The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA or the Buckley Amendment) is a United States federal law.
It gave students access to their education records, an opportunity to seek to have the records amended, and some control over the disclosure of information from the records. With several exceptions, schools must have a student's consent prior to the disclosure of education records. The law only applies to educational agencies and institutions that receive funding under a program administered by the U.S. Department of Education.
Examples of situations affected by FERPA include school employees divulging information to anyone other than the student about the student's grades or behavior, and school work posted on a bulletin board with a grade. Generally, schools must have written permission from the parent or eligible student in order to release any information from a student's education record.
This privacy policy also governs how state agencies transmit testing data to federal agencies. For example see Education Data Network.
This US federal law also gave students 18 years old or older, or students of any age if enrolled in any post-secondary educational institution, the right of privacy regarding grades, enrollment, and even billing information, unless the school has specific permission from the student to share that specific type of information with the parent.
The law allowed students who apply to an educational institution such as graduate school permission to view recommendations submitted by others as part of the application. However, on standard application forms, students are given the option to waive this right.
FERPA specifically excluded employees of an educational institution if they are not students.
The act is also referred to as the Buckley Amendment, for one of its proponents, Senator James L. Buckley of New York.
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—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“Class is rarely talked about in the United States; nowhere is there a more intense silence about the reality of class differences than in educational settings.”
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