Phi Delta Kappan

The education enterprise must tread carefully with student data and strike a balance with the aim of using technology to enhance learning and more efficiently run school operations with the need for children’s data to be kept private so that it can’t hurt them.

News items include a report that boys read more nonfiction than girls, but both group read less nonfiction than set by NAEP goals; a report that very few high school graduates plan to major in STEM subjects in college and fewer still plan to teach STEM subjects; and information about how to develop a growth mindset.

Everyone with a stake in education — especially parents — should understand the value of data and how they can benefit their children’s education. But most people aren’t hearing from their schools, districts, and states about how those data are being used and how their children’s and family’s privacy is being protected. Communicating clearly about what data are and how they’re used is essential to building the trust between parents and their school systems. And communicating about the full breadth of tools and resources that can be brought to life by data can go beyond trust and actually build demand for effective data use.

An introduction to the big picture conversation on student data privacy and the norms that are coming out of it. The author looks at the current state of federal law, and ahead to proposed legislation at the federal level. The intent is to help educators become familiar with the key issues regarding student data privacy in education so as to participate in the conversation.

As technology has leaped forward to provide valuable learning tools, parents and policy makers have begun raising concerns about the privacy of student data that schools and systems have. Federal laws are intended to protect students and their families but they have not and will never be able to keep up with rapidly evolving technology. School systems can help themselves and their students by following a list of guidelines, the authors say.

Data use should be a continuous, integrated part of practice, a tool that is used all the time. Good teachers have been doing data-driven decision making all along, it just has not been recognized by that term. But there is more work to be done to ensure that educators know how to continuously, effectively, and ethically use data; that is, to help them to be data literate. Several federal laws protect student data -- most notably FERPA; teachers and other school officials should have a working knowledge of them.

Using student information in schools is nothing new nor is the reliance on information technologies supported by external service providers. What is new is the adoption of innovations like cloud computing and data analytics that are increasing teacher and family data access, creating actionable information to drive instruction and decision making, improving data security, enhancing school capacity and productivity, and helping customize learning for each student. Given the importance of this issue and the concern around it, it is crucial to enhance communications and trust among the triad of stakeholders: students/parents and their schools; schools and their service providers; and service providers and students/parents. This will require increased understanding of the benefits of the data and technology, further agreement about its appropriate uses, enhanced governance and transparency around data collection and sharing, and a continuous improvement process for security.

What should a school district procurement officer ask when he or she sits down with a sales representative from a vendor of digital education products? Who else should be at the table? How do districts and providers become partners in instruction, rather than adversaries in negotiation? These are increasingly critical questions as public school districts in the U.S. are under more pressure than ever to buy digital services and products.

Who uses student data? is an infographic created by the Data Quality Campaign. (Used with permission) It answers important privacy-related questions about who collects, uses, and distributes student data. Most personal student information stays local. Districts, states, and the federal government all collect data about students for important purposes like informing instruction and providing information to the public. But the type of data collected, and who can access them, is different at each point.

When researchers are focused on improving teaching-and-learning domains that match the school district’s strategic plan, not only focusing on their own research agenda, they yield powerful results that can be useful for guiding processes of improving student learning.

This article reports on a study of teachers who have engaged in systematic research about their practice. It describes the inquiries of two urban teachers into challenges and dilemmas common to many who work with diverse groups of students. The accounts presented reveal how teachers are able to construct new knowledge about teaching when they engage as inquirers about their work; they invent new solutions to nagging problems, identify new challenges that need to be addressed, and respond to the unique contexts and needs of the children and families of the communities in which they teach.

Leadership is increasingly recognized as an important factor in moving schools forward, yet we have been relatively random in how we prepare and support them. Four obstacles often block or diminish their effectiveness. Avoiding or overcoming each of these requires an underlying set of skills and knowledge that we believe can be learned and practiced to improve leaders’ impact.

The Common Core State Standards have cast a renewed light on reading instruction, presenting teachers with the new requirements to teach close reading of complex texts. Teachers and administrators should consider a number of essential features of close reading: They are short, complex texts; rich discussions based on worthy questions; revisiting and annotating the text; and being inspired by the text. Educators should consider these the look-fors that deepen students’ interactions with text.

Each fall the author assigns undergraduate teacher education students to design rubrics that they can use to evaluate auditions for reality television shows like "American Idol." The point is to draw students into a critical reflection on assessment literature and practices they have been studying. Through these reflections, the author has identified six lessons 'American Idol' teaches us about writing assessment: (1) The importance of multiple performances; (2) There is no proxy for expert knowledge; (3) Clearly define the construct being measured; (4) Consistency is best achieved through dialogue; (5) Real audiences matter; and (6) Attend to consequences.

There’s been much commitment and extensive legislation intended to make schools inclusive for all students but not much real progress in improving student outcomes. The authors review and assess several schools that have succeeded at making schools inclusive and effective for all students, including those with disabilities and draw some inferences about how school leadership can help make it happen.

A Q&A with Christopher Cross, a leading thinker in education policy for three decades. Cross’s newest book, Political Education: Setting the Course for State and Federal Policy (Teachers College Press, 2014), reflects on the nation’s triumphs and shortcomings in public education and looks ahead to a new and better course for state and federal education policy. Cross highlights the federal/state relationship in American education, how it is affected by policy and politics, and how it needs to change to facilitate progress.

Technology can be a useful tool for security in schools; it can also trigger a backdraft of protest and legal complaints from parents and students raising constitutional law privacy objections. An action that begins with benign motives of student safety, identification, and helping schools and districts to improve their operations can end up in a full-blown federal court legal battle over the law governing individual freedoms.

PDK Emerging Leaders meet in Washington; applications for Prospective Educator Scholarships are now available; Emerging Leaders offer views on what’s needed to improve preservice teaching preparation.

While society worries about hackers stealing financial data, third-party vendors to the education establishment are amassing a myriad of personal data about teachers, students, and their families. The author says it is imperative that this data be handled with sufficient safeguards from those who would exploit the information for business or political gains.