Computer Says Maybe

EdTech companies make big promises about improving education through technology, but a lot of these tools aren't really designed for learning, they're designed for profit. So where does that leave our kids? I'm Alix Dunn, and welcome back to Computer Says Maybe, where I talk to the people pushing back on tech power and fighting for something better.

And this week, we are looking at what that fight looks like when it goes from the classroom to the courtroom. Today, I'm talking with Andrew Leddell, co-founder of the EdTech Law Center, who has spent years challenging EdTech in schools, one case at a time. We talk through the legal arguments against EdTech and the cases that show how technologies built for profit are distracting at best and harmful to students at worst.

So if failing children isn't a bug in the EdTech business model, but rather the business itself, what does it actually take to hold these companies accountable in court? This episode is part of a month-long exploration of technology and education, AI and schools, um, and it's also paired with something really exciting.

We have just launched the Maybe Collective. This is a community space for people who want to keep the conversation going beyond the podcast. So join us and come hang out with experts, organizers, curious minds, and other tech politics people who get it and are looking to go deeper. You can learn more at themaybe.org/collective, and we'll also drop the link in the show notes.

Okay, let's get into it with Andrew Leddell, talking all things the law and education technology. My name is, uh, Andrew Liddell. I'm the co-founder of the EdTech Law Center with my wife, Julie. Uh, we are a consumer protection law firm in Austin, Texas, and we help families solve problems where school meets technology.

We sue tech companies when kids get hurt using the computers and software their school makes them use. Can we sort of start with just, like, what does ed tech mean, and how does it show up in kids' lives? Ed tech is short for educational technology. You know, my, my kind of glib definition of it is, uh, technology that, uh, nobody would pay to use if they had a choice.

And so, but, but really, I mean, when, when we say ed tech, what, what I, what I mean is, uh, technology that's used in schools, but it's not technology that's designed to benefit children or help children or ensure that they learn or, uh, keep them safe. It's just technology that is used by and on and about children in the context of school.

I'd love to hear more about how you ended up deciding to start suing about ed tech. We're kind of the first entrant in this, in this area. You know, there are obviously a lot of laws that are meant to protect, um, students' privacy and their education records, which is, uh, FERPA, the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act, and then also to give young people and their parents extra rights when they're on the internet, and that's COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.

Uh, the problem is those laws are basically, you know, so under-enforced they may as well not exist. Even worse, they have s- served as kind of the seedbed for these ghost stories that the industry tells itself about what they're allowed to do under FERPA and COPPA, and basically they've turned those laws totally inside out to say that parent consent is not required and that school is a free-for-all for data mining kids.

That's not at all what those laws were intended to do, and if you look at the legislative history of, of FERPA, for example, you know, it's a little bit old-fashioned language, but, uh, Senator Buckley, who sponsored it, you know, Connecticut Republican, he was talking about the, the fear of using what he, what he called computer data banks on children and how that could basically turn their whole lives off, off a trajectory based on, you know, one teacher's sideways comment, and the idea that everybody in the world has access to these records, whether it's the FBI or district leadership or employers or colleges.

Everybody has access to these records except for parents and except for kids, and we don't know what's being collected about our kids, and we don't know what's being, you know, how it's being used, and nobody has rights to access it, much less correct it if it's wrong. That was over 50 years ago, and that's the world we're living in now, in large part because of that law.

Because companies say, "Well, we're school officials under FERPA, and therefore it's like we're, you know, the bus driver or the secretary or the cafeteria worker. We have total access and rights to this information, and we can do whatever we want with it." It's, it's crazy. It's crazy that that's the world we're living in, but that's, that's where we are now.

We're trying to fight those, those defenses in court. That's incredible. So basically it's just kind of like a Wild West- They do whatever they want. Yeah, I mean, there's nothing stopping them, right? These are companies primarily, you know, founded by venture capital and now owned by private equity, and they, they don't care.

They have all the resources in the world. They can do what they want, and what they want is data. You know, I mean, we've liv- lived now in this, you know, what I, I prefer surveillance capitalism, but attention economy, data economy, whatever it is, that's been the rule for 25 years. And that ideology, the data ideology that more is better, that, you know, privacy doesn't exist and surveillance is required, I mean, all of that is, you know, truest at school because it's a captive market, captive audience, you know, overseen by a handful of people who really, you know, school administrators, superintendents, they Have to view the thousands of people in their care as numbers, as stats.

And so they're not viewing, you know, your, your little kindergartner with her pigtails, you know, as, as a human being going to, going to class. They're, they're viewing that as just one line on, on a spreadsheet of, you know, trying to control for, for budgets and ratios and, and performance metrics. I feel like you're starting to answer my next question, which is how you decided to start suing, 'cause I can tell that you're, like, 'cause someone had to, feels like the answer maybe.

