Being a Civics of Tech Parent Part 3: Commitments
Civics of Tech Announcements
Next Tech Talk on Feb 4th: Join us for our monthly tech talk on Tuesday, February 4th from 8:00-9:00 PM EST (GMT-5). Join in an informal conversation about events, issues, articles, problems, and whatever else is on your mind. Use this link to register.
Join us on Bluesky: We have made the decision to quit using our Twitter account. We are going to give Bluesky a shot for those interested. Please follow us @civicsoftech.bsky.social and join/follow our Civics of Technology starter pack. Civics of Tech board member Charles Logan (@charleswlogan.bsky.social) has recently shared a number of other critical tech start packs that can help you get started if interested. Let's all just hope this platform doesn't get enshittified.
Spring Book Clubs: We have now have three spring book clubs on the schedule that you can register to attend on the events page.
On February 18th, Allie Thrall will be leading a discussion of The Propagandists' Playbook.
On March 13th, Jacob Pleasants and Dan Krutka will be leading a discussion of Nicholas Carr’s new book, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. This book club is a new addition!
On April 10th, Dan Krutka will be leading a discussion of Building the Innovation School, written by our very own CoT Board Member Phil Nichols.
This post is the final post, at least for now, in the Being a Civics of Tech Parent post series. You can read post 1 (Problems & Propositions) and post 2 (Testimonials), or you can find all the materials gathered on our new Parents’ page on the site. This is an ongoing project. Please contact us if you’d like to contribute.
by Allie Thrall, Charles Logan, and Phil Nichols
Over the past couple of months, we have had the opportunity to engage the Civics of Tech community in exploring the shared concerns, questions, and advocacy efforts of an often overlooked actor in the edtech playing field: parents. Allie began this exploration in the first blog post of this series, which attempted to lay bare the ways that educational technologies are already entrenched in her young daughter’s schooling experiences, “... shaping how, what, and why she learns, and who, as a student, she is.” Allie then invited other parents in the Civics of Tech community to share their experiences by contributing testimonials in response to the open question: having cultivated a critical eye toward educational technologies, what are we to do in the face of near daily reminders of the ways our children’s education is being overwritten by edtech? In the second blog post of this series, Allie and Charles published the parent testimonials in full and remarked that, despite the breadth of experiences and concerns, “... what Civics of Tech parents are looking for is the opportunity to assess the educational technologies our kids are encountering, and a more democratic approach to decision-making amidst what feels like a ceaselessly cementing process of edtech encroachment in schooling.” To this end, this third blog post seeks to provide some language and resources that may assist parents in initiating conversations in their own school communities.
Below, we have organized the primary concerns articulated by Civics of Tech parents into four broad categories: screen time, privacy, learning outcomes, and equity. While we provide some guiding questions and initial resources to think with each of these topics, our work doesn’t end here! Rather, we hope that the Civics of Tech parent blog series marks the beginning of our commitment to support parents in seeking to cultivate school communities with more critical perspectives and practices in relation to edtech. As such, we hope you will also visit our new Civics of Tech Parent page on our website. On it we will house updated resources for each of our four categories, as well as, provide a space for our Civics of Tech parent testimonials, including those not yet submitted. (If you are a Civics of Tech parent, please share your experiences and insights on the ways edtech has manifested in your child’s schooling, and your successes and failures in advocating for change by submitting a form at the bottom of this page!) Finally, at the bottom of this blog post, and on our new webpage, we are including the start of an advocacy letter for parents to share with their school community - whether school administrators, the school board, or the PTA. We look forward to the dialogue that comes from parents' efforts!
