Parents Challenge President to Dig Deeper on Ed Tech

While education technology companies that have pledged not to exploit student data they collect for marketing purposes welcomed President Barack Obama’s endorsement of the industry’s effort to limit its use of classroom data, the President's comments did nothing to alleviate the unease of some parents concerned about potential civil rights issues raised by the increasing use of ed tech in schools.

This unease includes the possibility that some programs and products might automatically channel or categorize students in ways that could ultimately be discriminatory or detrimental to their education. While welcoming efforts to curb the use of educational data for advertising purposes, they contend that neither the industry pledge nor the California law that President Obama invoked as a model for federal student digital privacy legislation places any meaningful requirements on companies regarding the accuracy, efficacy or fairness of their novel digital learning products. Parents concerned about these kinds of fairness issues said they would like to see President Obama push for legislation requiring companies to directly provide parents with comprehensive lists of the details they are collecting about students, to disclose how they use those details to categorize or rank students, and to describe the different treatment students might receive based on those rankings or categorizations.