While K-12 public school teachers are increasingly having their professional judgments questioned at every turn and are being subjected to wild claims that they are “indoctrinating” students with political ideologies, education technology—or “ed-tech”—businesses are taking on greater roles in education with little regulation or oversight. At a moment when many teachers are quitting the profession, these companies are also claiming the power to “personalize learning” while avoiding discussion about how their profit model could have dire consequences for children and their futures.
Teachers spend years gaining the skills and knowledge they need to do their jobs. And, once in the classroom, they often put in the extra work of attending to their students’ social and emotional needs using even more ed-tech to do so. As technology takes on a larger role in schools, teachers are being pressured to act more as curators of ed-tech products who navigate students through a multitude of platforms instead of helping them learn and develop academically.
Ed-tech companies have promised their products will solve the problem of large class sizes, accurately track students’ academic progress, attend to students’ social-emotional states, make teaching more efficient and precise, and free up teachers to spend more time with students.
But these promises remain largely unfulfilled, and substituting ed-tech tools for the professional expertise of teachers has only introduced intrusive new surveillance technologies into classrooms. As a recent Human Rights Watch investigation found, many ed-tech companies also exploit children’s data and engage in practices that put children’s basic rights at risk.
Software like Illuminate—which is currently affected by massive data breaches—stores information such as which students are likely to steal, cheat, or feel depressed. Teachers are expected to record this data on district-mandated platforms that are linked to higher data systems at the state and federal levels. This software and its algorithms can then be used to make predictions about student behavior and their social-emotional welfare.
Thrively, another software product, profiles students’ personalities and suggests career pathways. Performing daily “pulse checks,” Thrively gathers data daily regarding how students “feel.” This data is stored and tracked over time and provides a comprehensive profile of each user over time.
This type of invasive surveillance is both unwarranted, as it offers no educational benefit, and harmful to the privacy of all stakeholders in education, as it entitles ed-tech companies to access and share troves of personal data. Although all partners to ed-tech contracts must sign privacy and user agreements, there is no definitive way to ensure honesty and commitment to these policies.
Federal laws governing student privacy—the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act—was weakened in 2011 to allow tech companies to gain the same status as school districts in accessing and sharing students’ personal data. And as in other tech enterprises, owning the data has become more valuable than the products that these companies sell.
Teachers, meanwhile, are motivated to constantly engage their students with ed-tech products by earning badges that supposedly recognize their “professional growth.” Teachers are then nudged to tweet about their accomplishments.
Thus, ed-tech companies have come to certify teachers, rather than the other way around.
Ed-tech companies are even using teachers as their product ambassadors, digital gurus, or tech coaches—a stealth marketing technique that raises significant ethical questions.
These seemingly mundane details of ed-tech reality represent a powerful way to keep teachers preoccupied with an endless learning curve of new tech tools, diverting their attention away from the classroom, as ed-tech businesses capture one of the most essential segments of the consumer market: children.
Meanwhile, teachers neither have control over these products nor do they necessarily fully comprehend how they work beyond the surface. And in overcrowded classrooms, with huge responsibilities over children, they don’t need the added work of fighting against manipulative data extraction systems. When ed-tech businesses label children by their data trails and steer their learning, they undermine both teachers and students while fueling the data economy.
Education is a pillar of democracy. As surveillance capitalism encroaches on this space, educational experts need to pause and consider how technology will redefine what we know to be true about education and the basic rights of teachers and children.
As a means of intervention, standards like the Age-Appropriate Design Code have been proposed to control such manipulative techniques, especially when it comes to children (participation in these measures are currently voluntary). If technologies are to take a central pedagogic role in the classroom, they should be tested and accredited as vigorously as teachers are.
The only way to guarantee this is through a strict updated privacy protection policy that ensures students can learn unobstructed and undisturbed in the classroom.