Touchy typing

Massachusetts wants to build a database with information on every public-school student in the state. Is it an educational breakthrough or an invasion of privacy?

by Jason Gay

Ever since the state launched its mandatory testing program for public-school students in 1998, the effort has been alternately praised and ripped apart in education circles. Advocates call the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) important, comprehensive, and reliable. Naysayers call it political, inefficient, and unfair.

Now another byproduct of the state Education Reform Act is arousing passions: an ambitious plan to build a computer database featuring the test scores of every public-school student in Massachusetts, as well as other details about them.

Called the Student Information Management System (SIMS), the database will allow education officials to better tabulate, track, and break down student performance by school district, grade level, and much more. Starting in October, student information will be compiled from existing data in local school-district files and centralized in a computer program accessible only to select state administrators.

Proponents believe the SIMS database will be an extremely useful and efficient tool. The slow, paper-heavy process of compiling student data will be eliminated in favor of a streamlined, computer-based collection system. With the click of a button, proponents say, state Department of Education (DOE) administrators will be able to see how a particular school district or kind of student is performing on the MCAS test and track major improvements or declines. Patterns that might otherwise take weeks or months to tabulate could be recognized within seconds. Accountability -- a hallmark of the Education Reform Act -- will be improved.

But to some, SIMS raises questions about privacy and security. The state wants school districts to provide all kinds of identifying information -- including age, gender, place of residence, and city of birth -- about every public-school student in grades K through 12. It also wants a laundry list of demographic facts, including students' race, immigrant status, country of origin, English proficiency, and income status. (It even wants each student's post-graduation plans.) And though students will be given a numeric ID code, the state also wants every student's full name.

Such demands are making some school officials, parents, and legal experts wary. Critics complain that in addition to building a tool for studying testing trends, the state's making a storehouse of sensitive information about every student in the Commonwealth. And though state officials promise that the database will be secure, there are worries about who will get access.

"We're always concerned about these kinds of databases," says John Roberts, executive director of the Boston chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). "They always seem to want more information than seems necessary."

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To date, however, the only big uproar over SIMS has occurred in the city of Lawrence. There, the school committee recently voted unanimously to deny the state access to student information until DOE officials address the committee's concerns about the privacy and security of SIMS -- and officially notify parents about the program.

Several aspects of the SIMS project irk members of the Lawrence School Committee. One issue is the type of questions the state is asking. Committee members understand why the state wants test scores, grade levels, and ages. But they don't see, for example, why the state needs to know a student's immigrant status -- considering that even nonresidents are legally entitled to send their children to public school. Another concern is the state's plan for determining a student's race. According to a DOE legal advisory on SIMS, if parents refuse to divulge a student's race (as is their right), school administrators will be asked to make a "good faith" effort to determine it -- guesswork that is fraught with error potential, especially if a student is from a multiracial background.

A third issue is income status. The state is asking schools to tell them whether a student qualifies for low-income status -- a piece of information that is on hand only if a student's parents have applied for a free or reduced-rate meal program. The Lawrence critics say that to level the playing field, the state should ask for income information on the entire student population (it would need parental consent to do so). "[Right now] you're essentially being penalized for having low-income status," says Lawrence School Committee member Michael Sweeney, who has helped head the local charge against SIMS.

Of course, the state has legal authority to ask these kinds of questions, and it's also true that local school districts already have access to all or most of this information. Virtually every school maintains files on its student population, and they are often more detailed than anything SIMS would include.

But the prospect of centralizing all that individualized student information in a single database -- and putting it in a Web-based computer program -- is what alarms some SIMS critics. Never before has the state asked for such detailed information about each and every student; in fact, DOE has always studied student data in aggregate, not individualized, form.

Now, critics fear, SIMS will provide the equivalent of an educational fingerprint. Sweeney, who handles criminal as well as immigration cases, worries that federal agencies would covet some of the information contained on the SIMS program, such as immigration status. And since the information is obtainable by subpoena, they could get at it, says the ACLU's Roberts. "INS would love to rummage around in [SIMS]," he says.

"When you have a database with all that very specific, sensitive detail about a student, it opens up the potential for enormous abuse," says Sweeney. "Not necessarily [abuse by] the board of education -- though that's possible -- but from other state and federal agencies."

The DOE responds that there's no reason to fear a break-in by hackers or others with bad intentions. They point out that all records will be encrypted prior to transmission in order to be unrecognizable as student information. In addition, the student data will be divided into three separate databases. One database will be a directory of students, with names, genders, dates, and cities of birth. A second database will contain the demographic information, but no names -- students will be identified only by number. A third database will cross-reference these numbers with the student-directory database, but access to that database will be granted by the state commissioner of education only on a need-to-know basis.

In other words, the state says, sensitive student information will be broken up in such a way as to prevent abuse. No one outside the commissioner's office will get the key to the entire candy store. "You wouldn't be able to get any identifying information for a specific kid," says Greg Nadeau, the DOE's chief technology officer. "The security we would have would be the equivalent of a bank's."

Nadeau says he expected to hear some worries about SIMS from parents and school officials. But he maintains that the state's current paper-based system of collecting student information is far more cumbersome and unreliable than a computer database. Not to mention less accurate. Because SIMS asks schools to supply individual instead of aggregate student data, Nadeau says, administrators won't easily be able to fudge statistics. "You can't really fake it anymore," he says.

The purpose of all this, of course, is to increase accountability. Under SIMS, Nadeau says, it will be possible for DOE staff to ask extremely specific questions -- What programs help 12-year-old Hispanic girls increase their MCAS scores? -- and get extremely specific answers. Individual districts -- even classrooms -- can quickly learn which teaching methods are working and which are not. And in the future, SIMS data will also help tailor Internet-based education programs to individual students' needs.

It's a breakthrough, Nadeau argues. "This is the essence of the accountability system," he says. "This is how we say definitively what programs are adding value, by looking at student achievement."

But even those who agree with the state's pursuit of accountability believe that the DOE failed to recognize the political sensitivity of some of the questions it's asking. Though they can understand the state's goals, critics such as the Lawrence School Committee wonder why the state has to have such detailed information about its students.

And here it's important to recognize the critical distinction between "need" and "want." It's understandable why the state would want to have as much data about its student population as possible: the more data, the more the state can study the relationship between a student's background, course of study, and test performance. But does it need all that information? No, says Edwin Estevez, the assistant principal at the Lawrence Family Development Charter School and a candidate for the school committee. "You don't need all that information to obtain quality research on the effectiveness of programs," he says.

In essence, the debate over SIMS is another conflict between the public's desires for institutional accountability and individual privacy. Nadeau, a civil libertarian, argues that SIMS will provide both: "I believe the best way to protect our individual rights is to have our eyes open and move forward with publishing systems that protect individual privacy and confidentiality, not naively hoping that the data will accumulate in one place." But Michael Sweeney argues otherwise: "[SIMS] just strikes you in the gut as wrong."

Jason Gay can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com.