WISEdash Public Portal: Data Redaction and Student Privacy

Why are data for some student groups not reported?

The privacy of our students is protected by Federal law, State statutes and DPI policy.  Care is taken to avoid disclosure of confidential information about small groups of students, so there is not any direct or indirect disclosure of an individual student.  The process of masking the data displayed (putting an asterisk * in place of the actual number) to protect student privacy is called redaction.

• DIRECT DISCLOSURE. Reveals a student's identity and must be avoided by redacting the data when the number of students in the specific group is small.
  For example, if we are reporting dropouts for Hispanic students in a school and there are a small number of Hispanic students at the school, we would redact (mask) the data displayed.
• INDIRECT DISCLOSURE. Reveals a student's identity based on secondary information and must be avoided by redacting the data when data from a larger group can reveal a small group of students.
  For example, when data are reported BOTH for all students in a group (example, students enrolled in grade 3) AND FOR a large subset of this group (example: students without disabilities in grade 3), leaving only a small subset (example: students with disabilities in grade 3) not reported. The data about larger groups are sometimes not reported to avoid possible indirect disclosure of confidential information about the smaller group.

What does redaction look like in a WISEdash graph?

See the Graphs with No Data webpage for examples.

For more information on how DPI protects student privacy, see this page:

Student Data Privacy at DPI