Education & EdTech// topic
Student data privacy, engineered
In short
What FERPA, COPPA and GDPR for minors actually do to an architecture — which records may reach a model at all, who can see what, how long anything is kept, and what a school's security review will make you prove.
8 pages
diagnostics
- A records request came back with assistant transcripts nobody could redactThe transcripts were never classified, so nothing was designed to filter or delete them. The test is not which system wrote the row — it is whether any join you control gets from that row to a named student.diagnostic10 min
- After the term rollover, staff can see students who are not theirsThe role model is probably fine. What is missing is the moment where an ended assignment removes an access that was granted when it began — and rollover is when a year of those omissions becomes visible at once.diagnostic10 min
- You deleted the student, and the next roster sync put them backRunning the delete job a second time is the reflex and it is almost always wrong. Probe each store immediately after deletion and again after the next sync — the two results separate re-creation from incomplete deletion.diagnostic10 min
definitions
- A student data privacy agreement, read as an engineering specificationSchools bind vendors with a standard agreement plus an exhibit naming every data element collected. Five of its clauses are build work, and the exhibit is a schema diff in disguise.definition6 min
- Directory information is a per-student flag your code has to honourSchools designate their own directory information list, and any family can opt out mid-year. That makes it a dated per-student flag every outbound surface reads at render time.definition6 min
- The school official exception, and what it obliges a vendor to buildA vendor holding student records stands inside the school's own permission, not outside FERPA. Each condition of that permission converts into something you build and evidence.definition6 min
- Verifiable parental consent, and when the school can give it insteadUnder COPPA, consent must be obtained by a method reasonably likely to prove it came from a parent. Schools can stand in for parents in narrow classroom cases, and the deliverable is a consent record.definition6 min
- Where the education record starts and stops, in the schemaThe education record is not a system boundary you can draw around one database. It is a property of fields, which is why transcripts, prompt logs, error payloads and backups keep landing inside it.definition8 min
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