Every Child Achieves Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. HATCH. Madam President, I rise in support of an amendment I have offered along with my friend, the junior Senator from Massachusetts. This amendment advances an important priority: protecting student privacy in an era of vast data collection and tenuous security protections.

Advances in education technology are revolutionizing the way students learn in today's classroom. Going forward, it is important to balance the need for innovation to allow students to take advantage of the new learning tools with the need to make sure children's private information is protected. We must also ensure continuing to improve education through research, while not necessarily allowing researchers and their employers access to sensitive data.

To this end, our amendment sets up a commission to come back with recommendations for how to update our outdated Federal education privacy law. The commission's membership consists of experts, parents, teachers, technology professionals, researchers, and State officials--a broad array of leaders capable of providing diverse perspectives on these issues. Within 270 days, the commission is required to report to Congress on the current mechanisms for transparency, parental involvement, research usage, and third-party vendor usage as well as provide recommendations on how to improve the law to better protect students. As we seek to identify the best ways of protecting student data, this commission will serve to outline some commonsense and effective options for reform that we ought to consider.

This amendment has received support from a wide variety of organizations from Microsoft to the National PTA to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, demonstrating how this is a commonsense, bipartisan idea that we can all support. I urge my colleagues to support this important innovation.

I yield the floor.

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