FERPA
Privacy was once taken for granted in public education, but now through the 1974 law, Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act it is pushed to the forefront of the minds of every educator in the United States (Cossler, 2010). This law has paved the way for many lawsuits regarding privacy of student’s records, which have left teachers scared, undereducated and unaware of certain regulations of the law. FERPA laws provide protections for students, but also allow access of all student records to the student’s custodial parents, which in some situations has cause problems and in some cases have specifically brought clarifications of the law. Has the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act provided the much needed privacy for students or created an overboard policies?
The history of the FERPA Act began in 1974 when the act became the law; up to that time there was very little legislation on privacy within schools (Groves & Groves, 1981). Senator Buckley of New York was concerned with the lack of privacy within schools; the Buckley Amendment was enacted on August 21, 1974 (Groves & Groves, 1981). The two hugely significant impacts of the amendment is 1) people are required to be informed of their rights. 2) Helps educators reflect on their record and document policies in order to avoid conflicts with federal law (Groves & Groves, 1981). There have been many cases since the Buckley law, which have specified regulations within schools, which have affected both state and district policies.
The Peoria Unified School District Board Policy states, “Within the first three (3) weeks of each school year, the District will publish in a District communication a notice to parents and eligible students of their rights under the FERP...
... middle of paper ...
..., 2013, from http://lp.ctspublish.com/asba/public/lpext.dll?f=templates&fn=main-hit-h.htm&2.0
Bennett, A., & Brower, A. (2001). ’THAT’S NOT WHAT FERPA SAYS!’: THE TENTH CIRCUIT COURT GIVES DANGEROUS BREADTH TO FERPA IN ITS CONFUSING AND CONTRADICTORY FALVO V. OWASSO INDEPENDENT SCHOOL DISTRICT DECISION. Brigham Young University Education & Law Journal, 2, 327.
Cossler, C. (2010, April 1, 2010). Privacy Concerns: The Effects of the Latest FERPA Changes. School Buisness Affairs, 76(3), 22-24.
Groves, S. L., & Groves, D. L. (1981). Professional Discretion and Personal Liability of Teachers in Relation to Grades and Records. Education, 101(4), 335-340.
Lomonte, F. D. (2010). Ferpa Frustrations: It’s Time for Reform. Chronicle Of Higher Education, 56(35), A56.
White, L. (2013, January 1, 2013). Don’t Like Ferpa? Change the Law. Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. 59(18).
... is one that a reasonable guardian and tutor might undertake.” And he concluded that given the mission of public schools, and the circumstances of this case, the searches required by the school board's policy were “reasonable” and thereby permissible under the Constitution's 4th Amendment.
“FERPA [Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act] essentially means you have no right, as a parent, to know what or how your children are doing in school.” Michele Willens says this in her article, “College Students Have Too Much Privacy” about the FERPA act that was passed in 1974. It was originally put in place to protect the privacy of students, but it also keeps information private from the student’s parents, or current gauardians. Because so many parents waste money on college students that might miss classes or even drop out without them knowing, the FERPA act needs to be reformed.
Patterson, James T. Brown v. Board of Education a civil Rights Milestone and it’s Troubled Legacy. Oxford University Press. New York 2001.
In Goss v. Lopez, a student sued because an Ohio law allowed a school principal to suspend a student for 10 days or more with only a simple 24-hour notice to parents. The court ruled that this was a violation of a student’s 14th amendment due process clause rights because students were not given a due process hearing. In Dixon v. Alabama, a federal appellate court affirmed same standard in higher education by maintaining that a public college or university cannot expel a student without a hearing.
In 1998 in Owasso, Oklahoma, mother Kristja Falvo sued the Owasso Independent School District because she claimed that her children were ridiculed when their grades were read out loud in class by classmates. Falvo says that when teachers have students grade each other's papers, the 1974 federal law protecting the privacy of educational records is violated. This is such a controversial subject that it has not been resolved as of today. This paper argues that peer grading does not violate the privacy law.
Voss, Kate. "23 Years after the Clery Act, Are Schools Any Safer?" The College Fix RSS. N.p., 22 Oct. 2013. Web. 28 Nov. 2013. .
Loeb, Jane W, Marianne A. Ferber & Helen M. Lowry. (1978) The Effectiveness of Affirmative Action for Women The Journal of Higher Education, Vol. 49, No. 3, 218-230.
Essex, N. L. (2002). School Law and the Public School (4th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon
The National Center For Public Research. “Brown v Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) (USSC+).” Supreme Court of The United States. 1982 .
Fischer, L., Schimmel, D., & Stellman, L. (2007). Teachers and the law (7th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act is a federal law passed in 1974 that bars the disclosure of personally identifiable data in student records to third parties without parental consent.
Technology has developed in leaps and bounds over the past few decades. The case is that the law always has difficulty keeping pace with new issues and technology and the few laws that are enacted are usually very general and obsucre. The main topic of this paper is to address the effect of technology on privacy in the workplace. We have to have an understanding of privacy before trying to protect it. Based on the Gift of Fire, privacy has three pieces: freedom from intrusion, control of information about one's self, and freedom from surveillance.1 People's rights has always been protected by the constitution such as the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from "unreasonable searches and seizures". As said by Eric Hughes, "Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world."2 As written by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in 1928 is the right most valued by the American people was "the right to be left alone."3
Solove, Daniel J. “5 Myths about Privacy” Washington Post: B3. Jun 16 2013. SIRS. Web. 10
The Fourth Amendment essentially stands for the proposition that all United States citizens are protected from the unlawful search of their persons and property. However, the Fourth Amendment had not applied to public schools due to the fact school officials were governed by the doctrine of in loco parentis. This doctrine is predicated on the idea the educators should be viewed as substituting the place of the parents while the students’ are in the school setting. Following the rationale of this doctrine, educators shared the same rights and responsibilities that a student’s parents po...
Hughes, Kirsty. "A Behavioral Understanding of Privacy and Its Implications for Privacy Law." Modern Law Review 75.5 (2012): 806-836. Academic Search Complete. Web. 6 Apr. 2014.