As US children study online, an app monitors their movements

For New York teacher Michael Flanagan, the pandemic was a crash course in new technology. We rushed to hand out laptops to students who were staying at home and moved their hectic school life online.

Students are long gone back to school, but technology lives on, and a new generation of apps has emerged to monitor students online.

The program scans students’ online activities, social media posts, and more, with the goal of keeping students focused, detecting mental health issues, and alerting them to possible violence.

“You can’t ring a bell. Everyone has a device,” said Flanagan, who teaches social studies and economics.

But new trends in tracking mean that some apps may target minority students, others may exclude LGBT+ students without their consent, and many are out of care. It is used to instill discipline as well as provide.

As such, Flanagan parted ways with many of his colleagues and never uses such apps to monitor students online.

He remembers seeing a demo of one such program, GoGuardian. In this demo, a teacher showed what a student was doing on his computer in real time. The child was at home on his day off.

Such scrutiny raised a huge red flag for Flanagan.

“I have a school-issued device and I know I can’t expect privacy. But I’m an adult. These kids don’t know that,” he said.

A spokesperson for the New York City Department of Education said that using GoGuardian Teacher “allows teachers to see what’s currently on a student’s screen, prompts to refocus, and limits access to inappropriate content. It is used only to

With a valuation of over $1 billion, GoGuardian is one of the few apps on the market to gain traction, currently monitoring over 22 million students, including public systems in New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. increase.

Globally, the education technology sector is expected to grow by $133 billion from 2021 to 2026, market research firm Technavio said last year.

Parents expect schools to keep their children safe in classrooms and on field trips, and schools “have a responsibility to keep students safe in digital spaces and on school-issued devices,” GoGuardian said in a statement. increase.

The company says it “provides educators the ability to protect students from harmful or explicit content.”

Today, online surveillance is “just part of the school environment,” said Jamie Golosh, a policy adviser at the surveillance group Future of Privacy Forum.

And even if the school survives the pandemic, “it doesn’t look like we’ll be back,” she said.

guns and depression

A key priority for monitoring is to keep students focused on their studies, but it also addresses rapidly growing concerns about school violence and children’s mental health. This is what the medical group called a national emergency in 2021.

Federal data released this month showed that 82% of schools are training staff on how to spot mental health issues, up from 60% in 2018. 65% have a covert threat reporting system, an increase of 15% over the same period.

In a survey last year by the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), 89% of teachers reported that their school monitors their students’ online activities.

But it’s not clear if the software will make schools safer.

Gorosh cited May’s shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which left 21 dead at a school that had invested heavily in surveillance technology.

Some worry that tracking apps are actively causing harm.

For example, the CDT report found that while administrators overwhelmingly claimed that the purpose of surveillance software was student safety, “it is much more commonly used for disciplinary purposes and We see contradictions along racial lines,” said Elizabeth. Laird is director of the Equity program for Civic Technology at the CDT.

LGBT+ students are being kicked out without their consent, she said, because the program uses artificial intelligence to scan for keywords, and 29% of students who identify as LGBT+ say they or they know I just pointed out that someone said they experienced this.

And over a third of teachers say their school automatically sends alerts to law enforcement after school hours.

“The stated purpose is to ensure the safety of students, and we have set up a system here where law enforcement has regular access to this information to find out why they are entering student homes.”

“preyed”

A report last year by members of Congress against four companies making student-monitoring software found they made no effort to see if their programs disproportionately targeted marginalized students. rice field.

Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, one of the report’s co-authors, said in a Thomson Reuters Foundation statement that “students should not be monitored on the same platforms they use for schooling.” said.

“As school districts bring technology into the classroom, we need to ensure that children and teenagers are not preyed upon by targeted advertising and intrusive surveillance webs.”

The Department of Education has promised to release guidelines on the use of AI earlier this year.

A spokesperson said the agency is “committed to protecting the civil rights of all students.”

Aside from the ethical issues around spying on their children, many parents are frustrated by the lack of transparency.

“We need to be clear about whether data is being collected, especially if sensitive data is being collected. We need at least notice and maybe consent,” said advocacy group Illinois Families of Public Schools. Chief Executive Kathy Cresswell said.

According to Cresswell, who has a daughter in a public school in Chicago, some parents have been warned about their children’s online searches, even though they weren’t asked or told about the surveillance in the first place.

Another child was repeatedly warned not to play a particular game — even though the student was playing it at home on the family computer, she said.

Creswell et al. acknowledge that the problems monitoring seeks to address (bullying, depression, violence) are real and need to be addressed, but it is questionable whether technology is the answer.

“If we’re talking about monitoring self-harm, is this the best way to tackle the problem?”

Pointing to evidence suggesting AI is imperfect at catching warning signs, she said more funding for school counselors could help it better tailor the problem. rice field.

“There are big concerns,” she said. “But technology may not be the first step in answering some of these questions.”