights of students.

Until now, universities have provided individual student information to the federal government only in connection with federally financed student aid. Otherwise, colleges and universities submit information about overall enrollment, graduation, prices and financial aid without identifying particular students.

For the first time, however, colleges and universities would have to give the government data on all students individually, whether or not they received financial assistance, with their Social Security numbers.

The bid arises from efforts in Congress and elsewhere to extend the growing emphasis on school accountability in elementary and high schools to postsecondary education. Supporters say that government oversight of individual student data will make it easier for taxpayers and policy makers to judge the quality of colleges and universities through more reliable statistics on graduation, transfers and retention.
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Under the proposal, the National Center for Education Statistics at the Department of Education would receive, analyze and guard the data. In making its case for the change, the center points to a history of working with student information and says it has never been forced to share it with law enforcement or other agencies.
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A department overview of the proposal insisted that data would not be shared with other agencies and that outsiders could not gain access. By law, the summary says in capitals, "Information about individuals may NEVER leave N.C.E.S."

Hogwash. Does anyone truly believe that some fourth-tier bureaucrat from a third-tier branch of a second-tier cabinet office is going to defy a judge's subpoena or an inquiry from Homeland Security? Please.

As I recall, you have the "ability" (or is it a de facto requirement?) to opt out of education privacy protections when applying to college or graduate school. Will "optional" NCES waivers permitting the disclosure of one's educational data to, say, prospective employers, be as inconceivable as the bureaucrats claim? As with all bureaucratic promises, I'm skeptical.

In the good old days, "federalism" meant that certain government functions were the exclusive, or near-exclusive, domain of the states. Education policy was often at the top of the list. Now we have every level of government involved in every aspect of public policy, complete with taxing, spending, regulating and, perhaps most ominously, data gathering. Federal education funding, federal education regulation, federal education monitoring, and now federal education databases. Remind me again why No Child Left Behind was a good idea, and why it was passed by conservatives?

Some privacy-apathetic commentators like to point to the fact that there has never been a breach of privacy by the Census Bureau, so what's all the panic? That may be so (and I could say much about the Census regardless), but that impressive record owes to an express federal statute (and perhaps also from the Constitutional solemnity of the Census Bureau's function) rather than an intrinsic bureaucratic trait. Would the NCES take its responsibilities as seriously as the Census Bureau does? I doubt it.

And what lessons does comprehensive data gathering send to impressionable young college minds about the proper scope of government and their rights in a supposedly "free" society?

Tracking school performance can be easily accomplished by sampling, or alternatively by anonymous tracking (or here's a radical idea: pay students to participate in the tracking studies voluntarily). It's simply not as difficult to identify bad schools or bad teachers as the educrats claim. But more tracking, more studies and more research mean bigger budgets, bigger staffs, bigger influence -- and bigger headaches when the system gets abused, as it almost certainly would.

Without drawing the obvious analogies to the Solomon Amendments that were in the news yesterday, clearly a college student who receives federal student aid can be expected to abide by certain conditions and restrictions. But a student who takes nothing from the government should be free from government's curious eyes regarding his course selection, grades, post-collegiate plans, employment, extracurricular activities, etc.

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(Cross-linked at Outside the Beltway.)

Be sure to review this Wired piece about an alarming incident in California:

Parents of elementary and middle school students in a small California town are protesting a tracking program their school recently launched, which requires students to wear identification badges embedded with radio frequency, or RFID, chips.
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But students and parents, who weren't told about the RFID chips until they complained, are upset over what they say are surreptitious tactics the school used to implement the program. They also question the ethics of a monetary deal the school made with the company to test and promote its product, using students as guinea pigs.
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The system consists of a photo ID card affixed to a lanyard and worn around the neck. Embedded in the card is an RFID chip that contains a 15-digit number assigned to each student. As students pass beneath a doorway scanner on their way into a classroom, the scanner records the number and sends it to a server in the school's administrative office. The server translates the digits into names and sends an attendance list to the teacher's PDA, identifying all of the students who walked through the door. The teacher then visually verifies that the names on the PDA list match the students in the classroom.
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[T]he parents of [two students] told the school, which includes grades kindergarten through 8th grade, that their children wouldn't participate in the project. The school sent a letter threatening disciplinary action if students didn't participate.
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School officials could also quickly identify anyone who didn't belong on campus if they weren't wearing an RFID badge. But the main draw is a more efficient and accurate way to track and verify attendance in order to receive state funds.
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[An administrator] said the school properly notified parents about the test, as the law requires, and got no complaints. He said the school held an open board meeting to discuss the test and posted public notices describing the essence of the test, but could not say where exactly the notices were placed. ... A week after receiving parent complaints, the school scheduled a gathering to demonstrate the technology and answer questions, but notified parents only a day in advance.

Now, if I were a parent I might consider tagging my own children for their safety (Diamond has a microchip surgically implanted). And perhaps a school-based RFID system is a great idea -- I don't know.

But I do know that children aren't the property of the school district and shouldn't be used as guinea pigs to test a program whose primary motivation is not safety but money.

We seem to moving further and further away from the principle that students do not "shed their constitutional rights ... at the schoolhouse gate" (Tinker v. Des Moines School Dist., 393 U.S. 503 (1969)). And what of the right of the parents to notice and a hearing when a major new policy, one that implicates students' rights, is being implemented? In an era of emails and websites, let alone photocopiers, how can the educrats say with a straight face that parents should just "go to the school board meeting"?

