School Data Rooms Are Not the Answer to FERPA Compliance


The school data room has been a popular tool for displaying and reviewing students’ progress for many years. They typically take the form of white boards and charts that display academic data for teachers to review. The idea is for teacher teams and administrative personnel to be able to analyze and discuss the student’s performance in a cooperative manner.

But the problem with these displays is that they can be in violation of FERPA guidelines. These data spaces can be used to humiliate students in front of their peers or to humiliate them in public. This should not happen in schools.

It’s not easy for teachers to monitor student progress on these types of walls of data, especially when there are multiple subjects and grades being tracked. Teachers can tackle difficult issues more quickly using a digital platform which allows them to filter their data based on specific assignments, trends, and dates. They can also drill down to classrooms and student cohorts.

Digital solutions can also include an annotation tool that lets users create personal notes on any document that is stored on the system. This is a fantastic feature to keep the track of tasks, Q&A threads and uploads of documents. It would be fantastic for the solution to provide granular permissions for documents, folders and activities depending on roles, document and folder levels or activities.

As schools continue to be forced to focus on data-driven instruction it is crucial that they have tools to aid them in reviewing and discussing this data in a way that is collaborative. By choosing a digital solution that has the right balance of features that meet the needs of educators schools can be confident that they are making a smart choice.

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