High Court Rules Against Student Privacy Case

WASHINGTON — Schoolteachers who have students grade their fellow pupils’ papers in class need not fear they are violating federal privacy laws, the Supreme Court said Tuesday.

In a 9-0 ruling, the justices said the privacy law was intended to protect the kind of education records that are “kept in a filing cabinet in a records room or on a permanent secure database,” not the grades on a classroom paper.

It would make for a shocking change in the law, said Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, if thousands of ordinary classroom teachers were subject to being sued by children or their parents simply because they put “a happy face, a gold star or a disapproving remark on a classroom assignment.”

The justices said they were surprised that such a case ever made it to the Supreme Court.

It did so, however, because an Oklahoma mother won a favorable ruling in her lawsuit against her children’s school district.

Krista Falvo, who lives in a Tulsa suburb, objected because her children’s teachers had the pupils grade each other’s homework and tests in class. They went over correct and incorrect answers, and the teachers often had pupils call out the grade of the paper they were grading.

She claimed that her children were at times “severely embarrassed” by the comments made by others. She complained to the school board and urged it to adopt a policy forbidding this peer grading, or at least to take steps to protect the privacy of individual students.

When the board refused, she filed a lawsuit under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, a measure that shields “education records, files and documents” relating to individual students.

It is not clear precisely what this law was intended to protect, or indeed whether anyone has a right to sue schools or colleges over alleged violations.

In Tuesday’s opinion, Kennedy said he and his colleagues were not deciding whether parents such as Falvo have a right to sue. That question will be considered in April in a university case.

Nonetheless, the issue reached the high court because the U.S. Court of Appeals in Denver sided with Falvo and ruled that because classroom grades are a type of educational record, the privacy law forbids their disclosure.

Without spending a long time on this assignment, Kennedy said he was quite confident that Congress did not mean to regulate the handling of classroom assignments.

The law seems to say that “education records are institutional records kept by a single central custodian, such as a registrar, not individual assignments handled by many student graders in their separate classrooms,” he wrote in the case of Owasso Independent School District vs. Falvo, 00-1073.

The National School Boards Assn. applauded the ruling.

“This opinion is clearly based on a common-sense reading of the statute,” said Julie Underwood, the association’s general counsel. “A contrary ruling would have turned a widely used practice into a legal nightmare.”