But, like, how did you decide to start the EdTech Law Center? So I was actually a, a patent lawyer. I, I went to school to be an engineer, and then I went to law school after that and worked in, you know, technology law for, for a lot of my career. My wife Julie and I, we met in law school, and, uh, she spent most of her life as a, as a public servant for the state of Texas, primarily in our appeals courts.

She was really great and was actually tapped to do this, uh, judicial commission on mental health, and this was around the time that we had our, our first kid. And so through that work, that was 10 years ago or more, so this is before the book Surveillance Capitalism was written, it was before the ideas of persuasive design entered the mainstream, it was before anyone really knew anything about social media and the way that the Internet now works.

She was just exposed to the early research showing correlation between the more time kids spend online, the worse it is for their mental health. We don't know why. We're not saying that's the only cause, but it certainly correlates. We had a daughter, and we'd experienced in our own life that, um, you know, trying to do a little bit of iPad was way harder than doing no iPad at all.

And so with that background and our just experience and kinda gut check, we, we were like, "Uh, we're not doing this." So fast-forward to getting ready to start kindergarten, and news breaks here in Austin that, that a boy in a neighboring district in first grade on a school iPad was r- you know, surf porn at school for, for weeks at a time, and this was, you know, on a school iPad, during the school day, in the classroom.

And this is porn by anybody's definition. We can, we can talk about, you know, kinda some of the political currents around this, but this, this is something that nobody would want their seven-year-old kid to see at school, and it was happening over and over and over again, and it wasn't stuff that he sought out.

What was unusual, we found out, was that the parents spoke up. You know, it wasn't that this was the only time this had ever happened, it was that the parents went public with it and caused this big outcry. And we were like, "What the hell?" Like, I can't even believe they're giving kids iPads to go to school, much less like this is the situation.

And so we went over to watch the school board meeting and ended up, you know, connecting with, with the parents of, of the boy who were like, "Look, they're putting on this good face. They're, you know, purporting to listen to us. We have, you know, 10% of the families in the district have already signed this petition, and we've heard all of these even worse stories than have happened to, to our kid about, you know, predators contacting kids at school, or, you know, really young kids, you know, seeing ISIS beheading videos in class that gives them PTSD.

Help us. See what we can do. Because what the district is telling us is, you know, you, you can, you can accept this or you can go to private school. You know, that you don't actually have a right to a public education that's not mediated through the internet." And so, you know, we weren't able to help them as their lawyers at that time, but I wanted to try and help them find somebody.

And so I called around, I called the ACLU, I called a number of organizations, couldn't get anyone to really take my call. The group that I connected with was the Campaign for Commercial Free Childhood, now, now called Fair Play, and they rule and, you know, like I, I'm still involved with them. They're amazing.

And so they were like, "We don't have a legal arm either, but you should join us. Come help us. You know, we, we have a Screens in Schools working group, and we want you to, to participate in that." And so that was May of 2019. I've been involved in that ever since. And so we've been advocating, we've been trying to inform policymakers, help support parents But the thing that I kept seeing over and over again was that exact same story playing out.

Something horrible happens to a kid at school, and the district is just like, "Well, it's your fault. You're a bad parent. Your kid's a pervert." And, you know, as, if, as, as long as, you know, if they weren't, if they weren't using it wrong, if they were doing it right, I'm talking about a seven-year-old kid, um, who never sought this out, but if they weren't so bad, then this would never have happened.

Just this victim blaming. And to see it happen over and over and over again made me realize two things. One, like our advocacy, there, there's maybe limits to that. And then also that there's something wrong with this business model and the design of these products because nothing else is, is, you know, causing this kind of havoc at schools.

Maybe they're designed wrong. And so that's when Julie and I really took a step back and, and, you know, I've long viewed that advocacy work on behalf of kids as a civil rights issue. You know, this is, this is civil rights because you are entitled to an education, whether we recognize it in our Constitution or not, education is a civil right.

Freedom at school is, is a civil right. Freedom from surveillance is a civil right. EdTech implicates all of this, but looking back to, you know, the actual, you know, or the, the, the civil rights movement for, for racial equality, they had a legal arm. They sued people. It wasn't just mobilization. It wasn't just advocacy.

It was also take, taking it to the courts, and Julie and I thought there was an opportunity to, to do the same thing here. How did we get to the point where basically s- the school experience is now just absolutely saturated with these products? We're not funding schools in the way that prioritizes, you know, highly paid, highly qualified teachers who are empowered to teach like any other professional is empowered to do their job.

Instead, we are, you know, requiring s- school leadership to do more with less Tech companies come in and say, "Hey, I've got this thing. Give it to your kids, and rather than have, you know, a 15 to one student to teacher ratio, we can now do twice that many or three times that many." And so, you know, for a lot of reasons, leadership is, um, very receptive to, to these arguments, and the, just the material conditions make it such that, um, you know, it, it's not like they're not trying, trying to solve a real problem.

