How would you feel if data pertaining to your interactions with government were made public just because the government is taxpayer-funded?
How about data pertaining to your kids?
Any Joe Taxpayer doesn’t have a right to walk in and demand any data they want from a government department. That’s entirely entirely reasonable. Anonymising data isn’t nearly as easy as a passer-by with “faker.fake_name()” may think it is.
I didn't see any mention of individual student records anywhere; seems like a red herring.
It's very possible to aggregate and anonymize (remove PII); aggregate the records by zipcode, anonymized school ID, school district, grade-level of student, age of student, educational attainment, etc.
You agree that's possible, FOIA-compliant and has been done already for decades? Like how Census data is made public (the Census also uses fuzzing to prevent reverse-engineering to individuals, esp. in tracts with small populations).
> Any Joe Taxpayer doesn’t have a right to walk in and demand any data they want from a government department.
Red herring: the CDE is not trying in good faith to define what level of aggregated data would be sufficiently anonymous; they're blanket-opposing legitimate public access to this data (even highly aggregated) via the researchers being allowed to testify in court.
> How about data pertaining to your kids?
Absolutely can and should be disclosed, in aggregate. Otherwise you have a public entity spending $128.5 billion taxpayer money that is not performing so well, violating constitutional disclosure requirements, gotten worse since 2020, lost students to homeschooling [0] and move-aways.
In any case, this isn't fodder for an opinion poll, it's what the Constitution says.
Might it bump against privacy? If you do a search on third graders receiving speech services in towns of pop less than 3000 in county... at some point you have private information.
