Politico (6/8, Simon) reports in an article of more than 3,000 words that parents “from across the political spectrum have mobilized into an unexpected political force in recent months to fight the data mining of their children,” and have “catapulted student privacy – an issue that was barely on anyone’s radar last spring – to prominence in statehouses from New York to Florida to Wyoming.” A Politico review of student privacy issues found “the parent privacy lobby gaining momentum – and catching big-data advocates off guard.” The movement, initially dismissed “as a fringe campaign,” has “attracted powerful allies on both the left and right,” including the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Legislative Exchange Council. The movement is targeting “huge state databases being built to track children for more than two decades, from as early as infancy through the start of their careers.” These databases are being promoted by the Obama Administration, Politico notes.
Study: Parents’ Help With Homework Counterproductive
The San Francisco Chronicle (3/28, Graff) reports that researchers studying NCES data have found that “parent help is mostly inconsequential, and sometimes can even hurt.” Researchers “looked at 63 measures of parental involvement in children’s lives, including helping with homework, volunteering at school, punishing kids with bad grades” and other factors, and found that “most had little affect on a child’s academic success.” Moreover, in middle school, “parental homework help had a negative effect, bringing down test scores.” The study found that “reading out loud to young kids and talking with teenagers about college” were the only factors that seemed to help academic achievement.