In two surveys polling over 1,000 teachers, 1,600 parents and 860 high schoolers, CDT found that potential harms to students through activity-monitoring software go beyond privacy, pointing to kids being targeted for disciplinary actions, contacted by law enforcement or having their sexual orientations outed without their consent. It also found that the percentage of schools using student monitoring systems increased since last year’s study, from 84 percent to 89 percent.
“We’ve found that nearly every school in the country is giving devices to students — and monitoring is hurting them,” CDT President and CEO Alexandra Reeve Givens said in a public statement. “When you combine the resurgence of violence in schools with the mental health crisis among kids, schools are surveilling students’ activities more than ever. But these efforts to make students safer more often result in disciplining students instead.”
Elizabeth Laird, director of the Equity in Civic Technology Project at CDT who co-authored the recent study, told Government Technology that schools stepped up their efforts at the onset of the pandemic to issue devices to students and their families as classrooms moved from the school building to the home. CDT wanted to make sure that those efforts didn’t have unintended consequences or strings attached.
“That’s been our focus here … supporting school efforts to close the homework gap and get students and their families online,” Laird said. “But at the same time, not accepting that it has to come at the expense of their privacy rights, or even what our most recent research shows, potentially even their civil rights.”
CDT’s surveys revealed that a majority of parents and students are comfortable with schools having monitoring technology, but they become wary of the idea once the monitoring takes place after school hours. What the study found was that, despite the intention of keeping students safe, the technology led to more disciplinary actions. Additionally, teachers were responsible for fielding alerts given by the system during school hours, but most lacked adequate training; the monitoring was not limited to school hours, with the system vendor contacting law enforcement as needed if there’s an alert after hours; and stakeholders lacked knowledge about what the system was actually doing.
What’s more, besides heightening the risk of interaction with law enforcement, student monitoring systems disproportionately targeted LGBTQ+ students for action — 29 percent of LGBTQ+ students reported knowing someone who had been outed because of student activity monitoring. Students coming from low-income, Black or Hispanic families were also at greater risk of harm from system alerts — 48 percent of Black students and 55 percent of Hispanic students reported that they or someone they know got into trouble, compared to 41 percent of white students.
Laird added that the findings revealed that school districts were relying on law enforcement to respond to these alerts, especially when they come in after hours, and the results were not just one-off stories.
“Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for LGBTQ students to either themselves have been outed by this technology or know someone who has been,” she said. “Similarly, it was not uncommon for schools to be sharing this information with law enforcement.”
The survey found that LGBTQ+ students have been disproportionately targeted by school interventions. Notably, 56 percent of LGBTQ+ students said they have gotten into trouble for visiting a website or saying something inappropriate online, whereas 44 percent of non-LGBTQ+ students said the same; 46 percent of LGBTQ+ respondents said they were contacted by a school counselor about their mental health, versus 30 percent of non-LGBTQ+ students; and 31 percent of LGBTQ+ students said they were contacted by a police officer due to concerns about them committing a crime, versus 19 percent. The survey found similar trends regarding students with learning or physical disabilities, as well as non-white students.
“I think certainly there’s evidence to suggest that some of the ways that these tools are operating themselves, or the way that they’re being used, could run afoul of existing civil rights protections,” Laird said. “If that’s the case, that should be enforced.”
In response to findings in the report, the CDT penned a letter to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights calling for a policy statement clarifying how such monitoring software violates civil rights laws, as well as enforcement against civil rights violations. The letter has been signed by the American Association of School Librarians, the American Civil Liberties Union, Civil Rights Corps, Common Sense Media, the Data Quality Campaign, LGBT Tech, the National Center for Learning Disabilities and the State Educational Technology Directors Association, among others.
“I hope that the evidence that we shared with them was persuasive enough to show that this is not only a problem right now, but it’s only growing,” Laird said. “And if this trend continues, this is the type of technology that will literally be used in every school.”
