Student personal data continues to stockpile: mental and behavioral health, social security numbers, academics, emotions.
by Stuart Jenner.
What data about emotions of students should school districts gather? How safe is that data? Is there any risk or unintended consequence of asking questions about student emotions and feelings?
Three recent articles stress the seriousness of asking these questions. They point to risks and dangers for students and families. Ideally, the school board will consider these issues and adjust current approaches.
Student Data Exposure
The first article is from one of my favorite bloggers, Melissa Westbrook. She covers Seattle Public Schools. On March 7, 2024, she posted a story about the records of Seattle Public School children being exposed. The information includes free-form responses to questions about emotions conducted using the SBIRT tool.
(Screening, Brief Intervention and Referral to Treatment) While student names are not included in the data, the other facts present make it very easy to identify the students.
Could the same thing happen in Highline? There are no guarantees it won’t. According to the Highline website SBIRT page, similar data has been collected. Since 2018, over 3,000 Highline middle school students have taken the “Check Yourself” survey, and this year, Evergreen HS and Mount Rainier HS are piloting the program. Participation is voluntary.
Emotions are Malleable and Easy to Manipulate
The second article is from the Wall Street Journal’s Saturday March 9, 2024 issue. The headline says it all: “Stop Constantly Asking Your Kids How They Feel.” The article is behind a paywall. It includes extensive quotes from psychologists and researchers. This paragraph, in particular, makes me think of Highline’s approaches to social-emotional learning (SEL):
Therapists, teachers, and parents in America all seem to proceed with the faith that emotion check-ins are as harmless and enlightening as sticking a thermometer under a kid’s tongue. But Chentsova Dutton, who studies emotional self-regulation among young people in the U.S., East Asia, West Africa and Russia, warns that encouraging kids, and especially struggling kids, to dwell on their feelings can actually be counterproductive.
Her research shows how malleable our emotions are and how vulnerable they are to manipulation. This makes our feelings somewhat unreliable when it comes to diagnosing what’s going right or wrong in our lives. But we communicate the opposite when we ask kids to constantly examine how they feel. “We are basically telling them that this deeply imperfect signal is always valid, is always important to track…and then use it to guide your behavior, use it to guide how you act in a situation,” Chentsova Dutton said.
Two of the concluding paragraphs are also worth noting:
Instead of constantly asking kids to name how they feel in the moment, adults should be telling kids how imperfect and unreliable their emotions can be. This means helping them recognize not only that their feelings of envy or indignation or infatuation rarely reflect a full and accurate picture of the world, but also that they sometimes deserve to be ignored.
A healthy emotional life involves a certain amount of repression. How is a child supposed to get through a day of school if she’s never learned to put aside her hurt feelings and concentrate on the lessons in front of her? How will she ever be a good friend if her own feelings are always front and center? How will she ever hope to function at work? She can’t. She won’t. They aren’t.
For further reading, the article is excerpted from a new book by Abigail Shrier, “Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.” The book is listed in the King County Library system, though there are at least 158 holds on the 8 library copies.
Hackers Aim for Student Records
A third story is from NPR on March 12: Hackers are targeting a surprising group of people: young public school students. Excerpt:
Minneapolis Public Schools had been hit by what experts describe as one of the most devastating cyberattacks ever. Hackers stole district data, including files where children were identifiable, and then demanded the district pay a ransom for it. When district officials refused, the hackers released the data online. It included Social Security numbers, school security details, and information about sexual assaults and psychiatric holds.
Put all these stories together ….
- the easy access to information
- the hackers
- questions about whether getting personal and detailed info is doing more harm than good
There is inherent risk and danger of all the information-gathering regarding our children. What will Highline Schools do to protect student data?
