That's an unreasonable restriction and I expect the ACLU to win this.
You can’t pitch a research project and then go rouge and do whatever with the data.
It looks like the state is interpreting that use of student data as part of the lawsuit to ve outside the scope of the prior approvals, therefore they are preventing Sean and Tom from using the data during the their testimony.
Nothing prevents the defense to subpoena the same data and have them use it for their testimony.
I am not a crazy disciple of the 1A but that seems pretty clearly to be something the government should not be able to do. Couldn't the government just slip that language into any of their FOIA agreements etc?
It would be a very different situation for a non-government actor to have the clause.
Very scummy by government.
That's not what this case is about. The California Department of Education is not claiming that Thomas Dee misused confidential data. The CDE said that their contract with Dee means that he cannot testify against them or participate in an unrelated case against them.
ACLU is often manipulative in how these stories are framed. They are an advocacy group advocating for their priorities.
If the headline was “Researchers publish confidential student data through litigation filings”, the crowd here would be pearl clutching about that. You may recall years ago when NYC released taxi data on their open data platform, that data let you basically track the movements of frequent taxi users.
The other question is… why don’t the researchers file a FOIA, which has no restrictions.
Looking at the details, it seems that this cannot be a blanket restriction, since a judge could compell you to provide testimony. [0] At that point it would not matter what the contract said.
Why do you expect the ACLU to win?
(not arguing. Genuinely curious.)
It also goes beyond K-12. Quite a few parents try to get their children’s college grades and run smack into this law.
How about data pertaining to your kids?
Any Joe Taxpayer doesn’t have a right to walk in and demand any data they want from a government department. That’s entirely entirely reasonable. Anonymising data isn’t nearly as easy as a passer-by with “faker.fake_name()” may think it is.
It's very possible to aggregate and anonymize (remove PII); aggregate the records by zipcode, anonymized school ID, school district, grade-level of student, age of student, educational attainment, etc.
You agree that's possible, FOIA-compliant and has been done already for decades? Like how Census data is made public (the Census also uses fuzzing to prevent reverse-engineering to individuals, esp. in tracts with small populations).
> Any Joe Taxpayer doesn’t have a right to walk in and demand any data they want from a government department.
Red herring: the CDE is not trying in good faith to define what level of aggregated data would be sufficiently anonymous; they're blanket-opposing legitimate public access to this data (even highly aggregated) via the researchers being allowed to testify in court.
> How about data pertaining to your kids?
Absolutely can and should be disclosed, in aggregate. Otherwise you have a public entity spending $128.5 billion taxpayer money that is not performing so well, violating constitutional disclosure requirements, gotten worse since 2020, lost students to homeschooling [0] and move-aways. In any case, this isn't fodder for an opinion poll, it's what the Constitution says.
[0]: https://www.montereyherald.com/2023/06/04/three-years-after-...