Ferpa: Comparing Ferpa in Maryland

FERPA: Comparing FERPA in Maryland to FERPA Nationally The Family Educational and Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), 20 U.S.C.S. § 1232g; 34 CFR 99, is a national law that focuses on the privacy rights of student education records for public school students and students of schools receiving public educational funds, from elementary level through the university level. Because FERPA applies to students at all levels of school, parents have access to information that would otherwise violate adult student privacy rights through a minor student's graduation from high school.

However, any student attending a school beyond the high school level, regardless of that student's age, has personal rights, rather than their parents being able to exercise rights on their behalf (U.S. Department of Education, 2008). Student privacy is the cornerstone of FERPA and the law attempts to navigate information that must be shared in order to ensure educational quality with a student's right to privacy.

The rights guaranteed under FERPA include, but are not limited to the following: the right to inspect and review educational records, the right to correct inaccurate information, and the right to privacy (U.S. Department of Education, 2008). These safeguards are meant to guard student privacy, particularly in the context of adult students. Privacy issues may seem linked to grades, but real concerns about FERPA are not linked to grades.

Instead, FERPA is frequently linked to the student disciplinary context, and FERPA ensures that adult students do not have their parents contacted when they engage inappropriate behavior. Moreover, it ensures the privacy of their educational records, which can keep disciplinary issues from becoming available to the public, at large.

The privacy that is inherent with FERPA appears to an unmitigated positive, but that position ignores the fact that many universities treat issues that would, in other contexts, be handled as criminal matters, where the students would not have a right to privacy, as disciplinary matters. These offenses could include drug offenses, crimes on campus including sexual assault, and other issues where there might be compelling reasons for the information to be made available to the public.

Furthermore, even if there is no compelling reason for disclosure to the public at large, there may be instances where the best interests of the student would require disclosure that is prohibited under FERPA. The reality is that many college students are still in very dependent relationships with their parents, but FERPA treats them as adults even while they are living as dependents.

If parents are continuing to pay for the educational and living expenses of students, is it fair or appropriate to deny them access to information about those students? In addition, while post high-school students have their own rights under FERPA, there may be times in which parental involvement would help students navigate difficult scenarios, particularly difficult disciplinary issues, where the consequences of the disciplinary issues may be greater than the student realizes at the time. Therefore, this paper will focus on whether FERPA is beneficial to adult college students.

Literature Review In order to properly assess FERPA, it is critical to understand the limitations of what it does and does not guarantee. FERPA's provisions provide several important protections for students, and several areas of potential liability for schools. The three most significant protections are the student's right to inspect the educational record, the right to correct erroneous information, and the right to privacy.

However, it is important to note that FERPA's protections come with limitations, including some aspects where the school might not only be able to disclose, but be required to disclose the student's records. The first significant contribution that FERPA makes to educational law is that it gives students the right to inspect their own educational records. FERPA provides that "Parents or eligible students have the right to inspect and review the student's education records maintained by the school.

Schools are not required to provide copies of records unless, for reasons such as great distance, it is impossible for parents or eligible students to review the records. Schools may charge a fee for copies" (U.S. Department of Education, 2011). At the college level, this is a personal right to be exercised by adult students, not their parents or guardians. Moreover, there is a transition in FERPA; at the high school level and below, the right to review records is a parental right.

This can place a high burden on students who wish to review their records if they do not have parental support and participation. This parental access to student records can also provide significant deterrents to students who might otherwise access school-related resources, particularly non-academic resources. For example, because parents have a right to review student records, they would have the right to review records that implicated the parents in possible child abuse, which is not an unusual co-occurrence when a child becomes a disciplinary problem at the school.

It is critical to understand that FERPA was written in the Watergate era, when distrust of the government was rampant. "The law's legislative history suggests the distrustful climate surrounding Watergate cascaded into other privacy areas, including education. Following Watergate, lawmakers were increasingly concerned that secret governmental documents could be erroneously relied upon to the detriment of individuals, most of whom had no idea that data was being kept and no method of correcting inaccurate information.

Thus, FERPA's purpose was to give parents access to their children's educational records to ensure that data being relied upon to classify their children was correct or correctable" (Penrose, 2011). Therefore, FERPA contains the following procedures by which a person can seek amendment of school records: "Parents or eligible students have the right to request that a school correct records which they believe to be inaccurate or misleading. If the school decides not to amend the record, the parent or eligible student then has the right to a formal hearing.