Screen Time
A resounding concern about educational technologies among parents centers on the simple fact that using edtech increases children’s daily ‘screen time’. It is understandable that this remains a primary concern among parents, especially as contemporary parents shoulder a significant burden in navigating this discourse in their own parenting decisions, as is amply described in the landmark sociological study, Parenting for a Digital Future: How Hopes and Fears about Technology Shape Children’s Lives. Further, popular knowledge tends to associate screen time with a number of adherent risks, including those related to children’s mental and physical health and their potential access to inappropriate online content. In 2024, the publication of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt spurred a renewed parental panic around the mental health effects of digital technologies. However, despite Haidt’s causal claims, research on the subject of screen time broadly, and its mental health consequences more specifically, remains much less resolved (consider this critical review of the book published in Nature). For in-depth reviews of the research in these areas, we recommend the newly published Handbook of Children and Screens: Digital Media, Development, and Well-Being from Birth Through Adolescence. Additionally, for a broader, critical account of how “screen time” has emerged and evolved as a source of parental and societal anxiety, we recommend Phillip Maciak’s short book, Screen Time.
While the empirical consequences of screen time and its associated concerns remain unresolved, this does not mean that parents should avoid discussing the impact of students’ usage of edtech in schools. Rather, these are the topics we believe school communities must address:
What content can students access through digital technologies at schools?
Many schools and governing bodies have specific policies and regulations in place to ensure that students are prohibited access to certain content, whether obscene or violent, using school devices and internet connections. While this will differ based on geographic location, an example of this type of regulation is the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) in the United States. Parents should feel entitled to inquire into their child(ren)’s school’s policies in regards to digital content, and in the absence of adequate policies or safeguards, advocate for such.
Of course, even this legally regulated standard is not without controversy, as what constitutes ‘appropriate’ is widely debated among parents and educators, and can be used as a launching point for excluding and degrading certain populations. Hence, parents interested in this line of advocacy should be prepared to defend a definition of ‘appropriate’ that ensures the promotion of respect and visibility for our diverse students and families.
What is the trade-off for edtech use?
Focusing specifically on students’ usage of digital devices in schools, it is important for school communities to deliberate over their inherent trade-offs. Parents are entitled to ask schools how much of their child(ren)’s school days are spent using digital devices. They should further inquire into what activities were/are being replaced by digital devices and to what end. Key points of this discussion might consider whether digital technology usage replaces students’ social interactions and/or physical activities. A consistent recommendation from researchers, like those in the above mentioned Handbook of Children and Screens, is that digital devices should not replace social and learning interactions for young people. When possible, edtech could be used as an addition to those social and learning interactions (for instance, if being used by a team of students working together on a project), rather than as a replacement for them. Physical activity should also remain a priority for schools in promoting students’ healthy development. Guidance for appropriate physical activity can be found in the International School-Related Sedentary Behavior Recommendations. Parents should pressure schools to ensure that students have varied learning activities, including those that are social and physically active, rather than dominated by a single form of independent, digital learning.
Privacy
Another central concern about edtech shared by parents relates to their children’s privacy, and rightly so. Educational technologies consume and house troves of student data, including highly sensitive data like those that relate to students’ medical needs and academic and disciplinary records. While various edtech products purport to use that data to benefit schools and students – say, by streamlining school recordkeeping, or by using the data to ‘personalize’ student learning – the uses and privacy of this data remains (and deserves to remain) a point of scrutiny. Below we provide questions around which parental advocacy efforts for students’ data privacy can cohere.
Is the student data collected by educational technologies protected?
This should be an easy target for parental advocacy efforts, given that student records are, in many situations, protected by law, and because edtech is so blatantly bad at actually ensuring privacy. For instance, the week prior to this blog’s publication, edtech company, PowerSchool, which purportedly serves 50 million students in the United States, reported a cybersecurity attack that made vulnerable its possible hundreds of terabytes of student and teacher data. Parents have the right to ensure that their child(ren)’s data is protected by their schools, and should pressure schools to be accountable to the educational technologies they employ. For those located in the United States, one avenue for this type of advocacy could be to submit a FERPA request, like this one created by The Markup. Given the breadth of edtech usage and each edtech tool’s separate policies and procedures in relation to student data, it is likely that a FERPA request like this would be incredibly difficult, if not, impossible for a school or district to deliver upon, drawing attention to the school’s breach of responsibility in protecting student data and opening up space for community intervention.
