May 5, 2008
Privacy and Education Research: Further Notes
Bonus afternoon wonkery: A few addenda to today’s article about privacy, education research, and unit-record databases.
1. For more background on the evolution of those databases at the state level, see this 2007 report from the Lumina Foundation for Education.
The Lumina report—which was based on a survey conducted by the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems—said that most states are slowly but surely beefing up their data projects. But many states reported being hindered by concerns about federal privacy laws, by a lack of resources for programming and analysis, and by doubts about the quality of the data they receive from colleges.
2. Here are the Education Department’s proposed amendments to the regulations that carry out the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, familiarly known as Ferpa.
Public comments on the proposed regulations are due this Thursday, May 8. To submit a comment, go here and enter docket number ED-2008-OPEPD-0002 in the search box.
The Data Quality Campaign has posted its own reactions to the proposed regulations. The campaign praises some of the proposals, but would like to see more clarity about how and when states’ college data systems may share information with K-12 databases. (That isn’t an issue in a handful of states like Florida, where colleges and elementary and secondary schools sit under a single governance structure.)
3. Unit-record tracking has been all the rage at The Education Optimists, a newish blog by Sara Goldrick-Rab, an assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Liam Goldrick, director of policy at the New Teacher Center.
Yesterday, Goldrick-Rab wrote about the Chicago Public Schools’ effort to track the fates of the system’s former high-school students. That effort—which has been made with the help of a research consortium based at the University of Chicago—has given the Chicago schools some painful-but-useful insights, Goldrick-Rab writes:
Some principals were stunned to learn that even at their “high-performing” high schools only thrre or four in 10 kids actually went on to attend college. Because the district also asks about what students want to do (what they aspire to), and follows up on their wages, they can respond to people who make excuses such as “Not all kids want to go to college” (not true, nearly 90 percent do), or “Some kids are better off going to work” (not so—the wages of CPS students who go straight to work are very, very low). Changes have been made, and over the last several years, while the collegegoing rates of high-school graduates nationwide have declined, they have gone up in Chicago.
Goldrick-Rab also recently touted a conference in Madison on “value-added modeling” of teachers’ effectiveness, a controversial enterprise that often involves analysis of unit-record databases.
(Vintage photo of an IBM 360 mainframe by the Flickr user cote. Used under a Creative Commons license.)
David Glenn | Posted on Monday May 5, 2008 | PermalinkComments
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Univac computer. Nice touch. Editorial comment, hip-ness or nostalgia for that easier, simpler time, before K-12 education forgot what it once knew how to do, before the dark age set in.
— first marci May 5, 07:30 PM #