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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

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.

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.