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FYI: Students With Disabilities Sue ACT Over Release of Personal Information


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From EdWeek http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/high_school_and_beyond/2018/08/students_with_disabilities_sue_act_over_release_of_personal_information.html

”A group of college-bound students with special needs and their parents filed suit Monday against ACT Inc., claiming the the testmaker illegally disclosed to colleges that they have disabilities.

The class action suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, challenges the way the Iowa-based company uses information about students with disabilities

...

ACT and the College Board, which makes the SAT, agreed years ago to stop flagging the test scores of students who take the exam with accommodations, after that practice drew widespread criticism. 

But the new lawsuit says that the version of the score report that ACT sends to colleges shows information about disabilities, while the version that goes to students and their high schools does not.

...

The students—from families in California, Colorado and Nevada—claim that their work prospects could be affected, also, because the data report created by ACT's WorkKeys assessment—a popular career-readiness test—suggests that they took that exam with accommodations. "Tens of thousands of employers may have access to this data at any given time," the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit describes how ACT's information-sharing practices played out for the students. Halie Bloom, who lives in Newport Beach, Calif., graduated from high school this past spring. Because of attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder and a reading disability, she's had an individualized education plan, or IEP, since middle school.

Bloom took the ACT several times with approved accommodations. ACT acquired the information about her disability from her test-registration process. The score reports it sent to the colleges she requested included a notation that she had a "learning or cognitive disability."

Bloom will attend the University of Arizona in the fall. But she believes that colleges and scholarship organizations may have declined to consider her after ACT shared her disability status with them.”

 

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