Technical Briefs

The Privacy Technical Assistance Center has developed a body of tools to help education stakeholders to learn more about data privacy, confidentiality, and security practices related to student-level longitudinal data systems.

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has developed a series of technical briefs to assist states with their development of Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems. We are seeking input and comments on these briefs. If you have any comments or suggestions on these Technical Briefs, please send them to SLDStechbrief@ed.gov.

• Basic Concepts and Definitions for Privacy and Confidentiality in Student Education Records
  http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2011601

  • This Technical Brief discusses basic concepts and definitions that establish a common set of terms related to the protection of personally identifiable information, especially in education records in the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS). This Brief also outlines a privacy framework that is tied to Fair Information Practice Principles that have been promulgated in both the United States and international privacy work.

• Data Stewardship: Managing Personally Identifiable Information in Electronic Student Education Records
  http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2011602

  • This Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) Technical Brief focuses on data stewardship, which involves each organization’s commitment to ensuring that privacy, confidentiality, security, and the appropriate use of data are respected when personally identifiable information is collected. Data stewardship involves all aspects of data collection, from planning, collection and maintenance to use and dissemination. The Brief also discusses internal control procedures that should be implemented to protect personally identifiable information, including the use of unique student identifiers and linking codes, workforce security, authorization for access, role based access to student record data, permitted uses, and the handling of data breaches. This Brief concludes with a discussion of accountability and auditing, including an overview of the types of audit activities that can be implemented to ensure that all stages of data stewardship have been successfully implemented.

• Statistical Methods for Protecting Personally Identifiable Information in Aggregate Reporting
  http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2011603

  • This Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) Technical Brief examines what protecting student privacy means in a reporting context. To protect a student's privacy, the student's personally identifiable information must be protected from public release. When schools, districts, or states publish reports on students' educational progress, they typically release aggregated data–data for groups of students–to prevent disclosure of information about an individual. However, even with aggregation, unintended disclosures of personally identifiable information may occur. Current reporting practices are described and each is accompanied by an example table that is used to consider whether the intended protections are successful. The Brief also illustrates that some practices work better than others in protecting against disclosures of personally identifiable information about individual students. Each data protection practice requires some loss of information. The challenge rests in identifying practices that protect information about individual students, while at the same time minimizing the negative impact on the utility of the publicly reported data. Drawing upon the review and analysis of current practices, the Brief concludes with a set of recommended reporting rules that can be applied in reports of percentages and rates that are used to describe student outcomes to the public. These reporting rules are intended to maximize the amount of detail that can be safely reported without allowing disclosures from student outcome measures that are based on small numbers of students.

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