An amendment added to a major education bill Wednesday would make it harder for marketers to obtain data about schoolchildren. The measure would require public schools to get parental consent before students could participate in education-related market research programs.
Rep. George Miller (D-CA) said he proposed the amendment in response to the growing number of commercial contracts with public schools requiring students to disclose personal information.
He pointed to a recent cable television’s station survey of children in a New Jersey school; a cereal company’s use of elementary school children in Massachusetts to test a new type of breakfast food; and a company that, after providing free computers to a California school district, monitored the students’ Web-browsing habits while obtaining voluminous personal information about them.
“My bill simply makes it clear that if students are going to be asked to divulge personal information to people who plan to profit from it, [their] parents should be involved,” Miller said, in a statement. “If parents do not want their children to be objects of market research firms while in school, they should have the right to say no,” he added.
The Direct Marketing Association “will try to have that amendment stricken from the bill before it reaches the House floor,” Richard A. Barton, the DMA’s senior vice president, Congressional Matters, told DIRECT Newsline.
Miller’s amendment, he explained, “actually is an opt-in and does not exclude aggregate non-personal information” that is obtained quite often from school authorities and administrations.
The National Association of School Boards and the National Association of Publishers are among a number of other groups also opposing the Miller amendment.
The House Education Committee voted 26-20 to add the measure to the Education Opportunities to Protect and Invest in our Nation’s Students Act. Under the bill, the federal government would fund a broad array of educational programs, including anti-drug and anti-violence programs.
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