UPIL records, confidentiality, privileged communication, and invasion of privacy have been issues of great concern to educators and, most particularly, to pupil personnel specialists during the decade of the sixties. Legislation, legal rulings or court decisions, administrative regulations, and debate on these topics have frequently erupted out of the larger issues of civil rights and community control. In some instances, a particular conflict has been initiated by the political left; in some cases, by the political right. In some cases, the extreme left and extreme right have found themselves unwittingly allied against the establishment or status quo. This article attempts to review a selected handful of these cases and to discuss their implication for the educator, with particular reference to the practice of school psychology-
CLARIFICATION OF TERMSIt is necessary first to clarify terms, so that in any discussion we may speak to the same point. Terms such as privileged communication and confidentiality of records are sometimes used in the literature in different or overlapping contexts.Having failed to locate one definitive and ultimate authority for clarifying these terms, we offer instead some working definitions for the purpose of this discussion. The concept of confidentiality has been used to refer to the intimacy or privacy of communication between people at many different levels. It is possible to define at least four bands on the spectrum of confidentiality:1. In the most general sense, confidentiality refers to the trust and faith we indicate when confiding in others.2. Within our society, various subgroups develop codes and norms that make the behavior of group 1 Requests for reprints should be sent to
School psychology training programs, by their diversity, have been open to the serious criticism that "There is really no such thing as a school psychologist if he can be trained in so many different ways." Few of us would be willing to submit to surgeons if that title did not signify something relatively specific in terms of training. School psychology training programs which have been characterized by great diversity have been defended with the argument that one does not want to limit creativity in a developing profession. By separating the program into a core and an "elective specialty sequence," Trachtman seems to have combined the best of both approachesguaranteeing certain critical knowledge (not subject to the differing abilities of students) and yet allowing for the creative use of individual differences in the specialty sequence.-W.H. A.
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