After the hearing, if the school still decides not to amend the record, the parent or eligible student has the right to place a statement with the record setting forth his or her view about the contested information" (U.S. Department of Education, 2011). In some instances, this right reflects the ability to correct simple mistakes made by the educational facility, which may not have been detected if the student did not also have the related right to review his or her educational record.

However, when placed in the context of the disciplinary process, it can provide students with an additional avenue for some type of review of behavior. Generally, people who have access to a student's records will be able to access disciplinary history.

Therefore, what this provision means is that any person who has access to the student's record will also have access, at that time, to any explanation that the student wishes to put in the record, as long as the student has complied with the steps required to access the right to provide an explanation. This may give the student an opportunity to mitigate some of the negatives contained in the student's record.

Finally, FERPA does what it was created to do; it ensures a certain level of privacy for the student. However, it is important to keep in mind that this guarantee of privacy is not absolute, and that students cannot use FERPA to shield students in particular situations. "Generally, schools must have written permission from the parent or eligible student in order to release any information from a student's education record" (U.S. Department of Education, 2011).

FERPA allows schools to disclose records, without student or parental consent to: school officials with legitimate educational interest; other schools to which a student is transferring; specified officials for audit or evaluation purposes; appropriate parties in connection with financial aid to a student; organizations conducting certain studies for or on behalf of the school; accrediting organizations; to comply with a judicial order or lawfully issued subpoena; appropriate officials in cases of health and safety emergencies; and state and local authorities, within a juvenile justice system, pursuant to specific State law (U.S.

Department of Education, 2011). Furthermore, schools have the right to disclose information, at will, if that information is considered directory information and the student has not made a request that they not disclose that information (U.S. Department of Education, 2011). However, there are some concerns that FERPA might interfere with the disciplinary process or somehow impede the university's ability to exercise its authority by shielding students from responsibility for their wrongdoing.

"No longer can parents simply send their children away to college assuming they will be immune to crime because college campuses reflect the same problems and concerns found in society as a whole. In an effort to provide parents and prospective students with an informed view of campus life, many members of the press and media are seeking access to the records of university judicial procedures" (Walton, 2002). However, these disciplinary proceedings have long been considered part of student's record, so that educational institutions keep them private.

This privacy is not just for the general public, but also for families, who may have genuine concerns about their students and be unable to access information about them. Walton suggests that increasing reports of crimes on campus is one way to resolve the seeming conflict between FERPA's dictates of student privacy and a university's legitimate concerns about the ability to exercise authority over students, since FERPA only addresses educational records and does not speak to criminal records (Walton, 2002).

Method In addition to using a literature review to examine this problem from a global perspective, this researcher engaged in two types of evidence-gathering to investigate attitudes towards FERPA. The first type of evidence-gathering involved surveying students at Maryland State University to determine their attitudes towards FERPA and whether they believed it helped or hindered their success in college. The second type of evidence-gathering involved an interview with a representative at the Office of the Dean at Maryland State University to ask his opinion about the utility of FERPA.

Evidence The results of both the survey and the interview reflect some of the same concerns about college students being quasi-adults and still being in need of some parental monitoring that must follow any discussions of FERPA. The results of the student survey demonstrated that four of every ten students would actually support easing the restrictions of FERPA in a way to increase the potential of parental monitoring.

While it may seem counterintuitive that college students would willingly give up some of their privacy, those results make sense when one understands the reasoning given by the college students. One of the students I interviewed has been getting good grades but due to excessive social gatherings in college, he has found that he has to pull frequent all-nighters in order to maintain this high grade point average. When he was asked whether college should enforce the discipline rules, he asserted that he would gladly a more authoritarian campus.

Subsequently, when asked why he wanted this, he simply said it was for his own good and the strictness would probably lead him to success in college. However, the student response was certainly not unanimous; another student claimed that he would find increased oversight burdensome because he wanted the ability to assert his freedom. Interestingly enough, all students seemed to agree that giving the university a greater ability to monitor their activity would help them vastly improve their grades.

The interview with the representative of the Office of the Dean was supportive of FERPA, but did acknowledge that the law was not flawless. He told me once there was a parent demanding to know what their son's grade are and his whereabouts. In fact, he already dropped out of college a year ago and had spent all the tuition fees on something else. However, the representative did not believe this was a problem with FERPA, itself, but seemed to suggest it was a student-specific problem.

