February 21, 2010

Obama Tries New Tack to Collect Student Data

Legal and privacy hurdles are higher than expected

Jim Watson, AFP, Getty Images

President Obama has hit legal and political obstacles to his plan to track the performance of individual students through databases that his administration believes are critical to improving the quality of education from kindergarten through college.

By Paul Basken

Washington

The Obama administration is opening a new campaign to persuade states of their full legal rights to develop and use student-records databases, after stalling in its bid to write new privacy rules that would make those rights unambiguous.

The effort is central to the president's education agenda, which seeks to inject more accountability into higher education through smarter use of data. But like his predecessors, Mr. Obama has quickly hit opposition to his desire to track the