Data System Disconnect

The Obama administration is encountering a lot of resistance to its efforts to help states build robust education and employment data systems. The anti-information forces are mainly comprised of a three-part coalition of hard-left privacy advocates, hard-right anti-government and privacy advocates, and the Washington, DC higher education lobby, which pretends to be a privacy advocate but is actually opposed to the creation of information that might make it easier for policymakers to hold them accountable for how they spend the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars they receive every year. While the Bush administration–particularly former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings–also pushed hard for better data systems, one decision made fairly early in Bush’s tenure is continuing to cause problems. As Paul Basken reports($):

Aimee R. Guidera, the Data Quality Campaign’s director, said the group had been waiting for the department’s legal strategy but has now decided to go ahead and “tell states what they should be thinking about.”

One of the most formidable legal obstacles, Ms. Guidera said, is a 2003 memorandum in which William D. Hansen, then deputy secretary of education, told state education officials they could not share student data with their states’ labor agencies.

Some state agencies wanted that sharing authority so they could monitor the success of federal education and job-training programs. Federal officials refused the states’ requests at a time, Ms. Martin said, when “you couldn’t envision the types of data systems that we’re talking about now, or the different types of mechanisms for protecting student privacy.”

And guidance such as that given by Mr. Hansen seven years ago, once it’s in effect long enough to be regarded as legally binding, is not easily rewritten by subsequent administrations, said Mr. Rooker, the former director of student-privacy policies.

Here’s what I don’t understand:  A number of states have already connected their education and labor information systems. They’re doing it right now. Today. Here, for example, is information from the Florida Education and Training Placement Information Program, which publishes detailed employment outcome information for every public high school, college, and university in the state. Here is very informative 56-page report that was jointly issued by the Connecticut Department of Labor and the Connecticut Department of Higher Education, chock-full of employment outcomes for the state’s public higher education institutions. Nothing in the Florida and Connecticut reports violates any student’s privacy. All the data is reported at the institution level and when the data are sliced fine enough to make identification of an individual student possible, they simply don’t report it. (Example: Only seven students graduated from the Connecticut State University System in 2006 with a degree in engineering, so their employment rates aren’t reported.)

The Hansen decision is obviously terrible public policy, but I don’t understand how it even makes sense as a matter of law to prevent states from doing what a number of other states are already doing.