In the face of growing pressure, the Pennsylvania Department of Education continues to deny reports that schools are collecting personal data on students and uploading it to a central database that can be accessed by certain third-party government contractors.
And all of the accused data-mining is being done without the permission of parents.
In a Dec. 3 story by Fox News, which followed WND’s report on Nov. 30, Timothy Eller, spokesman for the state’s Department of Education, offered several denials of invasive data-mining by Pennsylvania schools accused of inputting information into the Pennsylvania Information Management System, or PIMS.
Eller said it was “possible but not probable” that school districts were collecting personally identifiable data on students. He told WND that if local school districts were collecting this type of data, it was for their own use and was not being turned over to the state Department of Education or the U.S. Department of Education.
This denial comes after WND’s report that two groups of parents and activists – Pennsylvania Against Common Core and Pennsylvania Restoring Education – have documented what they believe is an aggressive data collection program serving as a model for the nation. They provided copies of grant contracts and Department of Education letters to WND to prove their case.
But Eller maintains that any information being collected by the state and being turned over to the feds is “aggregate” and not “personally identifiable.” This would preclude information on attitudes, values, opinions and beliefs.
“Schools may gather this information but it’s unlikely, and if they do, it is not a requirement of the department nor is it reported to the department,” Eller told WND.
But previous reports appear to indicate that the nature of data being collected is, at the very least, trending toward more and not less.
Superintendent William Keilbaugh of Haverford Township Schools in Pennsylvania complained at a public meeting earlier this year that the amount of data the state is requiring him to collect on students was worrisome.
The statewide longitudinal data system continuously collects information on approximately 1.8 million Pennsylvania students, pre-K through college, used to support testing and accountability systems, Keilbaugh told the Delaware County News Network in March.
PIMS data includes demographic records, courses, assessments, disciplinary problems, programs, services and more, Keilbaugh said at the school board meeting.
Keilbaugh noted that given the current number of fields, types of fields, and multiple annual submissions for students and staff, Haverford Township Schools annually submits a whopping 15,023,713 fields of information to PIMS.
Student templates total 7,841,600 fields, with 52 fields submitted 26 times throughout the year due to corrections and changes.
“On a regular basis, we are updating and chasing down data,” Keilbaugh revealed at the March meeting.
“It increases every year,” said Haverford Director of Technology Jane Greenspun in the same Delaware County newspaper article. “The demands, fields, pieces of information requested from us by the state…It’s substantial and takes a great deal of time from our staff.”
Keilbaugh said the PIMS database grew out of the federal No Child Left Behind policy, 9Sept. 11 and “the desire to collect data on a lot of people.”
The state’s spokesman, Eller, also told Fox News that Pennsylvania Department of Education does not have any outside contracts for data collection.
But that doesn’t mean the state doesn’t allow “access” to students’ private data to certain outside contractors, WND has learned.
The question of who the state is sharing its most sensitive student data with was spelled out in a June 2014 letter from Pennsylvania Secretary of Education Carolyn Dumaresq, a copy of which has been obtained by WND.
In that three-page letter responding to inquiries from state Rep. John Lawrence and four other representatives, Dumaresq names five outside contractors with access to students’ personal data.
The five contractors are: Data Recognition Corp. which holds the contracts for the Pennsylvania System of Assessment and the Keystone Exams; Central Susquehanna Intermediate Unit which holds the contract for the state’s data entry “help-desk;” SAS Inc., which has the contract for the department’s “educator effectiveness program;” E-Metric, the vendor for ELL testing; and Penn State University, which maintains the PennData special education record system under an agreement with the department.
The above five contractors have access to the students’ data “for the purpose for which they have been engaged by the Department,” Dumaresq writes in her letter to the legislators.
Access to student data was not allowed to third-party contractors under the U.S. Family Education Rights and Privacy Act until 2012, after President Obama acted through executive order to weaken the FERPA privacy protections that had been enacted years earlier by Congress.
Pennsylvania’s PIMS system is also managed by an outside contractor, New York-based eScholar Data Warehouse, which has assigned each of the state’s 1.8 million students a unique ID number.
All 50 states are in the process of implementing statewide “longitudinal databases” in compliance with U.S. Department of Education policy and funded by federal grants.
The databases will track student development from pre-k through college graduation to make sure they are meeting federally mandated outcomes for various skills that industries require. The list of skills originated from the U.S. Department of Labor in the 1990s and formed the basis of the Common Core State Standards that 45 states quietly bought into when they accepted federal stimulus money through Obama’s Race to the Top program.
There is some question, however, about the extent to which those states which rejected Common Core are still required to upload data to the new databases. If they accepted waivers that Obama granted to Bush’s No Child Left Behind policy, then it would appear that they are still obligated to document each student’s progress in the list of college and career ready standards and some of the data is tied to Title 1 funding rules set by the feds.
Pennsylvania was one of the first states to get its longitudinal student database up and running and has been considered a model for the other states.
“We’re not saying they shouldn’t have data, just trying to show how this is growing exponentially and taking up so much of our staff time,” Keilbaugh told the Haverford Township board in March, according to the report by Delaware County News. “We wanted to bring this important issue to your attention.”
