This summer, federal policymakers are undertaking a new round of discussions on a suite of data privacy and online safety bills that they’ve been discussing and refining over the last few years. With the recent House passage of the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act, a package of bills that includes the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the Senate may turn its attention to these and other measures like the Children’s Health, Advancement, Trust, Boundaries, and Oversight in Technology Act (CHATBOT) Act. This attention to student data privacy isn’t new: both conversations are reminiscent of children’s privacy debates from a decade ago.
Then, like now, federal and state policymakers faced mounting public pressure to ensure that as young people’s lives increasingly intersected with technology (in and out of the classroom), they were safe and that their information was not used inappropriately. Back in 2014, new technologies and rising public concern about growing data collection during everyday activities led to reasonable questions about how leaders were using and protecting children’s data. Today, that conversation has expanded beyond data to include public concerns about mental health, artificial intelligence, and more.
DQC closely tracked state legislation focused on better governing education data and children’s consumer data back in 2014 and saw a theme that’s reappearing now in key federal privacy and online safety bills: over-relying on banning the practices policymakers don’t want without giving enough attention to thoughtfully governing the practices they do want.
Thinking about protecting privacy only as prohibiting data collection and use means that policymakers miss opportunities to make data work for people, like using data to inform a principal’s staffing decisions or give a community college leader insight into their students’ future pathways. Starting data conversations by considering both good privacy protections (e.g., transparency, governance, data minimization, cybersecurity) as well as how policymakers want to use data to serve students, families, and educators means policymakers are more likely to prevent the things they don’t want without disrupting the things they do.
With respect to the current federal privacy and technology debate, policymakers appear to once again be debating from a binary place: yes technology in the classroom vs. no technology in the classroom, yes AI vs. no AI, yes chatbots vs. no chatbots. In doing so, they are missing opportunities to consider how and under what circumstances technology can support education objectives. While there is genuine concern about keeping children safe in an online environment and protecting their data from unauthorized uses, reflexively blanket banning technology is not the best approach. Policymakers must evaluate technology and data uses more thoughtfully.
There are myriad federal policy proposals that seek to regulate children’s use of technology, including in education settings. As policymakers consider whether to support these ideas, they should start with understanding what schools, families, and students want to get out of using technology and data in learning settings. Collectively, policymakers and experts across the field must evaluate and determine appropriate use cases before crafting rigid statutory and regulatory frameworks and prohibitions. Otherwise, they risk interrupting legitimate efforts to use technology to support students with disabilities, ease administrative burdens for teachers, or better differentiate learning for students.
The conversation about whether, when, and how technology should be used for teaching and learning while properly protecting student privacy is evolving alongside emerging technologies and new uses—but it carries many echoes of previous student data privacy conversations. Let’s learn from history rather than repeating it.
