Thursday, February 11, 2010

Go Obama Go

by Andrew Gillen

Paul Basken reports that
The Obama administration is stepping up its drive to compile detailed records on all students from preschool through adult employment, forming a panel of "national experts" to find ways of creating such databases while resolving political and legal concerns over privacy.

The Bush administration tried to form such a student-record database on the national level…But Congress blocked the nationwide effort…
Hopefully Obama can succeed where Bush failed.

4 comments:

John N. said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jane S. Shaw said...

Andrew: What is the point of this action by the Obama administration--creating national lifetime databases on the success and failure of students? This is a good idea? Are you being facetious and/or am I being dense?

~ said...

Jane, as I see it, one of the biggest problems that prevents consumers from holding institutions accountable is a lack of any sort of value added measures of what they do. Such measures are fiendishly difficult to come up with, and are next to impossible if you can't actually track students.

Jane S. Shaw said...

Andrew: In my view, we need innovators who can come up with value-added information without federal intrusion -- but you knew I'd say that!