CNN 2012-01-03

 The federal government tracking your kids. Your kids. The department of education recently taking steps, making it easier for states to share the personal information of fellow students. Information like where they live, where they were born, how old they are, but also information like how often they are absent from school, how many extracurriculars they participate in and how much do they weigh. The department of education says this is all an effort to help improve education programs all across the country, but, as you could imagine, not everyone is so thrilled about that, including my next guest, Mrs. Snell, youth director of education and child welfare. At the reason of foundation and Lisa, what is concerned No.1 for you when you hear about this?

 
Oh you know it's just a slippery slope. It gives new meaning to the idea that you would have a permanent record as a student and then anything that happened to you in 5th grade or in school that someone might have access to that personal information. So you know track things like disciplinary issues, how many days you were absent from school, you know, if you became a single mother. So there is just a lot of sensitive information, and the idea of moving toward putting it in one place，so that lots of different agencies have access to it, you know, is scary.
 
But what specifically is your concern if department of education says it's not like some big natural databases for the improvement of your kid's education. What is your biggest worry? What could they do with that information?
 
So I mean you know whether they eventually will be able to do this or not is completely an open question. But they collect a lot of information that has no relevance 1 to students' achievement. So the big worry might be something like OK,we are using this information to evaluate a program like say a school violence prevention program. So we're going to release all the records about individual kids and their discipline programs to evaluate whether this program had less school violence or less bullying 2 in the school. And so it just, it gets at... . Right now we're anonymous 3 and we don't link specific information to specific kids and the more the sharing goes on without the consent of the parents, the more likely that some of that information might fall into the wrong hands.
 
It sounds from what I've read from the department of Education. They're saying all of the information is ??. In fact one just part of what the DO is saying changes them into help evaluate education programs to ensure limited resources are invested effectively to build upon what works, discard what is not, to increase accountability and transparency and to contribute to a culture of innovation and continuous improvement in education. And I think Lissy will be with me in saying Look, you know, education in America very much we will put this constantly is lagging so far behind other countries. You know what's wrong with the idea of maybe the government helping 4 my kid out?
 
All right, so I mean one of the issues with that is that government already has tons of data that they can use to evaluate programs and teachers. So for instance, you know, the Los Angeles Times was able to look at 7 years of datas to see the individual value added up every teacher. Did the district do anything with that information to take the best teachers maybe have them have best practices? I mean the bottom line is there's tons of data out there. There's no reason that we have to have, you know, even less privacy for kids because they are not effectively using the data that's already obviously available to them. And that's very detailed 5 data about student achievement and about performance of programs. So this expansion just causes concern about how they might link to become a federal database in the future if they don't have to get parents' consent to share this kind of information. 
 
Well we'll just have to follow up and see if they do in fact honor their word and keep this information to themselves for the admen? of our children. Lissies now, thank you very much.