Data-mining of students raises alarms

Some lending companies with access to a national database that contains confidential information on 60 million student borrowers have repeatedly searched it in ways that violate federal rules, raising alarms about abuse of privacy, government and university officials said.

The unauthorized searching has grown so pervasive that the Education Department is considering a temporary shutdown of the government-run database to review access policies and tighten security.

Some officials worry that businesses are trolling for marketing data they can use to bombard students with mass mailings or other solicitations. . . .

NCLB is in trouble – big trouble

[NYT] When President Bush and Democratic leaders put together the bipartisan coalition behind the federal No Child Left Behind Act, they managed to sidestep, override or flat out ignore decades of sentiment that education is fundamentally a prerogative of state and local government.

Now, as the president and the same Democrats push to renew the landmark law, which has reshaped the face of American education with its mandates for annual testing, discontent with it in many states is threatening to undermine the effort in both parties.

Arizona and Virginia are battling the federal government over rules for testing children with limited English. Utah is fighting over whether rural teachers there pass muster under the law. And Connecticut is two years into a lawsuit arguing that No Child Left Behind has failed to provide states federal financing to meet its requirements.

Reacting to such disputes in state after state, dozens of Republicans in Congress are sponsoring legislation that would water down the law by allowing states to opt out of its testing requirements yet still receive federal money.

On the other side of the political spectrum, 10 Democratic senators signed a letter last month saying that based on feedback from constituents, they consider the law’s testing mandates to be “unsustainable” and want an overhaul.

“It’s going to be a brawl,” said Jack Jennings, a Democrat who as president of the Center on Education Policy has studied how the law has been set up in the 50 states. “The law is drawing opposition from the right because they are opposed to federal interference and from the left because of too much testing.” . . . [read on]

Major Education Dept reading program sent out for evaluative review – to the company that developed it

[WP] The government contractor that set up a billion-dollar-a-year federal reading program for the Education Department and failed, according to the department's inspector general, to keep it free of conflicts of interest is one of the companies now evaluating the program. . .

More on “Reading First”: http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-22-reading-audit_x.htm

http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/8542.html

http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Literacy/texasScam.asp