Here’s today’s NHPR story reporting on Governor Hassan’s signing of HB 1587, Rep. Kurk’s bill to enhance student data privacy in New Hampshire. As the piece points out, there will continue to be legislative work to do to put a more systematic framework around how New Hampshire manages education data as new education technologies emerge, but the State has put its finger in the data dike for now. More interested in having an issue than a solution, political opponents of the Common Core will continue to voice concern, but parents can move on.

There’s a database in New Hampshire, nestled in hard-drives in the Department of Education, with all sorts of information about student test scores, graduation rates, and achievement. It shows how poor kids do on tests compared to rich kids, and how minorities do compared to whites, and whether schools are improving on those tests.

Whenever the data in it is accessed, it’s totally anonymous; only a handful of employees at the DOE can match these test-scores with student names.

That makes New Hampshire already ahead of the curve, and that was the case before lawmakers passed a new student data privacy law.

National Privacy advocates are praising New Hampshire’s new measure, which Governor Maggie Hassan signed into law last week to basically no fanfare. They are saying it provides clarity in an area that in many states is largely unregulated.

“Student data is really… it’s really a wild-wild west situation,” explains Joshua Bleiberg who analyzes student data research for the Brookings Institution, “There’s a lot of good actors, there’s a lot of bad actors out there, and the ways that data is being gathered to say it’s largely unregulated is probably an understatement.”

get the full story at N.H. Student Data Privacy Law “One Of Most Comprehensive” In Nation | New Hampshire Public Radio.