This report, published by the Center for Democracy and Technology, offers three recommendations and related best practices to assist the education sector in achieving the right balance of retaining useful data that can serve students with deleting information that is no longer needed. They are:

• Conduct a comprehensive inventory of student data.
• Create an organizational student data retention policy.
• Implement technical best practices when deleting student data.

To assist education leaders and the companies with which they work, the brief provides practical resources that can be adapted to implement these recommendations, including samples of a student retention policy, a student data inventory template, a deletion certificate, and an initiative kick-off letter.