The rise of metrics-based school discipline: How ClassDojo is changing discipline practices in schools
Civics of Tech Announcements
Book Club on Feb 18th: Allie Thrall will be leading a discussion of The Propagandists' Playbook. Register to attend on the events page.
Next Tech Talk on March 4th: Join us for our monthly tech talk on Tuesday, February 4th from 8:00-9:00 PM EST (GMT-5). Join an informal conversation about events, issues, articles, problems, and whatever else is on your mind. Use this link to register.
Additional Spring Book Clubs: You can also register for these upcoming book clubs on our events page.
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.
Need More Books? Check out our most recent book reviews, including:
The Extinction of Experience (Rosen, September 2024)
AI Snake Oil (Narayanan & Kapoor, September 2024)
The Skill Code (Beane, June 2024)
Be sure to join us on Bluesky @civicsoftech.bsky.social and join/follow our Civics of Technology starter pack.
by Jamie Manolev, Anna Sullivan & Neil Tippett (Centre for Research in Educational and Social Inclusion, University of South Australia)
Recently, we published a journal article, Reshaping school discipline with metrics: an examination of teachers’ disciplinary practices with ClassDojo. In this article, we argued that ClassDojo is reshaping disciplinary practices in schools by using metrics to understand and respond to student behaviour.
We have been researching ClassDojo as a school discipline technology since 2016. A time when we noticed, curiously, that teachers were rapidly turning to ClassDojo to help them manage classrooms and student behaviour. While the technification of education had been underway for some years already, it was a sign that technology was also extending its reach into the domain of school discipline. Our interest as ‘critical scholars’ was not only to understand how ClassDojo was being used to discipline students in schools, but also what might be shaping that use, how it might alter the ways discipline occurs in schools, and whose interests are most served from this disciplinary approach.
ClassDojo has been around since 2011. In its first few years, it was regarded ‘the world’s fastest growing education startup’ (Czikk 2013) and one of the most popular classroom apps (Chaykowski 2017), and it remains an extraordinarily popular education platform. Until recently, ClassDojo was classified as an edtech ‘unicorn’, which is reserved for companies valued at over $1 billion US dollars (Holon IQ 2024). It is used by more than 51 million students and teachers across 180 countries (ClassDojo n.d.). Yet, little is known about the kind of education ClassDojo promotes.
Some critiques of ClassDojo have emerged. For example, media reports have linked it with privacy breaches (Singer 2014; Pilieci 2014), outdated modes of learning (Terzon 2017; Vittrup 2016), and the erosion of children’s rights (Garlen 2019). Education researchers, including ourselves, have drawn attention to some of ClassDojo’s inner workings, including its relations of power, revealing for example the way it valorises data, promotes behaviourism, and relies on techniques of surveillance (e.g. see the work of Ben Williamson, Bradely Robinson, Alex Jiahong Lu, and Daniela DiGiacomo).
In our new paper, we infer that the popular uptake and rapid expansion of ClassDojo is linked to the dominant political and economic rationality of recent times, neoliberalism. Neoliberal policies and ideologies have created a context which brings together market-based and economic logics, resulting in an increasing reliance on technologies, and the expanding utility of data, including in the form of metrics. In this condition, metrics serve as a way to measure, understand and make sense of, and govern things and people, including in education – making it a potent form of power which David Beer (2016) has termed ‘metric power’.
Against this context, we wanted to understand how ClassDojo, and its heavy reliance on metrics, was informing schools’ disciplinary practices, and how metric power was implicated in these practices.
What we found was that ClassDojo’s metrics played a pivotal role in the ways teachers’ disciplined students, determining how student behaviour was understood, reasoned about, and subsequently governed. Specifically, metrics were being used a) to code behaviours as good and bad, b) as a measure that gave behaviours a value, c) to transform behaviour and discipline into a classroom or school economy, d) to judge students and their behaviours, often with the intention of eliciting a particular response, e) to foster competition between students and against themselves, and f) in a way that made students more visible so they could be governed more easily. And while we describe these practices separately here, in the classroom they were often performed by teachers in multiple and overlapping ways.
In the article we argue that through ClassDojo’s widespread adoption and application of these practices, the ways discipline happens in schools is shifting. ClassDojo is introducing a new metrics-based way of enacting school discipline, which is shaping the ways teachers, students, school leaders, (and sometimes parents) conceive of, and attend to, student behaviour. It is a form of discipline and representation of behaviour which relies almost exclusively on numbers and their calculation, producing a narrow knowledge of behaviour which strips away context. In this way, ClassDojo is advancing a metric-driven form of school discipline which is underpin by, and promotes, neoliberal values. This is a new version of school discipline reconstituted in economic terms – including its knowledges, forms, content, conduct, practices, and adoption of a market model of discipline which reconfigures the student as a market actor (Brown 2015).
References
Beer, D. (2016). Metric Power. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55649-3
Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution. MIT Press.
Chaykowski, K. (2017). How ClassDojo Built One Of The Most Popular Classroom Apps By Listening To Teachers. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenchaykowski/2017/05/22/how-classdojo-built-one-of-the-most-popular-classroom-apps-by-listening-to-teachers/#27ca0d6f1e5e
Cook, H. (2019). 'It's all about controlling students': researchers slam popular app. The Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/education/it-s-all-about-controlling-students-researchers-slam-popular-app-20190118-p50s8l.html
ClassDojo. (n.d.). ClassDojo. Retrieved 23 December 2024 from https://www.classdojo.com/en-gb/about/
Czikk, J. (2013). ClassDojo, The "World's Fastest Growing Education Startup", Launches in Canada. BetaKit. https://betakit.com/classdojothe-worlds-fastest-growing-education-startup-launches-in-canada/
Garlen, J. (2019). ClassDojo raises concerns about children's rights. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/classdojo-raises-concerns-about-childrens-rights-111033
Holon IQ. (2024). Global EdTech Unicorns: The Complete List of Global EdTech Unicorns. QS Quacquarelli Symonds. Retrieved 17 January 2025 from https://www.holoniq.com/edtech-unicorns
Manolev, J., Sullivan, A., & Tippett, N. (2024). Reshaping school discipline with metrics: an examination of teachers’ disciplinary practices with ClassDojo. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2024.2407874
Pilieci, V. (2014). Student app in Ottawa classes gets raves from teachers, but worries privacy experts. Ottawa Citizen. https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/student-app-in-ottawa-classes-gets-raves-from-teachers-but-worries-privacy-experts
Singer, N. (2014). Privacy Concerns for ClassDojo and Other Tracking Apps for Schoolchildren. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/17/technology/privacy-concerns-for-classdojo-and-other-tracking-apps-for-schoolchildren.html
Terzon, E. (2017). How the rise of apps in Australian classrooms is coming with privacy and learning concerns. ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-13/rise-of-parent-teacher-behaviour-apps-in-australian-classrooms/8340414
Vittrup, B. (2015). Class Dojo App Is Already Past Its Expiration Date. The Blog. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-brigitte-vittrup/class-dojo-app-is-already_b_8287582.html?ir=Australia