CNN news 2012-01-03 加文本

cnn news 2012-01-03

BALDWIN: In tonight's "Under Surveillance" segment the federal government tracking your kids, your kids. The Department of Education recently taking steps to make 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're absent from school, how many extra curriculars they participate in and 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 can imagine, not everyone is so thrilled about that including my next guest. Lisa Snell is director of Education in Child Welfare at the Reason Foundation and Lisa, what is concern number one for you when you hear about this?

LISA SNELL, DIRECTOR OF EDUCATION & CHILD WELFARE, REASON FOUNDATION: Well, 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 that anything that happened to you in fifth grade or in high school that someone might get access to that personal information. So, you know, it tracks things like disciplinary issues, how many days you were absent from school, you know if you became a single mother, so there's 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.

BALDWIN: But, what specifically, is your concern if the Department of Education says it's not like it's some big national database. This is for the improvement of your kids' education. What is your biggest worry that what could they do with that information?

SNELL: So I mean you know whether they eventually will be able to do this or not is an open question, but they collect a lot of information that has no relevance to student achievement. So the big worry might be something like, OK, we're 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 in the school. And so it just -- it gets at right now we are anonymous and we don't link specific information to specific kids, and the more the sharing goes on without the consent of the parent, the more likely that some of that information might fall into the wrong hands.

BALDWIN: It sounds, from what I've read from the Department of Education that they say any and all information is indeed to remain -- in fact I want to just quote part of what the DOE is saying. Changes are meant to help, quote, "evaluate education programs to ensure limited resources are invested effectively, to build upon what works and discard what does not, to increase accountability and transparency and to contribute to a culture of innovation and continuous improvement in education."

SNELL: Right.

BALDWIN: I think, Lisa, you'll be with me in saying, look, you know education in America very much so, we report on this constantly --

SNELL: Right.

BALDWIN: -- is lagging so far behind other countries. You know what's wrong with the idea of maybe the government helping my kid out?

SNELL: Right. So, I mean, one of the issues with that is the government already has tons of data that they could use to evaluate programs and teachers. So, for instance, when -- you know "The Los Angeles Times" was able to look at seven years of data to see the individual value added of every teacher did the district do anything with that information to take the best teachers and 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're not effectively using the data that's already obviously available to them and that's very detailed 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.

BALDWIN: Well we will just have to follow up and see if they do, in fact, honor their word and keep this information to themselves for the betterment of our children.

SNELL: Absolutely.

BALDWIN: Lisa Snell, thank you very much.