A Real Tech President Would Implant a Tracking Chip in Your Kid
BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, August 9 2007
Here's something else that Hillary Clinton said at Yearly Kos, something that had nothing to do with lobbyists but was a similiar peek into her governing psyche. In her morning breakout session, Clinton warmed my little geek heart with her offhanded praise for the idea of electronic school records. It was a reminder that a true Tech President would see beyond just a free and open Internet to a fleshed-out vision of how hard a wired government and nation could rock.
As a question of policy, electronic school records have a lot going for it. A standardized format for education records would mean that American students could carry their school histories with them. That's a good thing for kids who move from school to school a lot, like immigrant and migrant children. And a truly smart school system could use that data to deliver a better educational product. They could track individual student performance, to see that Mary is quite good with numbers and should be pushed towards a math-heavy track. They could data mine in the aggregate, to see that while their freshmen and sophomores are flourishing in their science classes, those same students start to struggle in the science by the time they reach junior year.
Electronic school records avoid many of the problems that have plagued the implementation of electronic medical records. For one thing, the data in the average's student's school file is going to be less invasive than that in the average patient's medical record. Schools come with a federal driver for compliance that's lacking in the hodgepodge that is the American medical system, in the form of the Department of Education. And while it's somewhat scary to consider entrusting the records of all the nation's school-age children to a federal agency, can you think of a good reason that a system like this can't begin and end at developing a standardized format for records? Each kid's personalized information never has to travel beyond the walls of the school he's enrolled in or the school he hopes to get into. For the system to pass civil liberties muster, the kid (or rather, her parents) would need to own the data. That part's important.
(The "tracking chip" mentioned in the title of this post is, I hope, an obvious exaggeration. Nobody would want that, except maybe...nevermind -- this is a blessedly non-partisan blog.)
With the caveat that I've been thinking through the policy implications of electronic school records for all of about a day and a half, my first read is that it's a clever use of technology that (a) is doable and (b) would actually make the lives of Americans demonstrably better than they were before.
But the point isn't that it's a good policy. It might, in final analysis, be a dumb idea. But the point is that it's bold thinking firmly rooted in an understanding of how technology can be a force for concrete, tangible good. And in my mind, if you're a presidential candidate today, I can't believe that yours will be a Tech Presidency if you don't start to demonstrate soon that you get the power of tech down to your bones.