Parent Data Sovereignty Act of 2026

The family is the first and most fundamental institution of human society. Parents bear the God-given responsibility to raise, protect, and guide their children, and that responsibility does not disappear at the schoolhouse door. When schools and their contractors collect detailed data about children, parents have a rightful claim to know what is being gathered, how it is being used, and by whom. The Parent Data Sovereignty Act of 2026 gives that claim the force of law.

Among the bill's most important provisions is a firm prohibition on the use or transfer of student data for commercial purposes. Children in a classroom are not consumers to be profiled or products to be monetized. Corporate interests have demonstrated a persistent appetite for the kind of granular behavioral and academic data that schools generate, and without clear statutory barriers, that appetite is difficult to restrain. This bill draws a principled line and enforces it.

The bill also establishes affirmative parental rights to access and correct their children's educational records and to opt out of data uses that fall outside direct educational purposes. This is not a bureaucratic formality. It is a recognition that mothers and fathers are the primary decision-makers for their children, and that institutions serving families must remain accountable to them. Those in positions of public trust are stewards, not owners, of the information in their care.

The Data Transparency Portal requirement advances that accountability in a practical way. Transparency is not merely a procedural virtue; it is a precondition for genuine oversight. When parents can see clearly what data exists about their children and where it flows, they are equipped to exercise the rights the bill provides. Opacity in government systems, by contrast, tends to serve institutional convenience at the family's expense.

The bill's effectiveness will ultimately depend on the strength of its enforcement mechanisms and the quality of the rules promulgated under it, and those details deserve close attention as the legislation moves forward. Taken as a whole, however, this measure is a sound and warranted check on both government and commercial overreach into the sphere that rightly belongs to the family. The American Council urges its support.