Cecilia Machado: There are setbacks in the LGPD

Last week, we watched, perplexed, the withdrawal of several educational microdata, keeping only partial and limited information from the 2021 School Census and the 2020 ENEM. from the Higher Education Census and the Basic Education Assessment System (SAEB) — simply disappeared from the Inep page. For researchers using education data in their studies, tragedy was foretold. In recent years, suppression of information and denial of access to data have been recurrent under the General Law for the Protection of Personal Data (LGPD).

For example, the suppression of sex information in the 2019 SAEB represented a huge setback for gender research, considering that many of the factors responsible for the differences observed between men and women, such as unconscious biases and stereotypes, cross the entire educational trajectory of women. girls. Today, the entire history of the SAEB is unavailable, and the current disclosure of the 2021 School Census no longer includes the variables of gender and race/color that were previously disclosed, with unconvincing explanations that the disclosure of this information, without the other variables identifiers violates the LGPD.

Along the same lines, in 2019, Inep modified the anonymized code of students in the Higher Education Census databases, to prevent the same student from being monitored in different years, which makes analysis of permanence, progression and graduation in the various courses and universities in the country unfeasible. country, important for the diagnosis of many public policies that have been implemented, such as the Quota Law and the Unified Selection System (SISU). In the background, there is again the concern with the protection of personal data and the fear of the sanctions imposed by the LGPD on the managers of these data.

It is clear that the concern with the protection of sensitive information is legitimate, but complying with the LGPD in its strict form, prioritizing risks over benefits, does not come without costs for scientific knowledge and the analysis of the effectiveness of our public policies. Beautiful on paper, the LGPD puts us on the same level of regulation as developed countries, but forgets that non-compliance with the rule also leaves us adrift. The immediate consequence of a severe regulation, from which dubious adequacy arises, especially in the public sector, is a blackout of information, as seen in Inep’s disproportionate reaction to taking all educational information off the air.

But the public manager’s attitude towards the LGPD does not mean that he wants to prevent the evaluation of public policies or that there is something to hide when he does not make data available. On the contrary, it is the natural reaction when a complex and vague norm, which leaves open a series of interpretations about its violation, imposes personal costs on managers and makes them directly responsible. It is completely natural to expect public managers to take the most conservative attitude in a scenario that only presents risks.

Among the solutions presented by Inep, there is access to data through the existing Protected Data Access Service (SEDAP), which takes place through physical access to a room located on Inep’s premises in Brasília. The access model primarily serves academic research, via research project submission, in an extremely costly process in terms of time and resources.

Not surprisingly, since the creation of the room, from 2014 to 2021, only 111 studies have been approved. Among them, the vast majority of research is carried out by researchers or institutes based in Brasilia, or by private or international universities, typically with more financial resources to carry out their research in Brasilia. Without the possibility of remote access, the current model perpetuates inequality in research development, harming students, teachers and researchers with fewer resources.

It is even more important to note that the impacts of de-airing educational data go beyond its effects on scientific knowledge and affect society much more broadly. How to do serious journalism about the educational context of the country without data? How can parents of children with special needs be able to identify schools that effectively serve children with special needs? How to account for the teaching staff and the educational service that is being offered without access to information?

The LGPD as it has been interpreted and applied by the public sector is a step backwards for scientific research and evidence-based public policies, for the dissemination of information by the specialized press and for the common citizen who has the right to know about the quality of education. being offered in the country.

This column was written in collaboration with Christiane Szerman, a PhD student at Princeton, and my co-author on the first project accepted by SEDAP in 2014, now published in the Economics of Education Review. The article links data from ENEM and the Higher Education Census. We show that the Unified Selection System amplifies competition, changing the demographic composition of students, who have higher ENEM scores and come from other regions of the country. The integration of the educational market increases the stratification of students by the quality of higher education institutions, widening the gap between higher and lower quality institutions.