TL;DR: Student data privacy isn’t (just) about student safety; it’s about educational efficacy.
Introduction
In the US, there are a variety of laws protecting student data and data of minors (who are typically full-time students). The most well known is FERPA, which regulates the disclosure of personally identifiable data by schools that receive government funding (public schools, for example). As an education consultant and analytics provider, I generally don’t have to worry about disclosure regulations, as the data is anonymized before I see it, but thinking about data access and privacy controls is still a very important part of what I do as an educator.
In fact, I think laws around student data privacy have made teachers more aware of issues of student safety (for example, protecting students with complicated family situations, and minimizing predatory advertising) at the expense of blinding teachers to some of the strictly pedagogical issues stemming from a lack of student data privacy. In this (brief) essay, I hope to highlight why student data privacy should matter to every teacher, independent of regulatory legislation, and to illustrate some pervasive violations of student data privacy that are undermining our public education system.
Pedagogical Implications of Privacy
As much as we might think data privacy is about the physical and fiscal security of our students, it is even more important to their social and emotional security. In short, data privacy gives students the freedom to try something they might be bad at, so that someday they might be good at it.
As a society, I think we generally attribute too much of success to the idea that some people are “born for greatness”, “inherently gifted”, “talented”, or “naturals”. I think this way of thinking is attractive because it exonerates us of our lack of effort, but it is also a fairly large misrepresentation of how skill and ability develop. While the difference between the fastest runner and the second-fastest runner in the world might be due to genetics, luck, or circumstance, the difference between either of them and the vast majority of the population is the thousands of hours they have spent running. My wife and I recently received our first child, a son, and we’ve been delighted to watch his development over his first few weeks. While we love him deeply, it’s very apparent that he lacks many of the basic skills he will need in order to survive, as we all did at that age. My own mother is fond of reminding me that even though she needs me to teach her how to use her phone, I needed her to teach me how to use a spoon. It would be preposterous for my wife and I to decide during his first weeks of life that our son would never be a good pianist because he lacks the coordination to move his fingers independently, or that he would never be a great scientist because he is unable to run controlled experiments.
Consider language, or music. No one picks up a guitar for the first time and immediately plays a flawless rendition of Van Halen’s Eruption, unless perhaps for some reason they’ve already learned and thoroughly practiced the piece on a markedly similar instrument, such as a bass guitar. Most of the time, what we identify as “natural talent” and “beginner’s luck” is really a combination of transferred learning, audacity stemming from the Dunning-Kruger effect, deliberate focus on the part of the novice, and an increased tolerance for suboptimal performance. What we rarely recognize is that “beginners”, as measured by apparent experience, have a huge range in starting lines. When we mistake unseen advantages for talent, we tend to invest in developing that ability further, pouring resources, time, and emotional attention into the student in question, perpetuating the placebo of talent when they are compared to peers who haven’t received similar investment.
“Sure,” you say, “but what do sports and music have to do with data privacy?” Simple. If students are judged more harshly for having tried and failed than for never having tried, they will never invest the time and effort it takes to become good at something new. I have never met a student who was bad at math. But I have met lots of students who didn’t like the way math classes made them feel. Part of what makes difficult topics daunting is the emotional and social cost of being judged lacking. I know many students who would rather not turn in an assignment at all than turn in one partially completed or with potentially wrong answers. Musicians and athletes perform in public, but they practice in private. By giving students the ability to fail in private until they become good, we open up opportunities for marginalized or discounted participants to surprise us.
This is far from an academic discussion. To the contrary, the next section identifies (heretically) several staples of contemporary educational practice that are desperately in need of reformation.