He believed that one could help college students transition to greater privacy and adult autonomy without challenging the fundamental guarantees of privacy contained in FERPA. He went on to give examples to combat FERPA problem: disciplining students before they enroll into college. He gave me information about Florida State University, which has a summer bridge program that includes a week long orientation during which students meet the university president, followed by six weeks during which roughly 300 students live together in a residence hall staffed by handpicked upperclassmen.

During this time period, they familiarize students with the university's rules and disciplinary procedure in an attempt to avoid issues once school actually begins. Another solution is to advocate an open-door policy as a means of attempting to help students resolve issues that might be exacerbated by a lack of parental communication.

For example, McDaniel College has established a system of mentoring and advising with the goal of ensures that no student is lost; even parents facing difficulty transitions in life can come in and access school resources to help them deal with negative life events. Discussion Why is discipline considered such a critical issue when FERPA appears to be related to privacy concerns? This is due to the fact that discipline and privacy have significant overlap, particularly in regards to college-age students.

College students simultaneously face greater exposure to disciplinary proceedings, but also less exposure to significant interventions, and FERPA has been used to shelter some at-risk college students from exposure. The range of areas where FERPA has been used as an excuse to hide the fact that students who have committed infractions have received only nominal punishment is broad, encompassing everything from parking violations to sexual assaults. However, the Virginia Tech massacre and the concerns that it invoked led many people to really consider the full implications of FERPA.

One of the problems with FERPA is that is "a large, complex, and confusing body of law" (Daggett, 2008). It has evolved beyond a law protecting student privacy and the right to access one's own student records into a law that has been applied in other contexts.

One of the ways that this has occurred is that schools have used FERPA as a sword, rather than a shield, asserting privacy concerns that would seem to threaten a school's ability to be authoritarian, but, by shielding a school's actual actions, might actually place students at greater risk of malfeasance on the part of the educational facility.

After all, if there is no transparency in the disciplinary process, how can anyone assess whether a school is treating its students appropriately? FERPA has been subjected to a significant amount of critical discussion because of misconceptions about what type of information FERPA prohibits from disclosure. There seems to be a belief that FERPA prohibits an educational facility from releasing any non-directory information about a student, and that understanding is simply erroneous.

Moreover, that misunderstanding has impacted people at every level, with university administrators either intentionally or unintentionally misinterpreting these provisions to prohibit disclosure of students who have been found guilty of inappropriate behavior via the student disciplinary process. The reality is that FERPA does strongly protect student educational records, but that there is still substantial room for disclosure under the statute.

My informal survey suggests that a surprising percentage of college students would be willing to exchange some of their FERPA guarantees of privacy for a higher degree of either parental or university oversight of their behaviors. Moreover, even those who are unwilling to trade privacy for greater oversight acknowledge that doing so would probably lead to an increase in student grades. However, it would be erroneous to label this a problem with FERPA.

As previously discussed, FERPA does not prohibit students from signing waivers giving the university the right to share information with parents. Nor does FERPA prohibit parents from requiring their children to agree to this type of information-sharing as a condition of receiving tuition money from the parents.

Furthermore, the situation described by the representative in the Office of the Dean, in which the parents had spent a year's tuition on a child that was no longer even enrolled in the school may seem to indicate a problem with FERPA, but probably describes much more serious communication problems within that family. One simply cannot assume that degree of lack of communication in the average family.

Moreover, one cannot assume that a change to the law that would threaten the privacy of all college-age students is necessary to combat issues in individual families. After all, had those parents required their student to fill out a waiver that would have given the parents access to the student's information before every sending the University of Maryland tuition for that student, then they would not have found themselves in the position of trying to get FERPA-protected information from the school.

Moreover, while some students reflected genuine concerns that FERPA might prevent schools from notifying families in the event that a student seemed to be in need of help, and that such a need would prevent that student from signing any type of FERPA waiver, those concerns do not reflect the reality of the bill. In the wake of school shootings, where it has been revealed that students were considered high-risk prior to the shooting, some people believe that FERPA has operated to prevent disclosure of troubling information about those students.

However, FERPA only prohibits such disclosure if the information is part of the student's official educational records. While some universities might mistakenly believe that FERPA prohibits such disclosure, "in reality the law would permit disclosure" (Tribbensee & McDonald, 2007). In addition, FERPA is not linked to disclosure of personal information; a professor or other staff member who noted disturbing behavior by a student would not be prohibited from disclosing those observations, unless otherwise bound by some type of.