You may already have heard of Nikki Anderson, the mom in South Carolina whose six-year-old daughter came home from school with an AI-generated photo of the little girl as what she wanted to be when she grew up; it's now been covered in both USA Today and People, though I recommend reading Anderson's own posts over in Instagram.
In an update today, she notes that the district, in responding to USA Today, speaks of no longer having such assignments and adopting policies and procedures, including one that has an "parental release" for AI (whatever that is), but she can find no such release within the district handbooks.
What is feeling rather deja vu to me about this is the district being able to share student information without the permission of parents is something that was being raised by many of us 13 years ago in connection to InBloom*. Changes to FERPA during the Obama administration allowed school districts to share information about students to third parties in ways that previously had not been allowed. In 2016, this--along with more straightforward concerns about actual data breaches--were flagged in a petition to then-U.S. Secretary of Education John King:
The petition, sent to U.S. Education Secretary John King, says changes made to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, known as FERPA, over the past several years have allowed education agencies and organizations to share student data with third parties without permission from students or their parents.
Now, of course, districts are signing agreements with all sorts of tech companies all of the time, and, by their very nature, those companies have access to all sorts of data about the students in the district.
I think it's time to bring back up those concerns about the FERPA changes.**
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*alas for links that have since died...
**You know you're getting old when you've been through the whole pendulum swing on something in education...
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