Rights for Parents

A secretary at a private tutoring agency calls a public junior high school to inquire about a child's reading level. The principal checks the child's record, supplies the requested information and then gratuitously informs the caller that the child has a history of bedwetting, that his mother is an alcoholic, and that a different man sleeps at the home almost every night.

Incidents like this one, which was reported recently to the New York City board of education, have become increasingly commonplace. Today, teachers and guidance counselors record and dispense more and more personal information--much of it unsubstantiated --about students and their families. The widespread misuse of school records will soon be slowed by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act sponsored by New York Senator James Buckley, which was signed into law last week by President Ford as part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Bill. Buckley's legislation denies federal funds to any school or college that fails to allow parents to inspect, challenge and refuse public use of their children's school records.

Once confined to IQ scores and academic grades, student records now bulge with so-called soft data: psychological profiles, personality ratings, disciplinary reports and family-relations evaluations. All of this information becomes part of the student's permanent file, yet parents are often denied an opportunity to see the records or to challenge what may be erroneous or misleading. Some examples:

>-A nine-year-old boy who once hugged a classmate had "homosexual tendencies" written into his permanent record.

> A high school student who criticized his principal on a radio station had "radical tendencies" placed on his record.

Even worse, the records, with a few exceptions, are made available to almost anyone besides parents who asks to see them: potential employers, other school officials, credit bureaus, the local police, health department and Selective Service representatives, the FBI and the CIA. To top it off, parents are generally not informed about who might be reading their children's records.

Senator Buckley was not the first to try to remedy the unwarranted conclusions and the invasions of personal and family privacy made possible by total school control over student records. The National Committee for Citizens in Education, headquartered in Columbia, Md., prepared a state-by-state guide of school policies in order to inform parents where they stand and what action they can take if denied access to student records.

NCCE was also instrumental in helping Buckley frame his amendment, which is the first piece of national legislation that spells out the rights of parents to see and challenge student records.

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