The U.S. Department of Education will soon propose new regulations governing student privacy rights, Inside Higher Ed reports. The department wants to strengthen enforcement provisions of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA) to cover additional recipients of students' information and to clarify how states can develop and use data in statewide longitudinal data systems (SLDS) "while ensuring protection of individual privacy under FERPA," according to the Federal Register notice. The latter topic was the subject of debate at a recent House committee hearing where one academic warned that many state data systems lack the privacy safeguards necessary for protecting students' data.
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