I meant to post this last week, but hey, I’m old, I forget.
Benjamin Herold reports:
Nevada state education officials recently told a parent it would cost him more than $10,000 to access the data the department has collected on his four children, raising a tangled web of questions about everything from the structure of state educational databases to the interpretation of federal student-privacy laws to the implementation of new Common Core State Standards.
Parents have a right to inspect their children’s educational records at no cost to them under FERPA. But those requests are typically made to the Local Educational Agency (LEA), i.e., the child’s school district. In this case, the parent was querying information the state educational agency held in their databases.
The $10k tag would be for the state to develop a system to produce records responsive to his request as they currently have no means to do so. But should they have the means? What if data in a state database became corrupted after it was correctly transmitted by the LEA? Could that eventually cause difficulty for the student? And even if there was no potential for harm to the student, shouldn’t parents have the right to see what information the state has compiled about their children, which often includes parental and family information?
Read more on Education Week.