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K-12 schools during the pandemic: New National Academies of Science publication discusses unprecedented challenges

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented unprecedented challenges to the nation’s K-12 education system. These challenges certainly include the impacts of school closures, and the range of multi-layered, complex questions of whether to reopen school buildings and how to operate them safely if they do reopen. The pandemic has also highlighted significant fault lines in the student privacy space, which WPF researched and discussed extensively in its extensive student privacy report, Without Consent: An analysis of student directory information practices in US schools, and impacts on privacy, published in April 2020 (See: https://www.worldprivacyforum.org/2020/04/without-consent/ ) .

Now, a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine consensus study report delves into the topic of K-12 schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. The consensus report, Reopening K-12 Schools During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Prioritizing health, equity, and communities, is available free (See: https://www.nap.edu/read/25858/chapter/1#viii) and is recommended reading for those interested in looking at systemic issues within the K-12 system. The report does not discuss impacts on health privacy of students, but it does grapple with potential frameworks for decision making, and has an excellent discussion of equity.

Read alongside WPF’s Without Consent report, the NAS study presents a fulsome picture of where the most pressing policy work in K-12 is right now, and hints at where the most important intersections are between impacts of the pandemic and student privacy under the US Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) regulations.

Related reading:

Without Consent: An analysis of student directory information practices in US schools, and impacts on privacy (WPF Research Report, April 2020 PDF, ebook, web )

Reopening K-12 Schools During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Prioritizing health, equity, and communities (National Academies Press Consensus Report, October 2020, ebook, PDF, web.)

Posted October 12, 2020 in COVID-19, Education privacy
Tags: #K-12

New Report: Risky Analysis: Assessing and Improving AI Governance Tools

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new WPF report, “Risky Analysis: Assessing and Improving AI Governance Tools.” This report sets out a definition of AI governance tools, documents why and how these tools are critically important for trustworthy AI, and where these tools are around the world. The report also documents problems in some AI governance tools themselves, and suggests pathways to improve AI governance tools and create an evaluative environment to measure their effectiveness. AI systems should not be deployed without simultaneously evaluating the potential adverse impacts of such systems and mitigating their risks, and most of the world agrees about the need to take precautions against the threats posed. The specific tools and techniques that exist to evaluate and measure AI systems for their inclusiveness, fairness, explainability, privacy, safety and other trustworthiness issues — called in the report collectively AI governance tools – can improve such issues. While some AI governance tools provide reassurance to the public and to regulators, the tools too often lack meaningful oversight and quality assessments. Incomplete or ineffective AI governance tools can create a false sense of confidence, cause unintended problems, and generally undermine the promise of AI systems. The report contains rich background details, use cases, potential solutions to the problems discussed in the report, and a global index of AI Governance Tools.
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Report: From the Filing Cabinet to the Cloud: Updating the Privacy Act of 1974

This comprehensive report and proposed bill text is focused on the Privacy Act of 1974, an important and early Federal privacy law that applies to the government sector and some contractors. The Privacy Act was written for the 1970s information era -- an era that was characterized by the use of mainframe computers and filing cabinets. Today's digital information era looks much different than the '70s: smart phones are smarter than the old mainframes, and documents are now routinely digitized and stored and perhaps even analyzed in the cloud, among many other changes. The report focuses on why the Privacy Act needs an update that will bring it into this century, and how that could look and work. This work was written by Robert Gellman, and informed by a two-year multi-stakeholder process.