What do educational technologies do with the data?
Security breaches should not be the only parent concern when it comes to edtech and student data. Rather, it is what those educational technologies intend to do with the data that is also of immense concern. For instance, the same TechCrunch article about the PowerSchool cybersecurity attack, also references a class action lawsuit being brought against the company by parents for selling the student data it harvests to third party partners. In addition to concerns about using data for targeted advertisements, a well-known source of profit for digital platforms (for this history, read The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power), the allegations against PowerSchool, and other edtech companies, move toward even more insidious uses of student data, like selling the data to colleges, vocational training programs, and government agencies for longitudinal student college-and-career tracking. Parents should be concerned that these types of profit-motivated data practices are shaped by a preemptive logic – one that uses data as simplified abstractions of our children, in order to make generalizations that guide their educational experiences and outcomes. For instance, this data might suggest what level of content they should receive, what kinds of learning might be interesting to them, and what their college and career pathways might entail, all while supplying that kind of abstracted, generalized, and speculative information to third parties. While edtech companies, like PowerSchool, might maintain that they are within their right to sell the data they collect, parents should form a stronger source of resistance to their profit-motivated data harvesting practices. Both student privacy regulations, as well as, educational technology user agreements supposedly rest upon user consent. If parents are concerned about their child(ren)’s privacy, they can consider refusing to sign the school’s technology agreement, or refuse to agree to the educational technologies’ terms and services. While these forms of consent may be required by the school, refusing to consent might open a pathway for dialogue between school leaders and the community to discuss issues of student data privacy. Of course, if you have witnessed harms to your child in regards to edtech data practices, you may also contact legal experts to assist in your advocacy, like those at the EdTech Law Center.
What impact does dataveillance have on students?
Another parental concern about student privacy relates to the impacts of dataveillance, or the kind of surveillance that comes from constant digital data harvesting, on students. Any of these edtech data harvesting practices could be construed as dataveillance, but many edtech tools explicitly seek to surveil students, on behalf of schools and parents. This might come in the form of a behavior tracking app, like the one that was so aptly described in our first parent testimonial, or any of the host of security or student monitoring technologies that are entering schools. Although these are touted as being in the best interest of student safety, or able to increase our understanding of student behaviors, we stand firmly in the belief that surveillance is not a form of care that our children need, especially given the threat to their privacy and autonomy that this surveillance entails.
For additional insights on student privacy, check out these organizations:
Learning Outcomes
Not all educational technologies directly support learning. Some of the edtech that has been most pervasive in schools, like learning management systems (LMS), aid in administrative tasks like attendance, grading, and other forms of communication and recordkeeping. However, learning software presents its own question: does it actually help students learn?
This question is more complex than it may seem. As the Civics of Tech community knows, technology’s usage and impacts are contextually specific, and this is no less true when entering into the messy world of classrooms. When asking a question about learning outcomes, we are immediately met with the question of what evidence might be used to assess the desired learning outcome, which is a slippery slope. Edtech companies, which rely on student data for their operation and profit, might seize the opportunity to solicit evidence by proposing ever greater data production (often in the form of student testing). However, this evidence is never neutral, and especially so when produced by the same software that relies on it to remain competitive and profitable. While there has been a rise in organizations that gather and report on edtech evidence, emerging research demonstrates that these organizations often define ‘evidence’ in ways that conveniently reinforce their own power and interests. Amidst this muddy evidentiary field, for parents, the better questions might not be whether a specific edtech product helps all/most/many students learn, but rather:
Does this edtech product help my child learn?
While ‘personalized’ learning is a mainstay in edtech marketing, parents should push schools to hold these tools, and their own curriculum and instruction, to that standard. Recalling Paige’s parent testimonial, edtech that may work for some students, may fail your student, whether based on their learning differences or other circumstances. Although edtech can be used as a bandaid by schools in instances of high teacher turnover and limited teacher experience, it cannot become the only option for curriculum and instruction when it does not meet the needs of all students. As always, parents should ensure that their child’s learning needs are being met by the school, and demand that schools provide alternatives to learning software when it is not suitable for their child.
