For Immediate Release, Monday Aug 26, 2019

On Friday Governor Pritzker signed PA 101-0516 (HB3606), an update to Illinois’ Student Online Personal Protection Act (SOPPA) into law. The legislation, one of the most far-reaching student data protection laws in the country, will provide much greater transparency and control to parents on how schools, vendors and the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) are collecting and using data from public school students from preschool through 12th grade.

Last month, assessment giant Pearson began notifying 13,000 schools and universities of a massive data breach involving their AIMSweb product.

We now know that at least ten Illinois school districts including tens of thousands of IL students data were affected by this breach. (We're keeping a running list of reports here.)

In May 2018, a bill was introduced in the IL Senate that would have had the IL State Board of Education administer a survey of all high school juniors in conjunction with the administration of the state test and share the survey data with all public institutions of higher education in Illinois. After opposition from RYH Action, the bill was amended instead to set up a taskforce to study this type of data sharing (PA 100-1007).

The federal Commission on Evidence-based Policy held its Midwest Hearing in Chicago on January 5, 2016. Raise Your Hand Action's co-executive director Cassie Creswell testified at the hearing on behalf of Raise Your Hand Action and the national group Parent Coalition for Student Privacy.