SURVEILLANCE STATE, JUNIOR EDITION: These 3 Student Data Bills Could Ruin Your Kid’s Life.

Sadly, states have had only varying degrees of success stopping some of the unbelievable amounts of data being collected on public school students. When I say “unbelievable amounts,” I have actual screen shots from the National Center for Education Statistics’ “National Education Data Model” (no longer online, incidentally), which provided model data points to be collected from students for very important educational information like “routine health care procedure required at school,” “number of teeth,” “orthodontic appliances,” “voting status,” “religious affiliation” (these two being big no-no’s in the world of data collection), “weeks of gestation,” and “weight at birth.”

The Common Education Data Standards, a one-stop A-Z data collecting shop where anyone can see the possible data collection titles populating public school SLDS, are still online. Here, a cursory search of the letter “I” will return 133 main records, from “IDEA Disability Type” through “Itinerant Teacher.”

I was most interested in the category of “Incident Behavior.” Here one can find 30 different sub-category data tags for school officials to use in describing any number of ways students can misbehave on campus, including “Sexual Harassment,” “Obscene Behavior,” and “Threat/Intimidation.” Thank goodness the government has spent so many taxpayer dollars finding ways to label accused students with subjective and often juvenile behaviors that will follow them throughout their academic careers—and, thanks to some new bills in play, especially, possibly their adult lives.

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