What technology skills do our students actually need?
Another learning outcome that frequently drives edtech adoption in schools is students’ acquisition of technology skills. Those skills are often considered necessary to students for two reasons: (1) to prepare them for computerized testing, and (2) to prepare them for future jobs; both of which we find to be problematic. Each of these rationales subordinates the rich and complex project of ‘education’ to its narrowest, most instrumental aims — improving test scores, for the former; job training, for the latter. While there is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with either of these outcomes, we would suggest that these ought to be the byproducts, not the drivers, of instructional decision-making. This is especially important given the unpredictability of both the computer testing industry and the job market. Requiring students to learn how to use a particular type of testing software, or to cultivate a particular set of computer skills, may have short-term benefits, but this ‘learning’ can be instantly rendered obsolete by the adoption of new testing software or a shift in market demands. A more durable form of technology education, then, would be less focused on the instrumental use of specific technologies (e.g., testing software) and more on building a repertoire of practices that enable students to strategically adopt, adapt, or resist technologies in service of their learning. Parents could point their schools toward resources from the Civics of Tech community that are geared toward supporting this type of instruction.
Equity
While the above arguments focus on the work that parents can do to advocate for their own child(ren), we urge parents to consider advancing the interests of all children in their advocacy efforts. Equity is a foremost charge of our public education system, which stands in contrast to the corporate interests designing and distributing the educational technologies in our schools. While parents naturally form particularistic relationships to schools through their children, far too many of the most visible parent advocacy efforts promote the interests of some groups of students, at the expense of others. Rather, the Civics of Tech community implores parents to center concerns for educational equity in their efforts to advance more critical approaches toward edtech in schooling.
What kinds of equity considerations should schools make in their edtech adoption process?
The list of concerns around equity and educational technologies is ever-growing. Learning software may reproduce a host of social biases embedded in their algorithms and training data; student surveillance software may unfairly target certain students or student populations; students may come to internalize the logic of educational technologies that fail to support or recognize their diverse perspectives and approaches to learning and communicating; educational technologies may take on different tenors in different contexts – supporting the agency and autonomy of students in more privileged contexts, and being used in ways that are punitive or threatening for students in more vulnerable contexts; and the list goes on. Nor do these concerns cohere around only one particular subset of marginalized students, rather research and testimonials have come to demonstrate edtech equity concerns for an array of populations, whether students of color, queer students, students with disabilities, emerging bilingual students, and again, the list goes on. While educational inequities were not born of our contemporary educational technologies, technologies can often obscure their biases behind slick marketing copy, their own forms of evidence, and the algorithmic ‘black box’. The adoption of educational technologies that do not withstand critical scrutiny may then cement these biases into schooling infrastructures, making them difficult to discern and weed out. Therefore, questions of equity must remain at the forefront of any critical edtech advocacy stance.
To learn more about equity and edtech, get more involved in the Civics of Tech community!
For more reading on the subject, check out our future and past Civics of Tech book clubs, which include excellent emerging scholarship that critically examines technology’s impacts on education and equity.
Advocacy Letter
Dear Community Member,
I write out of concern for the extensive use of educational technologies in [my child(ren)’s school]. Despite the rapid adoption of these technologies in schooling, with some studies reporting that students access an average of 49 unique edtech tools over the course of a school year (see The EdTech Top 40), the school community, including students and their families, are rarely invited to engage in the decision-making that drives their adoption. Below I outline key areas of concern in regards to educational technologies, including [select most pertinent categories for your community: screen time, privacy, learning outcomes, equity], that I believe deserve community engagement and dialogue in order to ensure that the educational technologies that are embedded in our schools align with the school community’s goals and values. I hope this provides the starting point for conversations that will enhance the schooling experience for all children and families in our community.
[Paste questions and/or commentary from above that pertains most to your school community].