4 ms·

> At issue is a restriction that CDE requires researchers to sign as a condition for their gaining access to nonpublic K-12 data. The clause, which CDE is inter

> At issue is a restriction that CDE requires researchers to sign as a condition for their gaining access to nonpublic K-12 data. The clause, which CDE is interpreting broadly, prohibits the researcher from participating in any litigation against the department, even in cases unrelated to the research they were doing through CDE. That's an unreasonable restriction and I expect the ACLU to win this.

ww520 3y ago
Why are the K-12 data non-public? Aren't they from publicly funded institutes?
- kayodelycaon 3y ago
  There’s a law protecting individual student records: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Educational_Rights_and_Privacy_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Educational_Rights_an... It also goes beyond K-12. Quite a few parents try to get their children’s college grades and run smack into this law.
- spamizbad 3y ago
  I'm guessing detailed information on individual students, anonymized - that's not something that any edu department will make public.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  Things involving minors tend to have stricter regulations.
- jimhefferon 3y ago
  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.
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
  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.
  - smcin 3y ago
    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. [0]: https://www.montereyherald.com/2023/06/04/three-years-after-covid-19-began-thousands-of-families-are-still-homeschooling-their-children-whats-keeping-them-from-california-classrooms/ https://www.montereyherald.com/2023/06/04/three-years-after-...
ke88y 3y ago
Totally unreasonable, but that doesn't mean it's not legally enforceable :( Why do you expect the ACLU to win? (not arguing. Genuinely curious.)
- karaterobot 3y ago
  I'm not the person you're responding to, but I think there's a case for optimism based on this being something which seems unreasonable, and not is thoroughly established by precedent. Especially since the organization challenging it exists to make exactly this kind of argument, and has a decent track record of doing it in the past. /shrug
  - ke88y 3y ago
    I've been screwed by enough unreasonable contracts that I have little faith. But, yeah, I suppose "ACLU's lawyers think they have a case" is as good a reason for optimism as any.
hodgesrm 3y ago
> That's an unreasonable restriction and I expect the ACLU to win this. Looking at the details, it seems that this cannot be a blanket restriction, since a judge could compell you to provide testimony. [0] At that point it would not matter what the contract said. [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/43/30.224 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/43/30.224
pacbard 3y ago
When you work with state level education data, you do so under a research agreement. That means you outline your research agenda and the state agrees to provide data to you to answer your research questions. You can’t pitch a research project and then go rouge and do whatever with the data. It looks like the state is interpreting that use of student data as part of the lawsuit to ve outside the scope of the prior approvals, therefore they are preventing Sean and Tom from using the data during the their testimony. Nothing prevents the defense to subpoena the same data and have them use it for their testimony.
- arcticfox 3y ago
  As I understand it, this is the government saying that data it provided cannot be used as the basis for supporting litigation against the government. I am not a crazy disciple of the 1A but that seems pretty clearly to be something the government should not be able to do. Couldn't the government just slip that language into any of their FOIA agreements etc? It would be a very different situation for a non-government actor to have the clause. Very scummy by government.
- jahewson 3y ago
  True but they are preventing Sean and Tom from speaking in court on behalf of the defence and preventing the defence from speaking by quoting Sean and Tom. In the context of petitioning the government, no less.
- kahirsch 3y ago
  > You can’t pitch a research project and then go rouge and do whatever with the data. That's not what this case is about. The California Department of Education is not claiming that Thomas Dee misused confidential data. The CDE said that their contract with Dee means that he cannot testify against them or participate in an unrelated case against them.
  - Spooky23 3y ago
    What is the nature of the data? ACLU is often manipulative in how these stories are framed. They are an advocacy group advocating for their priorities. If the headline was “Researchers publish confidential student data through litigation filings”, the crowd here would be pearl clutching about that. You may recall years ago when NYC released taxi data on their open data platform, that data let you basically track the movements of frequent taxi users. The other question is… why don’t the researchers file a FOIA, which has no restrictions.

ww520 3y ago

Why are the K-12 data non-public? Aren't they from publicly funded institutes?

kayodelycaon 3y ago
There’s a law protecting individual student records: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Educational_Rights_and_Privacy_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Educational_Rights_an... It also goes beyond K-12. Quite a few parents try to get their children’s college grades and run smack into this law.
spamizbad 3y ago
I'm guessing detailed information on individual students, anonymized - that's not something that any edu department will make public.
edgyquant 3y ago
Things involving minors tend to have stricter regulations.
jimhefferon 3y ago
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.
tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
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.
- smcin 3y ago
  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. [0]: https://www.montereyherald.com/2023/06/04/three-years-after-covid-19-began-thousands-of-families-are-still-homeschooling-their-children-whats-keeping-them-from-california-classrooms/ https://www.montereyherald.com/2023/06/04/three-years-after-...

ke88y 3y ago

Totally unreasonable, but that doesn't mean it's not legally enforceable :( Why do you expect the ACLU to win? (not arguing. Genuinely curious.)

karaterobot 3y ago
I'm not the person you're responding to, but I think there's a case for optimism based on this being something which seems unreasonable, and not is thoroughly established by precedent. Especially since the organization challenging it exists to make exactly this kind of argument, and has a decent track record of doing it in the past. /shrug
- ke88y 3y ago
  I've been screwed by enough unreasonable contracts that I have little faith. But, yeah, I suppose "ACLU's lawyers think they have a case" is as good a reason for optimism as any.

hodgesrm 3y ago

> That's an unreasonable restriction and I expect the ACLU to win this. Looking at the details, it seems that this cannot be a blanket restriction, since a judge could compell you to provide testimony. [0] At that point it would not matter what the contract said. [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/43/30.224 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/43/30.224

pacbard 3y ago

When you work with state level education data, you do so under a research agreement. That means you outline your research agenda and the state agrees to provide data to you to answer your research questions. You can’t pitch a research project and then go rouge and do whatever with the data. It looks like the state is interpreting that use of student data as part of the lawsuit to ve outside the scope of the prior approvals, therefore they are preventing Sean and Tom from using the data during the their testimony. Nothing prevents the defense to subpoena the same data and have them use it for their testimony.

arcticfox 3y ago
As I understand it, this is the government saying that data it provided cannot be used as the basis for supporting litigation against the government. I am not a crazy disciple of the 1A but that seems pretty clearly to be something the government should not be able to do. Couldn't the government just slip that language into any of their FOIA agreements etc? It would be a very different situation for a non-government actor to have the clause. Very scummy by government.
jahewson 3y ago
True but they are preventing Sean and Tom from speaking in court on behalf of the defence and preventing the defence from speaking by quoting Sean and Tom. In the context of petitioning the government, no less.
kahirsch 3y ago
> You can’t pitch a research project and then go rouge and do whatever with the data. That's not what this case is about. The California Department of Education is not claiming that Thomas Dee misused confidential data. The CDE said that their contract with Dee means that he cannot testify against them or participate in an unrelated case against them.
- Spooky23 3y ago
  What is the nature of the data? ACLU is often manipulative in how these stories are framed. They are an advocacy group advocating for their priorities. If the headline was “Researchers publish confidential student data through litigation filings”, the crowd here would be pearl clutching about that. You may recall years ago when NYC released taxi data on their open data platform, that data let you basically track the movements of frequent taxi users. The other question is… why don’t the researchers file a FOIA, which has no restrictions.