Dive Brief:

• In contrast to a previous ruling, CA Judge Kimberly Mueller decided that a state Dept. of Ed database containing info related to 10 million students will not be released to attorneys in a special-ed lawsuit.
• The California Department of Education will now have to assist attorneys in the suit who are seeking evidence in the state's database.
• Yet some records will still be released, some of which contain personal information including six years of STAR test data and records of special-education students including mental health and behavior files.

Dive Insight:

Although the previous ruling, which sparked outrage in CA, has been walked back, the controversy is likely to continue. The pending release of private health records related to special ed students, which comprise around 10% of California's total student population, will reportedly contain details including names, addresses, disciplinary records, grades, test scores, pregnancy, addiction and criminal histories.

California is known as a state that takes student privacy very seriously. Last January, President Obama announced his support of the Student Digital Privacy Act, which is based in part on an existing California law. The nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is based in the Bay Area, has a pending  formal complaint with the FTC alleging that tech giant Google has engaged in improper collection of student data. The EFF has also launched a crowd-sourced campaign calling attention to data collection in public school classrooms by ed tech companies and device manufacturers. 

Pennsylvania is also setting an example in the student privacy realm, considering a pair of bills that would require school districts to inform parents when they use technology that doesn’t meet certain pre-established student data privacy protection requirements. The ACLU is also working on the issue.