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This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year. Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.

This story might sound like a fluke, maybe it sounds like an abnormality. Because it isn’t the kind of story we often read about in the newspapers or hear about on TV. Certainly not the way that headlines about gun violence and bullying grab our attention. That’s what makes this topic a data desert. There is, in fact, no way of knowing how many other teachers there are out there, with stories like this one and how many of them don’t have the support they need. Our requests for this data, from state departments of education in all 50 states, turned up a broken recording system.

We assumed that since school shootings are such a known public safety concern there would be really detailed data on this. We figured schools would keep a number, report that to the state department of ed, and then when we made our records request, we could see a spreadsheet of that data. But, that’s not a reality.

To untangle the complex web of FERPA, we really have to start in the United States Capitol, in 1974. A Junior Senator from New York named James Buckley, had an idea to give parents and students better access to school records. He was primarily concerned that schools were keeping secret information about student behavior, and potentially sharing it with law enforcement and other outsiders without the parents’ consent. You know how you see in movies sometimes, big ideas that start with a couple of people making notes on the back of a napkin. Well, in the halls of congress, urban legend is that, that’s pretty much how FERPA was born, too.

Two court cases, which have been meandering through the system for more than four years now, are challenging a common claim that universities cannot share the outcomes or punishments given in sexual misconduct investigations because doing so would violate a Federal Student Privacy Law called FERPA.

This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year. Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.

This story might sound like a fluke, maybe it sounds like an abnormality. Because it isn’t the kind of story we often read about in the newspapers or hear about on TV. Certainly not the way that headlines about gun violence and bullying grab our attention. That’s what makes this topic a data desert. There is, in fact, no way of knowing how many other teachers there are out there, with stories like this one and how many of them don’t have the support they need. Our requests for this data, from state departments of education in all 50 states, turned up a broken recording system.

We assumed that since school shootings are such a known public safety concern there would be really detailed data on this. We figured schools would keep a number, report that to the state department of ed, and then when we made our records request, we could see a spreadsheet of that data. But, that’s not a reality.

To untangle the complex web of FERPA, we really have to start in the United States Capitol, in 1974. A Junior Senator from New York named James Buckley, had an idea to give parents and students better access to school records. He was primarily concerned that schools were keeping secret information about student behavior, and potentially sharing it with law enforcement and other outsiders without the parents’ consent. You know how you see in movies sometimes, big ideas that start with a couple of people making notes on the back of a napkin. Well, in the halls of congress, urban legend is that, that’s pretty much how FERPA was born, too.

Two court cases, which have been meandering through the system for more than four years now, are challenging a common claim that universities cannot share the outcomes or punishments given in sexual misconduct investigations because doing so would violate a Federal Student Privacy Law called FERPA.

This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year. Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.

This story might sound like a fluke, maybe it sounds like an abnormality. Because it isn’t the kind of story we often read about in the newspapers or hear about on TV. Certainly not the way that headlines about gun violence and bullying grab our attention. That’s what makes this topic a data desert. There is, in fact, no way of knowing how many other teachers there are out there, with stories like this one and how many of them don’t have the support they need. Our requests for this data, from state departments of education in all 50 states, turned up a broken recording system.

We assumed that since school shootings are such a known public safety concern there would be really detailed data on this. We figured schools would keep a number, report that to the state department of ed, and then when we made our records request, we could see a spreadsheet of that data. But, that’s not a reality.

To untangle the complex web of FERPA, we really have to start in the United States Capitol, in 1974. A Junior Senator from New York named James Buckley, had an idea to give parents and students better access to school records. He was primarily concerned that schools were keeping secret information about student behavior, and potentially sharing it with law enforcement and other outsiders without the parents’ consent. You know how you see in movies sometimes, big ideas that start with a couple of people making notes on the back of a napkin. Well, in the halls of congress, urban legend is that, that’s pretty much how FERPA was born, too.

Two court cases, which have been meandering through the system for more than four years now, are challenging a common claim that universities cannot share the outcomes or punishments given in sexual misconduct investigations because doing so would violate a Federal Student Privacy Law called FERPA.