The majority of children go to public school in America, to which these schools are "free" because they are paid for by the tax dollars of the residents of a given community. Public schools should be accountable to the residents of that community, and in particular, to the parents and the actual children that attend the school and this should be preeminent over all other issues. This means, rather than the data that is being collected about students being controlled, accessed, and in the hands of governmental authorities -- that instead, it is the parents and to a lesser extent, the actual students, that should have primary access to this vital information. That is to say, while it appears fair for schools to keep a database of actual grades, attendance records, test scores, extracurricular school activities, and disciplinary actions, each one of these records, each one of these events, should be available at will, to the parents. Further to the cause, data that represents student's racial characteristics, family situation, height, weight, religion, income of family, address, siblings, medical, prescription drugs, and so forth should be handled in such a manner that no student, ever, should have this information available to be sold, borrowed, or utilized by any governmental agency or private company that would allow these agencies to monitor students and be identified by their real actual name. While there might be some valid reason why this personal information needs to be correlated and analyzed in the first place, each student's real ID should be protected, and this primary directive should be inviolable.
In actual fact, in today's society, to which everything is being digitized, and with the understanding that information is power, government agencies as well as private companies absolutely love being able to access pertinent and actionable data, especially in regards to students from ages five to eighteen, which, no doubt, would allow these entities inside information as to how to exploit such knowledge to their advantage at the expense of the actual students themselves. There are two basic things that are being lost in all of this unnecessary and intrusive data acquisition: to which the first, is that schools are there to actually teach, and students are there to actually learn and to think. The second basic thing is that these students are young, impressionable, mistake prone, decision challenged, and vulnerable, to which they should be allowed to grow up in an environment that is not constantly monitoring, and digitizing their every activity, good or bad.
Schools should not be seen as a battleground, they should instead be seen as a sanctuary, and as an opportunity for all that attend to learn at a minimum the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, along with core moral values. In actual fact, the testing of students is for their benefit, their attendance record and behavior is for their benefit, their interaction with other students and teachers is for their benefit, the school itself and all that it contains, is for their benefit. When a school system becomes not a vessel for learning, but instead a tool for the indoctrination of and for the benefit of the State by providing massive pertinent data for manipulation and exploitation of and on behalf of private enterprise or State, than schools have failed this country, their parents, and most importantly, their children.