By Lindsay Street, Statehouse correspondent | State officials and a key lawmaker say it may not be too late to rescue a proposed state data warehouse to collect, store and access data on South Carolina students from kindergarten into their employment years. But for now, privacy concerns have shelved the plan.
The warehouse sought to create a single digital hub where multiple state agencies would contribute data on South Carolina citizens, everything from third-grade reading evaluations to driving records. In turn, agencies using the warehouse and others could access data to assess value and efficiency of the state’s education system in terms of workforce readiness.
Gov. Henry McMaster vetoed a budget proviso establishing the warehouse on July 5. But he called the idea “meritorious.”
“South Carolina’s workforce requirements are urgent and ongoing, and I thank the General Assembly for endeavoring to resolve the problem,” McMaster wrote in his veto message. But he wanted lawmakers to go “back to the drawing board” over privacy concerns.
If lawmakers don’t override McMaster’s veto, then legislation is imminent when session begins in January, S.C. House Ways and Means Committee Chair Brian White, R-Anderson, told Statehouse Report.
“The data warehouse would give South Carolina’s workforce pipeline stakeholders another tool in the arsenal to address critical workforce needs,” White said. “You got to have the data if you’re spending the money doing the training. You got to make sure we’re getting the outcomes with the public money.”
Background
The 2018-19 budget proviso was inserted by White after two years of work by about 20 state agencies.
Under the S.C. Department of Commerce, the S.C. Coordinating Council for Workforce Development (CCWD) began a Data Sharing Committee that has met since November 2016. The latest meeting was June 26.
According to documents obtained by Statehouse Report, agencies with representatives at meetings included the state departments of Commerce, Administration, Education, Revenue, Transportation, Employment and Workforce, Motor Vehicles, and Health and Environmental Control, as well as the state Education Oversight Committee,, Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Office, S.C. First Steps, the Commission on Higher Education, the S.C. Technical College System, multiple universities, the S.C. Power Team, the S.C. Labor, Licensing and Review, and Able SC.
Elisabeth Kovacs, who oversees CCWD as Commerce’s deputy director of workforce development, described the proviso as “a branch to get us going on the process” and that it was
“only intended to be a bridge, and the coordinating council (created in the proviso) will review the legislation and recommend it for next session.”
‘A real star’
South Carolina’s effort to create a workforce data warehouse is part of a national trend focused on using data sharing for workforce development. Under then-Gov. Mike Pence, Indiana was one of the first in the nation to create an accessible database that aligns education goals with workforce development. Now, the Trump administration has made workforce development a key mantra, such as when President Donald Trump visited Boeing South Carolina’s plant earlier this month.
South Carolina was one of five states working with the national nonprofit Center for Regional Economic Competitiveness (CREC) on creating education-and-workforce databases.
“There is a movement afoot of promoting evidence based policy at the national level,” CREC CEO Ken Poole told Statehouse Report.
Center officials said South Carolina offered “the most ambitious plan.”
“South Carolina was a real star in our effort,” CREC senior research fellow Marty Romitti said. “South Carolina had a lot of assets in place.”
Those assets included a legislative mandate to compile a list of workforce development programs and an existing, 15-year-old data warehouse. Housed under the S.C. Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Office (RFA), the existing digital warehouse holds medical information that is accessible by multiple state agencies.
“We were in an advantage because the infrastructure is already here,” Kovacs said. She added that also meant zero-cost to taxpayers in the proviso.
The state’s existing data warehouse was created in the 2002-03 budget to provide support to state departments of Health and Human Services, and Social Services and other agencies as needed, according to the RFA. Like the proposed education-workforce database, the health database does not contain any new information, but offers an easier way of accessing the information.
This month, the RFA gained recognition from the National Governors Association for maintaining “an integrated data system” that offers a “promising example” of data use.
Privacy concerns
The new data warehouse proviso cleared the House and Senate with no debate. But a week prior to McMaster’s veto of the proviso, the S.C. Policy Council brought the data warehouse to light in its publication The Nerve.
The proviso set off alarm bells for SCPC President Ashley Landess for two reasons. First were the privacy concerns outlined by McMaster and the potential for hacking. And second, Landess questioned whether S.C. public education should be “catering” to the needs of private industry, bucking a trend among politicians and bureaucrats seeking to better align public education with workforce needs. Landess also added that the warehouse could spell the beginning of tracking individual citizens.
