Advocacy Groups Argue Against Too Much FERPA

Six advocacy groups representing journalists and open-government activists today called for congressional hearings on what they called the “rampant abuse” of federal student privacy law.

In a letter to Sens. Ed Markey and Orrin Hatch, the advocacy groups argue that schools and colleges are abusing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act by using it as a shield to keep the public from learning about important issues. They say colleges have inappropriately cited FERPA as reasons to keep confidential everything from sports scores to administrative scandals to sexual assaults.

Markey and Hatch have introduced a “discussion draft” of a bill to update FERPA, but the draft does not address the issues raised by the advocacy groups. On the contrary, the groups warn that the draft could prompt schools and colleges to declare more information off-limits to the public because it expands the definition of confidential records.

“FERPA is a completely broken statute that is effective only in obstructing accountability of public educational institutions,” said Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, one of the signatories to the letter. “Congress needs to scrap this law and start over, with a narrowly drawn statute that strongly protects the privacy of legitimately private educational records while letting the public exercise its watchdog function.”


Other signatories are the American Society of News Editors, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, OpenTheGovernment.org and Californians Aware.