Leadership is key to protecting student data privacy in 2025
In the year 2025, no one should have to be convinced that protecting data privacy matters. For education institutions, it’s really that simple of a priority--and that complicated.
Key points:
- Every privacy program needs leadership to champion the work
- Is your district safeguarding student data?
- Protecting our students: The urgency of securing education data
- For more news on data privacy, visit eSN’s IT Leadership hub
In the year 2025, no one should have to be convinced that protecting data privacy matters. For education institutions, it’s really that simple of a priority–and that complicated.
Despite the passage of over 130 state student data privacy laws, headlines about data breaches in school districts remain alarmingly common. The stakes have never been higher–and strong, top-down leadership is needed to ensure institutions understand the complex landscape and effectively protect student data.
Protecting student data privacy is top of mind for so many who are involved with and invested in the education sector–especially in an increasingly digital learning environment. Yet, for all the concern over how to best safeguard student data, there has been little examination of just what school districts are actually doing to protect student data privacy–or what types of support they need to be more successful.
Certainly, we know that data breaches in education are a pressing issue, and over time, we’ve started to better understand what districts need to help shore up their security efforts. But what about the many other factors involved in protecting student data, like the decisions districts make about what student data to collect, how to use it, how to handle it, who to share it with and how long to keep it?
For the first time, with the CoSN 2025 National Student Data Privacy Report, we have real insights into how school districts across the country are addressing their student data privacy requirements. You might be surprised by the results.
For many years, the education community–including school districts, parents, legislators, and the variety of organizations developing resources to support district privacy work–has had a concerted focus on privacy concerns related to school districts sharing student data with technology vendors. That’s absolutely important, and it should continue, but it’s also woefully inadequate.
As district edtech leaders from across the country have told us, their top concern when it comes to protecting student data privacy is effectively managing employee behavior. Challenges include being unable to 1. enforce employee-facing privacy policies; 2. mandate privacy training for staff; 3. control the influx of free and low-cost technologies into the classroom; and 4. simply not having sufficient privacy and security policies to serve as a basic foundation for student data privacy and security programs.
Thankfully, building momentum to improve student data privacy programs takes just one key ingredient: leadership.
The report’s findings reveal that student data privacy requires greater attention from leaders in state education agencies, school boards and superintendent roles. Notably, nearly 90 percent of edtech leaders say they are responsible for their school district’s student data privacy programs and rank data privacy as one of their top two priorities. Yet, 17 percent say they have never received any relevant data privacy training–and 73 percent say data privacy is not included in their job description. Moreover, 20 percent noted that lack of support from their superintendent was a barrier to improving their district’s student data privacy program.
Every privacy program in every organization needs leadership to champion the work, highlight its importance to the organization, and lead by example. In the education sector, superintendents can clear pathways for edtech leaders to improve their student data privacy program by breaking down organizational silos, clearing pathways for mandatory privacy training and technology vetting programs, enforcing policies, and partnering with their technology teams to develop new privacy and security policies.
When leadership is clear on what student data may be collected, how it will be used, shared, protected and retained, the institution operates more effectively around those core requirements. This clarity strengthens internal processes and builds fluency, making it easier to apply data privacy mandates externally as well.
At its core, privacy is not about the machines; it’s about the people. For many school districts, successful implementation of a student data privacy program may require some form of organizational change, and change management starts at the top. The rest of the work is hard enough, but once leadership has set the right tone and cleared the pathway, the rest of the road forward becomes much easier to navigate.
