California: Strongest Student Privacy Bills to Become Law? (2014)

Best Practices’s Docs ▸ California: Strongest Student Privacy Bills to Become Law? (2014)

The San Jose Mercury News is reporting that SB 1177, if signed into law, could become the nation’s most stringent student privacy law. It regulates “operators” (vendors) and what they may do with regard to student data. It says that any student data generated belongs to the district.

Does it define testing companies as “operators”? Remains to be seen.

Does it enable high-stakes testing? Perhaps. It may need revisiting to actually build in provisions to slow or halt HST. It’s a good start, at least.

This piece from TechWire is an excellent overview of both SB1177 and AB1584. AB1584 spells out what the responsibilities are of local education agencies (LEAs) are to families and students regarding student privacy. For example, AB1584 requires that LEAs:

  1. Do establish that the local educational agency owns and controls student records.
  2. Do describe how students can keep control of their projects and other content created for school, along with a way to transfer their content to a personal account later.
  3. Do prohibit third parties from using student information for purposes outside of those named in the contract.
  4. Do describe how parents, legal guardians or students can review and correct personally identifiable information contained in their records.
  5. Do outline actions that third parties will take to make sure that student data is secure and confidential.
  6. Do describe procedures for notifying affected parents, legal guardians or eligible students when there is an unauthorized disclosure of student records.
  7. Do certify that student records will not be retained or available to the third party once the contract is over and lay out how that will be enforced.
  8. Do describe how local educational agencies and third parties will comply with the federal FERPA legislation.
  9. Do prohibit third parties from using personally identifiable information from student records to target advertising to students.

Clearly our federal hole-riddled FERPA law needs updating.

Anyway, here’s a link to actual bill text for both SB1177 and AB1584:

SB1177

AB1584

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