Where We’re Getting it Wrong
GPA. When a student graduates from high school or university, they carry with them a single number that summarizes their performance at the institution. The Grade Point Average is typically computed in the following manner: each course is graded on a percentage basis, those percentages are binned into letter grades at convenient cut-offs (A, B, C, D, F), each of those grades are assigned an integer value between 4 and 0, and then the mean of those integers is taken (sometimes as a weighted average for courses of unequal duration). Students are often evaluated as candidates for jobs or future education partially on the basis of this number, with the natural consequence that many students don’t want to risk taking a class in which they might receive a low grade (regardless of how much they might learn). This creates perverse incentives all around. Students seek easier classes and avoid risking classes outside of their main interests, educational institutions attempt to attract driven students by offering classes that are effectively watered-down versions of the main class (Physics for Pre-meds, Calculus for Non-majors, etc.). This produces a vicious cycle of pushing the lower bound of educational attainment, driving grade inflation, and siloing disciplines.
There is another way. Brown University, for example, allows students to drop classes from their transcript (and GPA) any time up until the final weeks of classes, allows students to retake classes to replace their previous grade at any time, and allows students to take any class on a pass-fail basis. This isn’t the only solution, but I highlight it because it does have the intended consequence of encouraging students to focus more on cultivating their intellectual curiosity and breadth of knowledge than on maximizing an artificial metric of knowledge. One might think that these are differences in grading, but they are ultimately about student data privacy. Students are free, without social consequence, to have poor performance on the way to attaining good performance.
Transcripts. This is similar to the issue with GPA, but has more to do with filtering for interests than for grades. If a student has “extra classes” in a field of interest, it can make them appear less focused than a peer who only took classes within their major (high school students have much less freedom to pick classes, so it is less of an issue for them). Students can be afraid that accessory classes in dance, martial arts, or the proverbial “underwater basket-weaving” will dilute the career-relevant classes they have taken. The pressure to present an application with a unified narrative can inhibit students from exploring unexpected connections between disciplines (like computer science, education, and game design, for example). If I play 6 instruments, nothing stops me from only listing piano as a hobby on my resume. But if I have to attach a transcript for my application to grad. school, I am unable to control which classes are seen by the admissions committee.
Deadlines and Final Exams. I’ll admit, coordination between people often requires agreeing on times and places. But many of the deadlines in education are artificial: end-of-term; presentation dates; final exams; and assignment due dates, for example. The real issue here isn’t the deadlines themselves; again, many of them are necessary for coordination. The issue is that students don’t have control over when their progress is assessed. Suppose a student has a bad day on the date of a critical presentation or assessment. Hopefully their preparation is enough to carry them through, but if not, the evaluation they received will become a permanent (if small) part of their educational record. In real life, deadlines show up cyclically (publication submission deadlines, annual conference cycles, seasonal rises in business) or by mutual consent (client expectations, contractual agreements, initiation of a physical or biological process), and there are always future opportunities. Because students don’t have control over when they are observed, measured, and evaluated (or when their performance is made public), short-term thinking is rewarded, and long-term thinking is discounted. Students have much higher relative rewards for cheating, cramming for tests, and optimizing their grades than they would if there were multiple opportunities to be assessed. This is a privacy issue in the same sense that letting musicians practice in private is a privacy issue - letting someone decide when they will make their performance public enables students to persevere in developing new skills, even if they can’t commit the same amount of time per day as their peers.
How We Can Do Better
If you’ve made it this far in my essay, I hope you’ll hear me out on two calls to action - one cognitive and one practical.
Cognitive call to action: Start thinking about student privacy as the freedom to be bad before becoming good. When students have the freedom to decide what is made public to whom and when, they will be much more willing to take intellectual risks, persevere through difficulty, and pursue learning over credentialing.
Practical call to action: Design systems that allow students to opt-in to sharing their data, and give them the ability to select what subset of their data they make available. This includes sharing with teachers, other students, and potential employers. If you are a teacher or administrator, give students the ability to retake assessments (say, for the same class the following year), to select which classes and grades are shared with others, and give them the emotional and social security to fail on the path to success.
If you’re interested in designing education systems that are both practical and effective, feel free to reach out.
Thanks,
- (S)am