McMaster summed up concerns about the warehouse in this statement:
“Under this provision state agencies would be required to turn over the personal information of South Carolina citizens for any reason or no reason at all. This proviso provides no official oversight for the decisions made by the data warehouse committee, no requirement that citizens consent to their personal information being released and quite frankly no one to say ‘no’ or ‘pull the plug’ before it’s too late.”
Privacy professor Allyson Haynes Stuart of the Charleston School of Law said concerns over data sharing systems and individual privacy were to be expected.
“They’re supposed to track people kindergarten through the workforce and, not surprisingly, they have raised a lot of red flags,” she told Statehouse Report. “There’s no limitation on the types of information that is gathered here.”
And that data can be shared with multiple agencies, exposing it to hacking weaknesses, but also with no clear limitation on who can access the data, Stuart said.
Kovacs said that the agencies worked very carefully with attorneys and economists to word the proviso, keeping in mind that sensitive data is being housed there. She said that while there were no outside privacy experts consulted for drafting the proviso, there were state agencies’ personnel who are privacy officers or data management personnel.
Moving forward
Stuart said the proviso needs work and lawmakers should consider the following for drafting legislation to make privacy stronger:
- Be more specific about the purposes for gathering the data and how the data is obtained;
- Outline exactly who can access the information;
- Codify a regular audit; and,
- Allow individuals to see what information is collected about them.
Still, Stuart called the warehouse a good idea.
“They want to improve student outcomes and make sure South Carolina is competitive in the education and workforce field, and that is a laudable goal but we need to make sure in fulfilling that goal we don’t take steps that will violate privacy and cause even more damage,” she said.
But Landess said no amount of privacy-protection promises would make the warehouse a good idea.
“It’s a bunch of politicians and well-meaning bureaucrats that have decided they need to take control of education and make sure these children get a job,” she said.
White said he “would hope so” that his fellow lawmakers would overturn the veto, which could happen as soon as September when General Assembly leaders have said they will address budget vetoes.
“We talked to some of them. It obviously passed in the budget on the floor, so I think a lot of us out there already understand it,” White said. “Without access to these data, it will be much more difficult to ensure that education and training programs are delivering the skills necessary to fill current and anticipated needs.”
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We Can Do Better, South Carolina!
These data are too valuable not to be saved.
Longitudinal data or data collected over time provides leads about causality and sequencing of biological events and treatment effectiveness in the health arena. This is why the USA is embarking on a massive longitudinal health data study spanning decades as that is where the mother lode of health treatments can come from.
https://pop.umn.edu/sites/pop.umn.edu/files/2.working_paper17.pdf
These data are too valuable not to be well protected.
There are ways to protect data using software technology design without the need of one controlling entity to surrender the safeguards and interests of the collectors and those whose data are collected. Application software can make a prearranged “call” to each of the controlling institution’s data stores “requesting” the particular data field, for the particular individual, so that analyses can be run and the resulting summarizing statistics developed (correlation, variance, Chi Square, Multiple R, etc.) followed by the researcher’s analysis, distribution of the findings and eventual expression into informed policy predicated on real world data and not some hair brained spurious theories about the topic. The College of Charleston has a Data Science Program and their expertise needs to be used. Bring them in on this question. http://datascience.cofc.edu.
Facebook exemplifies what can go wrong.
Facebook was negligent, pecuniary and self-serving when it gave user data without protections that were available then. This was a management policy failure. It was not rocket science complicated; it was lack of caring about societal responsibilities and awareness of the concept among Facebook’s executives. The endorsement of darkness that destruction provides throws out the immensely important learning, where the whole is more valuable that the more focused parts.
These valuable data can be protected.
The Institutional Review Board (IRB) is an appropriately constituted group within each of the data holding entities can formally designated to review and monitor biomedical, social and psychological research involving human subjects. An IRB has the authority to approve, require modifications in (to secure approval), or disapprove research. This group review serves an important role in the protection of the rights and welfare of human research subjects and their data. Appropriate steps are taken to protect the rights and welfare of humans participating as subjects in the research. To accomplish this purpose, IRBs use a group process to review research protocols and related materials to ensure protection of the rights and welfare of human subjects of research. The MUSC, Office of Research Integrity should be contacted about the IRB process and the protections it provides. http://academicdepartments.musc.edu/research/ori/
Destruction of valuable data is not the way to ensure privacy in this case. This is not a social media event and should not be framed in that manner.