School database loses backers as parents balk over privacy

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http://news.yahoo.com/school-database-loses-backers-parents-balk-over-privacy-162614630.html

A $100 million database set up to store extensive records on millions of public school students has stumbled badly since its launch this spring, with officials in several states backing away from the project amid protests from irate parents.

The database, funded mostly by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is intended to track students from kindergarten through high school by storing myriad data points: test scores, learning disabilities, discipline records - even teacher assessments of a child's character. The idea is that consolidated records make it easier for teachers to use software that mines data to identify academic weaknesses. Games, videos or lesson plans would then be precisely targeted to engage specific children or promote specific skills.

The system is set up to identify millions of children by name, race, economic status and other metrics and is constructed in a way that makes it easy for school districts to share some or all of that information with private companies developing education software.

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The nonprofit recently announced that it would no longer let school districts use student social security numbers to label individual files in the database. Instead, districts must assign each student a random numerical ID. But spokesman Adam Gaber refused to say whether social security numbers might be included elsewhere - not as a label but as a basic data point, along with ethnicity, address, parents' names and other personal information routinely collected by public schools.

That is unlikely to assuage Karen Sprowal, the mother of a 10-year-old in a New York City public school. She's terrified to think that records of her son's medical treatments will be stored on the cloud indefinitely, along with so many other intimate details, she said. "It feels like such a violation."