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From: jod@ccat.sas.upenn.edu (James J. O'Donnell)
Message-Id: <200107082326.f68NQmU28856@ccat.sas.upenn.edu>
Subject: Re: leading edge of madness
To: classics@u.washington.edu
Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 19:26:47 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <006601c10803$e9bd35a0$b6f7b3d1@earthlink.net> from "James Mixon" at Jul 8, 2001 04:15:42 pm
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Very helpful URL (see below).  Courts are not often mad, just obsessive. 
In this case, if you dig down, you will find that the touchstone point is
not that the other students adjudge grades or call them out loud, but that
they later become "educational records": 

	The undisputed evidence indicates that at least some grades which
	students give one another and report to the teacher are then
	recorded in the teacher's grade book. At that later time when the
	grades are placed in the teacher's grade book, they are
	"maintained . . .  by a person acting for [an educational] agency
	or institution" and constitute "education records." 

I'm happy to involve students in the conversation about their evaluation
of their own and others' work, but am disinclined to carry this to the
point of having them give "grades" and would be very uncomfortable with a
teacher who took student-assigned grades and entered them, unverified, in
a grade book.  At any rate, the reading of FERPA that excludes this
practice seems quite within the bounds of reason.  (Note that the court
deliberately rejected a claim to disallow the practice on grounds of
violating a Fourteenth Amendment right of privacy.) 

Jim O'Donnell
Classics, U. of Penn
jod@ccat.sas.upenn.edu


James Mixon wrote:
> 
> You can read the 10th Circuit Court's opinion in Falvo v. Owasso Independent
> School District at:
> 
> http://laws.findlaw.com/10th/995130.html
> 
> James Mixon
> 
.