During the last year or so about half of the states have enacted legislation aimed at protecting student privacy. Meanwhile, President Obama has called for a Student Data Privacy Act, saying “data collected on students in the classroom should only be used for educational purposes — to teach our children, not to market to our children.”
Most of the new laws and the President’s proposal have omitted the most egregious violation of student privacy in the nation. It is the Department of Defense’s administration of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) to more than 650,000 children in 12,000 high schools and the retention of demographic information, social security numbers, and 3 hours of test results for recruiting purposes without parental consent.
The ASVAB is the military’s enlistment examination.
The DoD claims their administration of the ASVAB in the nation’s high schools is exempt from the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, (FERPA) and that parents do not have the right to provide consent to the release of their children’s information when they are given the test – even when they are required to take it.
Two states – Maryland and New Hampshire – have laws in place that require mom and dad to sign off before their children are tested and their personal information is delivered to the Pentagon. Hawaii’s Department of Education has a similar regulation in place. The California legislature passed a bill requiring parental consent for the DoD to test and retrieve data from minor-aged children that was ultimately vetoed. Last year, Connecticut came close to passing legislation protecting the privacy of children who take the ASVAB. An unlikely maneuver by the Veterans Affairs Committee in that Democrat-controlled state killed the measure at the last minute.
American schoolchildren are often required to take the ASVAB during school hours. Two years ago the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Children -IV 21 (d) called on the Obama Administration to ensure that “schools, parents and pupils are made aware of the voluntary nature of the ASVAB before consenting to the participation into it.”
The US Army Recruiting Command’s School Recruiting Program Handbook (Section 6-2) says the primary purpose of the ASVAB is to provide military recruiters “with a source of leads of high school juniors and seniors qualified through the ASVAB for enlistment into the Active Army and Army Reserve.”
Student privacy should take precedence over military recruitment in the high schools. If the President is sincere in his statement that data collected on students in the classroom should only be used for educational purposes and not to market to our children, parents should be given the right to consent to the release of their children’s data to the military.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.