How To Hide Student’s Data In Plain Sight

Hats off to Widener University for coming up with this idea.

With the demise of inBloom, the  threat of loose ends of our children’s data becoming unclaimed property, and then being claimed by someone we parents don’t approve, is real..

We are already in the computer era. We can’t really go back to shuffling papers.

The answer is simple.  We give every child a secret number.  That child is known from the earliest entry into the educational system only by that number.  (The parents keep it)  The child doesn’t need to know.  Somewhere deep in our educational bureaucracy will be a master list that for the most part never gets seen.  Only there can one look up the name and find the number.

So if number 8675309 gets an “A”. that is how it gets published.  Open source, everyone can see 8675309 got an “A. ” If 8675309 gets top honor on their test; that is how it gets published. Everyone can see that 8675309 got top honors on their test.  When you as a parent want to review your child’s file, you go to an open source, where all the data is viewable to all, and look up the number. No one else ever knows who that number represents.

This allows data to be processed for sociological studies without ever being traced back to this kid or that kid…. This allows the freedom to see how a school is doing student by student, and posting it out in the open, without anyone knowing or being able to find out who those real human beings are….

Instead of chasing around every single byte of data connected to a child’s name in effort to secure it.  we just have to secure the master list that correlates real people to fake numbers…

Thank you Widener University.