To Phyllis Schlafly, the longtime conservative activist and author, there are few bigger threats to freedom than the creation by the government of databases that hold detailed personal information about American citizens.
“Databases give the government extraordinary powers to monitor the daily activities of law-abiding Americans,” she stated in testimony to Congress in 2000, adding that only “totalitarian regimes” engage in such activities.
Over the last decade, Ms. Schlafly’s group, the Eagle Forum, has fought to limit the types of data the government can collect, particularly in the areas of health and education, and to restrict how that information can be used.
So when officials at the Eagle Forum learned that the U.S. Education Department was considering a proposal to create a new national database to track the educational progress of every college student, they took notice.
“Whenever we hear that word ‘database’ our ears perk up,” says Jessica Echard, the forum’s executive director.
Leaders of privacy-rights groups, on both the right and the left of the political spectrum, are preparing to mobilize their members to fight the creation of such a database, should the Education Department and Congress decide to move forward with it.
But with Republicans firmly ensconced in power at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, it is the conservative organizations, like the Eagle Forum and the Free Congress Foundation, a think tank that is led by Paul M. Weyrich, the founding president of the Heritage Foundation and a leading fund raiser for conservative causes, that wield the most influence.
Those groups, which call for a smaller federal government with less power and consider themselves to be soldiers in the culture wars, have strong support among the members of the Republican Study Committee, which is made up of more than 100 of the most conservative legislators in the U.S. House of Representatives, who are “organized for the purpose of advancing a conservative social and economic agenda.”
Changing the Debate
The conservative opposition is changing the political dynamics of the debate on higher-education accountability.
For two years, the Republican leaders of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce have accused higher-education lobbyists and leaders of resisting calls to make colleges more accountable for the performance of their students.
But now that there is a proposal, backed by some higher-education associations, that would strengthen the government’s ability to measure the effectiveness of colleges in graduating their students, it is the Republican lawmakers who appear to be balking.
Speaking at a hearing last summer on college graduation rates, Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon, the California Republican who helped draft legislation to renew the Higher Education Act, acknowledged the political hazards of creating such a database. “We could give everybody a number, kind of like a Social Security number, and then we could track them by that,” he said. “But I know we have people who have great concerns about being tracked.”
Rep. John A. Boehner, the Ohio Republican who is chairman of the education committee in the House, has not taken a position on the proposal yet, a spokeswoman for the panel said. But his top aide on education issues, Sally G. Lovejoy, has spoken openly about her disdain for the plan, according to college lobbyists and Congressional aides who have heard her comment on it.
“If Sally Lovejoy doesn’t like it, it’s unlikely her boss would either,” said a Republican-leaning lobbyist, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of offending Ms. Lovejoy and the congressman. Ms. Lovejoy was not available for comment.
But some college lobbyists who favor the proposal say that the lawmakers can’t have it both ways -- chastising colleges for lacking accountability, but then opposing efforts to provide the government with more reliable data with which to judge them.
“You can walk the walk and talk the talk, but at some point you have to walk your talk,” says Travis J. Reindl, director of state policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, which supports the database. “It’s time for the committee to come to the table and work something out.”
In recent years, colleges have come under fire for allowing too many financially needy and minority students to drop out as tuition rates have skyrocketed. In a report last May, the Education Trust, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization, criticized colleges for failing to graduate more than half of all black students and of all Hispanic students within six years.
The leaders of the House education committee used the report to bash college lobbyists. “These are serious concerns, but we have yet to hear a formal response from the higher-education lobbying community,” Representatives Boehner and McKeon wrote in a letter last summer to the college groups. “That is troubling.”
Several higher-education groups -- the American Council on Education, the state-college group, and the State Higher Education Executive Officers -- responded by announcing that they supported a test by the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics to determine whether it was technically possible for the government to create a database that would contain information about all college students without compromising their privacy.
Officials at the statistics center, and the college lobbyists who back them, have argued that the proposal would allow the Education Department to measure a college’s performance more accurately by generating better information about retention and graduation rates and by enabling the department, for the first time, to track transfer students.
This “unit record” plan would replace the current system, in which colleges report summary data about total enrollment, student aid, graduation rates, and other measures for the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System survey. That survey -- which is composed of about 10 reports -- is the only such central database and is heavily used by federal and state officials to develop higher-education policy.
In March, the center sent its report to Congress, stating that adequate safeguards were in place to ensure data security. “The central defining question of the feasibility of a unit-record system is not a ‘could’ question,” the report concluded. “It is a ‘should’ question, asking whether the federal government should develop a system that is based upon individually identifiable information.”
College lobbyists and leaders are divided on the answer to that question. While lobbyists for state colleges generally support the proposal, most private-college presidents object to it. They worry about the risk to student privacy and the potential need to make changes in their campus computer systems to provide the data. (See article on Page A37.)
“Any time that the government proposes to collect a student’s name, personal data, and academic record in one place, there is reason to be concerned,” says R. Judson Carlberg, president of Gordon College, an independent Christian institution in Massachusetts.
