> a lot of data sharing is driven by the misguided desire to control (that is, to centralize power), whether it be teachers, students, or administrators, not for actual educational outcomes, despite the latter being the nominal impetus.

I have yet to see this occur. instead, it's all about bureaucratic convenience. why hire more people for Student Transportation to keep bus routes straight, and deal with printing out & distributing paper passenger lists to bus drivers, etc. etc., when you could use a piece of software to handle it all for you? nobody at the bureaucratic levels we're talking about here care about hoarding personal information for power or centralization or anything like that, it's purely for convenience and streamlining of bureaucracy.

one might say, ok, sure, but why does it have to be a third-party SaaS that you're SFTPing data back and forth with, why can't it just be a traditional piece of software that you install and manage locally? again: convenience, for all involved. that's one less thing for our sysadmins to worry about dealing with, and when you get enough of these things then you'll need to hire and retain more sysadmins (who we're frequently cycling through as is due to failure to compete with corporate salaries). the software developers of the third-party bus routing software don't have to worry about platform compatibility if the platform they're targeting is the web. parents can easily log into the website to see their child's bus routes and if they're delayed or whatever (apparently this is a real thing real parents demand...). but also, hey, we're already using Office 365, so "what's a few more SaaS solutions to problems we have, at this point?"

what I'm getting at here is the rise of SaaS and the fall of self-hosted solutions to things like this is pervasive everywhere in the corporate world, so if you don't want your tax money "wasted" on even keeping school district student data in-house and secure, this is the world we have to live with now. I'm not saying it doesn't suck ass, another piece of software we replaced is all web-based (albeit locally-hosted) and strictly inferior to the end-of-life Java-based software it is replacing. software kinda just keeps getting worse, and the further stratification of everything into SaaS is definitely not good in the long run. but... that's the current state of things everywhere, so why should government be any different?

if this bothers you about public schooling in particular, then the solution (which I'll likely be doing, but not for this reason) is homeschooling your kids. then their data is only stored in the district database and only transmitted to and from the state and local governments, for reporting purposes.

but more broadly speaking, what's the use in calling out governments transmitting personal information to corporations when corporations are already taking so much of your data themselves? I bought my fiancée a hat with a soda logo on it last week and she was getting ads for that specific soda the next day. how it happened, I have no idea. shortly after I moved back to my hometown, I picked up some groceries for my mom using her credit card, including a can of Red Bull I got for myself, the first I'd had in months. later that day, ad for Red Bull on my social feeds, first I'd seen... in months. whenever I buy booze, I get (different) booze ads on Twitter for days—when I don't buy any booze for awhile, the ads stop.

there's already so much personal information being trafficked between corporations everywhere without our consent, what makes the government sending it to corporations for legitimate purposes so specifically offensive? maybe I'm being too cynical but it seems like the genie's just kind of out of the bottle now for personal data in general. TFA is sticking a finger in one of many finger-sized holes in the hull of a ship which is sinking mostly not due to the finger-sized holes but to the person-sized ones that we're just kinda ignoring.