Bringing in the technological, ethical, educational and social-structural for a new education data governance

ABSTRACT

The need for a comprehensive education data governance – the regulation of who collects what data, how it is used and why – continues to grow. Technologically, data can be collected by third parties, rendering schools unable to control their use. Legal frameworks partially achieve data governance as businesses continue to exploit existing loopholes. Education data use practices undergo no prior ethical reviews. And at a personal level, students have no agency over these practices. In other words, there is no coherent and meaningful oversight and data governance framework that ensures accountable data use in an increasingly digitalised education sector. In this article, I contextualise the issues arising from education data transactions in one school district in the United States. The case study helps to contextualise what needs governance, who may access education data and how the district governs data use and transactions, emphasising the need for a coherent education data governance but also the limitations of such isolated efforts.

KEYWORDS:

• Education data governance
• edtech
• children
• data privacy
• ethics

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the representatives of Cambridge public school district and the Student Data Privacy Consortium in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for their contribution to this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 List of signed or refused data privacy agreements between edtech providers and the district: https://sdpc.a4l.org/district_listing.php?districtID=457.

2 CEDS’s collaborators include some of the leading education data standards and SMSs used in the US including Ed-Fi Alliance, IMS Global and A4L/SIF (CEDS 2021). SIF specifically is common among Anglo-Saxon countries (A4L 2019) and used by CPSD. These three entities are funded by leading corporations. Ed-Fi Alliance is a subsidiary of the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, of Dell, the computer software company. While Ed-Fi Alliance partners with IMS Global (2016) in providing single rostering across the US. The latter also receives financial contributions from the Gates Foundation (IMS Global 2014).

3 The Foundation for Excellence in Education (n.d.), the paper’s publisher, was founded by former Florida governor Jeb Bush, also founder of the advocacy group Chiefs for Change (Layton 2015), which is partnering with Data Quality Campaign in the common goal for common data standards and data pipeline development (DQC 2021). CFC is funded by Bill Gates (Gates Foundation 2019), the long-time driver behind common education data standards.