It’s About Time

By Tracy Mitrano. Since most of the country – including students and teachers – don’t even know what the Family Rights Education Privacy Act is, it probably won’t mean all that much to mainstream journalists that the White House today released a review that called for a revision of FERPA. But to K-12, and colleges and universities across the country, it is a big deal. Not just because school district and institutional counsel will have to interpret the proposed regulations and their respective associations begin lobbying the Department of Education.  But because the reasons for this revision are good ones, and one hopes that the advocates of Big Data will not intervene so forcefully or effectively in only the way that their lobbying money knows how to gut the purpose of these revisions. Read more...