A ‘Threat’ to Privacy
Officials with the Free Congress Foundation couldn’t agree more with that sentiment. In March the organization sent an alert to its members warning that the Education Department was planning “to create a massive federal database” of student records. “The threat to our students’ privacy is of grave concern,” the notice said.
Stephen Lilienthal, a policy analyst for the foundation, says he is particularly worried that government officials could misuse the data -- mining the information for purposes other than those for which it was intended. “This might strike some people as far-fetched,” he says, “but government programs start out incrementally and then expand, expand, and expand.”
That kind of “creep” would have been especially possible had the department used Social Security numbers to identify students, as officials at the statistics center initially proposed, says Michael D. Ostrolenk, the director of education policy for the Eagle Forum. With Social Security numbers, he says, federal officials would have been able to link up different databases to gain access to more complete information about individuals.
Recognizing the sensitivity of using Social Security numbers, researchers at the statistics center recently ruled out using them and are considering assigning students a 14-digit “bar code” to identify them.
Rash of Security Breaches
But not including Social Security numbers eliminates only one of Mr. Ostrolenk’s concerns. He is dubious of the department’s claims that it will be able to keep the data secure. Over the last year, a rash of security breaches at universities, data brokers such as LexisNexis and ChoicePoint, and some federal agencies has left more than a million people at risk of identity theft. (See article on Page A35.)
“I think we know from recent examples that information supposedly protected by the government and private enterprise is not necessarily protected well,” he says. “I don’t feel comfortable with the government securing that data, or protecting it from misuse.”
In addition to his work for the Eagle Forum, Mr. Ostrolenk is the national director of the Liberty Coalition, which is made of privacy-rights organizations across the political spectrum, including conservative groups like the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms and liberal ones like the American Civil Liberties Union.
He says the database proposal will be at the top of the coalition’s agenda when it meets this week. “I think there’s enough concern about these databases and privacy issues, as well as security concerns, that both Republicans and Democrats will oppose the proposal,” he says.
Moving Forward?
Whether Mr. Boehner, the House education-committee chairman, supports or opposes the unit-record proposal may ultimately hinge on his political aspirations, several Republican-leaning higher-education lobbyists say.
It has been widely reported that Mr. Boehner has been angling to return to a position in the House leadership, where he served from 1995 to 1998 while Newt Gingrich of Georgia was speaker of the House. In fact, there has been much speculation that he is positioning himself to be a candidate to replace Rep. Tom DeLay as House majority leader if the Texan is forced to relinquish his post due to allegations of ethical improprieties.
Mr. Boehner has not discussed his plans, and his aides say that his attention is focused on the work of the education committee.
Mr. Boehner is a pragmatist, the Republican lobbyists say, and would not want to alienate the conservative wing of the party by supporting the database proposal, as he will need that wing’s backing to retake a leadership position.
Uncertainty in the Senate
The proposal’s prospects in the Senate are less clear. Sen. Michael B. Enzi, the Wyoming Republican who as chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee will be in charge of drafting that chamber’s version of legislation to reauthorize the Higher Education Act, is an accountability hawk. But one third of the panel’s senators are from the Northeast, and they tend to be protective of the interests of the private colleges and universities that play such a large role in their states. In addition, the conservative privacy-rights groups will be looking to their allies on the committee -- such as Sen. Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican -- to fight the plan.
Over all, several college lobbyists and political observers say, the proposal won’t move forward unless someone champions it.
For now, lobbyists are waiting to see if the Bush administration gets behind it. So far, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has not shown her hand.
“The future of the unit-record proposal most likely rests with the education secretary,” says Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education. “Absent her strong support, I don’t think the idea will go any further.”
2 WAYS TO TRACK STUDENT DATA
The U.S. Education Department is considering a proposal to begin tracking the educational progress of every college student as part of an overhaul of the database it uses to calculate higher-education statistics.
CURRENT SYSTEM
Information that colleges report to the Education Department in summary form:
- Enrollment figures of full- and part-time students, broken down by level of study and by race, ethnicity, and gender
- Number of degrees awarded each year, broken down by race, ethnicity, and gender of recipient and by field of study
- The percentage of full-time, first-time students who receive financial aid in a given year, and the average amount they receive by type, such as federal grants, federal loans, state grants, and institutional aid
- The percentage of full-time students in a given class who entered as freshmen and graduated within six years
- The amount of money colleges charge each year in tuition and fees, room and board, books and supplies, and other expenses
PROPOSED SYSTEM
Information that colleges would report to the Education Department about each student:
- Name of student, Social Security number or other type of identifier, address, date of birth, gender, race, ethnicity, and citizenship
- Academic major and degree plan
- High-school graduation date
- Start and end date at the college, and, if a transfer student, date of transfer
- Number of courses taken and credits earned
- Academic level (undergraduate, graduate, or professional-school)
- Tuition and fees charged and total cost of attendance
- In-state or out-of-state, full- or part-time student
- Dependency status
- Financial aid received, broken down by federal, state, and institutional grants and federal or private student loans
- Degree granted and date
SOURCE: U.S. Education Department
http://chronicle.com Section: Government & Politics Volume 51, Issue 35, Page A1