I have a better solution. Hold the State of California legally liable for ANY identity theft of any student in this information system, with no sovereign immunity. . .

The school districts teachers and administrators have largely hid this data for a reason, to avoid accountability for their dismal educational outcomes.
Just like the Univeristy of Texas hides the LSAT scores of their minority admissions.

in my opinion, once you enroll in a tax payer funded school, your privacy rights ( and these are really very few anyway) are pretty much gone, and should be.

You sold your privacy to feed at the tax payer funded trough.

Nothing is really secure anymore anyway, especially apparently Hillary's email.

While the identity theft issue mentioned is important; what is more important to me is that the rights of the disabled belong to the individual and their families; not some non-profit group.

"The nonprofit said it needs the information . . ."

"Needs"? Why? Just why are they claiming to take this upon themselves?

If they think someone's rights might be violated they should get out the information to the public and ask folks to come forward. Not the other way around - go digging for it.

Also, despite their name (The Concerned Parents Association) and their claims that they are/will be acting in the students' best interest I do not trust them - they are nothing but another organization that has an agenda that may not mesh with the individuals they claim they are interested in helping.

They could very well turn out to be the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing.

So, yet again, individual rights are slowly being chipped away; only this time they are going after a very vulnerable group - the disabled.

Further thought:

I would even have a problem with "opt in" being on a student enrollment form; so, this whole "opt out" not being so readily available is a huge issue to me.

I'm not in California; but, it is still an issue to me. As the saying goes:

So goes California, so goes the Nation.

I am surprised to hear this. A few years ago I took a college course and one student had come up with an extremely elegant answer to a home work assignment. In class the HW was being discussed and the student suggested that the prof just email it out to the class. The prof turned white and said he could not do that because of some law (he gave the name, I have forgot it) which I think was federal that is really protective of all student related material. He had gotten on the wrong side of that a couple times already. He suggested that if the student wanted to share the information the student could email it out himself to the class discussion list - the prof had no problem with that since the HW was already graded.

The public has a huge blind spot when it comes to privacy issues.

They say, "I have nothing to hide! If you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't have any objection!"

Idiocy.

When talking about releasing information, what this does is to let a government agency put measures in place to watch everything you do. Then, if you decide at some time in the future that you don't like what your government is doing and decide to change it, the agency can block you ahead of time.

Every generation thinks bad things cannot possibly happen to them. Cemeteries are full of such people.

Take a look at the California Concerned Parents Association's website - http://californiaconcernedparents.org/

Its sole activity is participation in a lawsuit against the state of California. The organization is evidently sponsored by a group of law firms and exists for the purpose of organizing plaintiffs in this suit.

The suit concerns claims that the state of CA has been delinquent in providing Individual Education Plans (IEP) to disabled CA students as mandated under federal law. Some of these claims incorporate unlawful discrimination, which is why they want the student dataset, to potentially unearth statistical disparities in the provision of IEPs.

Apparently the California Department of Ed has been compelled to provide them this, but not to strip out identifying student information. So some of the data they're getting has SSNs and other sensitive info.

I can't speak to the merits of their suit. IEPs are notoriously expensive to support and administer, and a common point of contention between districts and parents of disabled students.

What's worrying though is that the firms receiving this data don't seem to have made plans for its secure handling, now and into the future.

They mention that it will be transferred under the guidance of a special master, but that doesn't mean that they're competent to follow those guidelines. IT security is a specialization that I doubt most law firms are duly fit to provide.

I have a better solution. Hold the State of California legally liable for ANY identity theft of any student in this information system, with no sovereign immunity. . .

As I understand it the state tried to fight this, hold the judge, the employees of this group and their lawyers PERSONALLY libale

As "advocate" write above: This organization is just a lawsuit factory. They claim noble intentions, but they are really about filing lawsuits. The primary benefit of such lawsuits is to enrich the lawyers - if the parents see any kind of benefit, it will be more by accident than intent.

A legal requirement to provide this organization with child data? Possible, but only anonymous data. There is no excuse whatsoever for the court to allow individually identifiable data into their hands. This will be used by the organization to contact individual parents and strong-arm them into participation.

We need to attack the root of the problem: Tort reform, and reform of class action lawsuits. They simply should not be money-factories for lawyers. Of course, any reform would have to come from our legislators, most of whom are...lawyers.

Actually there is no mechanism for opting out. The form allows you to register your protest and the judge may -- or may not -- decide to consider that cause for letting parents opt out on their children's behalf. Scary stuff. That said, our little charter school in LAUSD kept every parent apprised of the lawsuit's requirements and provided each of us with a link to the form.