Protecting Student Records and Facilitating Education Research A Workshop Summary (2009) / Chapter Skim
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4 Reconciling the Access, Privacy, and Confidentiality of Education Data
4 Reconciling the Access, Privacy, and Confidentiality of Education Data
Pages 37-50
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From page 37... ...
NORTH CAROLINA EDUCATION RESEARCH DATA CENTER Helen Ladd provided an overview of the North Carolina Education Research Data Center, which she described as "one of the most productive collaborations between a state department of education and researchers." The data center was originally created in 2001 through a memorandum of agreement between the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction and a consortium of researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Duke University. The data center is housed at Duke University's Sanford Institute of Public Policy. Today's center had its origins in 2000, when researchers at the two See http://www.pubpol.duke.edu/centers/child/ep/nceddatacenter/index.html.
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From page 38... ...
Ladd argued that the data center's greatest accomplishment has been to overcome barriers to research using the state's education data. In addition to barriers related to compliance with FERPA, the Department of Public Instruction stored administrative data in a format that researchers could not use, and lacked resources to link data on teacher characteristics with data on student achievement, or to create longitudinally matched data over time.
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From page 39... ...
As a result of this process, Ladd said, "I would never see any data with identifiers on it. There are firewalls all around that." The data center makes these deidentified data available only to researchers employed at a higher education institution or other research organization that has an institutional review board -- excluding journalists, advocacy groups, and other organizations that lack these procedures.
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From page 40... ...
Ladd emphasized that the research community's data needs differ from those of the Department of Public Instruction. Researchers value longitudinal data over a long time period, in order to estimate models of educational activities and outcomes.
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From page 41... ...
This central data warehouse is administered by the Florida Department of Education but relies on administrative data from a variety of state and federal agencies. It includes individual assessment results from prekindergarten through community college, including scores on teacher certification assessments, as well as other individual student and staff data from all levels of education, prekindergarten through state university.
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From page 42... ...
are stripped off. The data enter a "black box" in which each individual or institution is assigned a unique student or teacher identification code, known as a "data warehouse internal identifier." This anonymous identifier is then relinked with the data that followed the other path, creating a new, anonymous record, which, in turn, is loaded into the data warehouse for storage.
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From page 43... ...
. Using an approach similar to the one Susanna Loeb used in New York, the state analysts link teacher identifiers with student identifiers and also look at the teacher's educational record when she or he was a university student, to assess the effectiveness of alternative preparation programs based on student performance.
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From page 44... ...
Because of this, she said, local and state education agencies are now more motivated to find solutions that enable research while also protecting student confidentiality. DeStefano outlined different phases in the relationship between University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign education researchers and local school districts.
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From page 45... ...
At the same time, responding to the federal requirements had increased their awareness of value of data analysis, evaluation, and research. These changes led the university and the school districts to a new phase in their relationships, establishing long-term research partnerships based on common interests and a shared commitment to school improvement.
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From page 46... ...
. In addition, a memorandum of understanding with each school or district partner allows the university researcher and the district to obtain approval for the research from the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign institutional review board, which has been expanded to include representatives of the school districts.
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From page 47... ...
Instead, the university aims to educate and inform parents about research going on in their children's schools, through a newsletter, a series of public forums, an annual conference cohosted by the university and the school districts, and the toll-free number mentioned earlier. As a result of these efforts, when a student brings home an informed consent agreement, the parents are more likely to be aware of the research and are more likely to read and sign the agreement.
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From page 48... ...
. The researchers learned that state education policy leaders are very interested in developing longitudinal data systems with linked student, teacher, and school data.
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From page 49... ...
The state superintendent of schools wanted to know whether schools across the state had enough qualified teachers to teach the required subjects. To address this question, the state gave the team access to a large file of teacher data.
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From page 50... ...
. The state officials welcomed the report, using it to target professional development courses and funding toward schools with an inadequate supply of qualified teachers.
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