As the ACLU puts it:

Articles about controversial subjects written for student newspapers are censored. Lockers and backpacks are searched without reasonable suspicion. Minority students are disproportionately shunted in lower track programs. Majoritarian religious practices are officially sanctioned by teachers and school administrators. Female students are excluded from certain extracurricular activities, and gay students are intimidated into silence.

Indeed. And don't forget censorship in school libraries and humiliating strip searches.

Now of course the hyper-anarcho-libertarian would say "if we didn't have public schools, then we wouldn't have these problems." And to an extent that's true. But given that we do have public schools and will continue to have them for the foreseeable future, then can we at least make sure that the rules -- constitutional rules more often than not -- are actually followed and that educrats develop a mindset of "better to err on the side of constitutional caution"?

Just as rights aren't shed at the schoolhouse gate, neither should common sense be.

MAJOR UPDATE: The project has been scrapped.

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Back in November I blogged about a federal proposal to create a vast new database of all college student academic records, nominally to track school success, curriculum popularity, etc.

Well, the proposal is back in the news:

A feasibility study released this month by the [Education] department's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) states that the center can handle the technological and privacy challenges of such a database, but adds that it would impose additional costs on colleges to update their administrative systems.

The proposed tracking system would require a centralized database and secure off-line storage to manage millions of student records initially, along with millions of new records that would be added each year.
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The proposed database would provide individually identifiable student information, including names, Social Security numbers, number of courses taken and credits earned, degrees completed, and actual education costs.

The study acknowledges the privacy concerns that already have been raised. But it states that NCES operates under legislation that makes it a Class E felony to violate data confidentiality rules. The study also states that no cases have occurred in which confidential data collected by NCES has been wrongfully disclosed.

As I blogged back in November:

As I recall, you have the "ability" (or is it a de facto requirement?) to opt out of education privacy protections when applying to college or graduate school. Will "optional" NCES waivers permitting the disclosure of one's educational data to, say, prospective employers, be as inconceivable as the bureaucrats claim? As with all bureaucratic promises, I'm skeptical.
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And what lessons does comprehensive data gathering send to impressionable young college minds about the proper scope of government and their rights in a supposedly "free" society?

Hat tip to PrivacySpot.

Related Post:
Feds Propose Vast College Student Database

Imagine if the federal government passed a new law that not only carved out (yet another) exception to the Fourth Amendment's requirement of either a warrant or probable cause to enter a home, but also required every homeowner to provide, at their own expense, one of those battering rams that police use to break down doors.

Well, something similar is happening at America's colleges:

The federal government, vastly extending the reach of an 11-year-old law, is requiring hundreds of universities, online communications companies and cities to overhaul their Internet computer networks to make it easier for law enforcement authorities to monitor e-mail and other online communications.

The action, which the government says is intended to help catch terrorists and other criminals, has unleashed protests and the threat of lawsuits from universities, which argue that it will cost them at least $7 billion while doing little to apprehend lawbreakers.

Please correct me if I'm mistaken, but isn't it true that few if any recent terrorists, whether Islamofascists or neo-Nazis or whatever, have attended U.S. colleges or utilized their technological infrastructure? Heck, it seems to me that the best thing we could do would be to get more potential terrorists into our mainstream educational system — maybe it would prevent them from becoming terrorists in the first place.

Keep in mind that the colleges are not actually challenging the requirement on privacy grounds per se, but on the unreasonable timing and expense. According to one spokesman for the colleges, the requirement would amount to a $450 annual tuition increase for every college student in America.

With no guarantee, indeed no reasonable expectation, that a single terrorist would be caught or a single terrorist plot thwarted.

Everyone wants to stop the terrorists. But there simply must be limits. Limits to the price we pay, both in terms of dollars and in terms of erosion of our privacy rights.

And if we're not at those limits yet, then we're coming pretty damn close.

For about two years a plan has been bouncing around the Department of Education to create a massive federal database of college students -- including transcripts, financial aid and post-academic pursuits. I've blogged about it twice before.

Well, the proposal is back in the news:

It was given a boost last month when Education Secretary Margaret Spellings's Commission on the Future of Higher Education released a draft report endorsing such a plan.
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Right now, the plan has no legs. The House included in its higher education bill a prohibition on such a plan; the Senate bill ignored it; and some powerful legislators oppose it. Nonetheless, private institutions are fretting that the Department of Education will find a way around Congress to implement it.

The Executive Branch circumventing Congress to implement tracking of American citizens? Why would anyone be worried about that?

As I blogged previously:

Does anyone truly believe that some fourth-tier bureaucrat from a third-tier branch of a second-tier cabinet office is going to defy a judge's subpoena or an inquiry from Homeland Security?

Now we need to add the NSA to that list.

Which, by the way, is not my point. This is:

In 1980, Ronald Reagan ran for president with the promise that if he were elected, he would abolish the Department of Education. His opponent, President Jimmy Carter promised to protect the department, which he had created several years earlier. The department still exists, but the Republicans are gearing up to fulfill Reagan's promise.

That was in 1996, when Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole was under attack for promising merely to cut funding for the Department of Education.

So we've gone from Reagan's "abolish" to Dole's "cut" to George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" and proposals for federal student cradle-to-grave tracking databases. (And, for all we know, NSA monitoring...)

Sigh.

Remind me again how libertarians naturally lean toward the Republican Party?