Stephanie Simon

Moms and dads from across the political spectrum have mobilized into an unexpected political force in recent months to fight the data mining of their children.

In a frenzy of activity, they’ve catapulted student privacy -- issue that was barely on anyone’s radar up until now -- to prominence in statehouses from New York to Florida to Wyoming.

Now, parents are rallying against another perceived threat: huge state databases being built to track children for more than two decades, from as early as infancy through the start of their careers. Promoted by the Obama Administration, the databases are being built in nearly every state at a total cost of well over $1 billion. They are intended to store intimate details on tens of millions of children and young adults -- identified by name, birth date, address and even, in some cases, Social Security number -- to help officials pinpoint the education system’s strengths and weaknesses and craft public policy accordingly.

“Every parent I’ve talked to has been horrified,” said Leonie Haimson, a New York mother who is organizing a national Parent Coalition for Student Privacy. “We just don’t want our kids tracked from cradle to grave.” Eager to support technological innovation and wary of new regulations, Congress has taken little notice of parent concerns. But state legislators have raced to respond. Since January, 14 states have enacted stricter student privacy protections, often with overwhelming bipartisan support, and more are likely on the way.

The National Security Agency has nothing on the education technology startup known as Knewton. The data analytics firm has peered into the brains of more than 4 million students across the country.

By monitoring every mouse click, every keystroke and every split-second hesitation as children work through digital textbooks, Knewton is able to find out not just what individual kids know, but how they think. It can tell who has trouble focusing on science before lunch -- and who will struggle with fractions. Even as Congress moves to rein in the National Security Agency, private-sector data mining has galloped forward -- perhaps nowhere faster than in education. Both Republicans and Democrats have embraced the practice.

And the Obama Administration has encouraged it, even relaxing federal privacy law to allow school districts to share student data more widely. The goal is to identify potential problems early and to help kids surmount them. But the data revolution has also put heaps of intimate information about school children in the hands of private companies -- where it is highly vulnerable to being shared, sold or mined for profit.