Valerie Strauss

When schools around the country began to close this spring because of the spread of the coronavirus, millions of students had the resources to transition to online learning — but not in Detroit (MI). Some 90 percent of the 51,000 students in the high-poverty Detroit Public Schools Community District did not have access to Internet services or the technology at home required for online learning. Teachers sent home packets of lessons on paper instead.

Parents, teachers and privacy advocates are urging a federal commission not to bend to requests to change a federal law so that a centralized federal database of students’ personal data can be established. The Education Department has plans to build a system of records that will collect detailed data on thousands of students — even though experts say there are not sufficient safeguards to protect student privacy. How President-elect Donald Trump would feel about such a database is unclear. He has criticized a strong federal role in education — and even threatened to eliminate the Education Department, but he has not made an issue of student data privacy.