How does it work? So a company signs a contract with a school district, they roll out a technology. What does it actually look like when these technologies are integrated into, to schooling? There's the top down adoption, and there's also kind of like this bottom up social adoption through, through teachers.

And so I'll try and paint a picture of, of the landscape and the types of products that, that are, that are used in school. They have what are called, uh, student information systems, SIS, and those are more top down contract. And this is really the administrative backend that schools use to do their operations, and nothing problematic about this necessarily conceptually, right?

I mean, schools have to enroll kids. They have to figure out who lives where, and where the buses go, and who's, who qualifies for school lunch, and, you know, who's got a restraining order against a relative, all of this stuff. There is great reasons for public schools to collect certain information about their students in the course of administrating school What becomes a problem is when that lives on the cloud and it's exchanged among, you know, a host of other providers.

There is no control over where that information goes. It's vulnerable to hackers, and, you know, twice now we've sued two of these companies predicting that they were vulnerable to, to a hack, and after we sued them, twice indeed, they were hacked. So th- there's a problem of just collecting the stuff, keeping it forever, not controlling who has access to it internally at school or either, you know, or how the, the product is disseminating it, not ensuring that it's only used to benefit kids, um, as opposed to being used against them, and then using it for other purposes than those that it was initially collected for.

And so y- you can imagine there are these companies that do try to predict outcomes and say, "Well, these, these kids are in danger of not graduating. These kids are in danger of criminality," what- whatever it may be. And on the surface that may sound okay, that, okay, well, if they're in danger of not graduating, then we can intervene and help them, or i- if there's things in their lives that are pushing them down, down a path toward crime, maybe we can remove those things in their lives.

That's not how these tools are often used. They're actually used more to punish people and to deny them opportunities, right? To get the problems off the books, make them someone else's issue, and that information was never meant to be used in that way, basically to impose a credit score on kids for their entire lives.

So that's student information systems, and that's the behind the scenes stuff that no one ever sees, but still really problematic. Then you have the things that students interface with, and these are usually web-based platforms that students interact with through a computer of some kind. That computer is usually an iPad for little kids, you know, up to second grade, and then becomes a Chromebook usually for the rest of high school.

Some better resourced districts, you know, give kids MacBooks. Basically, it's- A web-based program that kids interface with and access their inter- their education in some way. And so these are programs that parents may be familiar with, like IXL or i-Ready, which is for diagnostics and practice for, um, you know, math and, and language learning.

There is a new program that's gotten a lot of heat recently called, um, Amira, which is this AI learning tool that basically, you know, purports to help kids learn to read out loud, um, through an AI assistant that, you know, possibly may be also training AI to recognize children's voices, although we don't have evidence of that yet.

And so these are the things, like I said, that, that, that kids interact with directly. And we've sued a number of these companies as well because these companies, you know, again, they share information very widely. They don't get consent from parents to do so, and a lot of times there's hidden advertising trackers that are just, you know, in, in the product.

So we've done a lot of forensics to show that in use, there are pixels that are attached and, and present, hidden in, in the software that are observing every single thing a kid is doing with this software. And we know that, you know, th- this pixel tracking, again, if you aren't super familiar with it, it may sound benign, but essentially it all feeds up into this system through the, the real-time bidding network is this massive data exchange, and it allows composite profiles to be assembled from people from all of these different sources but tied to an individual, and then anyone can buy those.

And so in- including the government And so basically we have now this warrantless surveillance system on every American, and this is-- and, and people around the world as well, that anyone can have access to as long as they can pay for it. And now this is happening to kids just because they're going to school.

So they're feeding this data machine as they go to school, and that's the unwitting stuff. On top of that, we have, again, these predictive algorithms, these programs that purport to help kids learn, that purport to help them achieve, but that are really supported by very thin or no independent evidence at all.

You know, tech companies have long wanted to put computers in schools. I mean, at-- the App- the Apple II was right there in schools the year after it was released. The idea being we, we want this to be what kids think of as computing. You know? So we want them to be familiar with our products, grow up with our products, and, and learn those products so they buy them.

Apple did it, Microsoft did it, Google is now doing it too. And so there's that just kind of normal crass commercialism that, um, is, is, is present in school and has been for fifty years. But what's different now with Google products is that they are about an order of magnitude cheaper than their equivalents with Apple and, and Microsoft.

And the way they do that is by subsidizing it with their data business. And so the Chromebook is not a computer like, you know, we might think of it. It is a browser with a keyboard and a monitor attached. And there is so much information that is sucked out of that Chromebook about kids that goes into Google's ecosystem for some reason.

We don't know exactly how they're using it, we don't know exactly what they're doing with it, but we know they're taking it, and we know they're getting some benefit from it, because otherwise, why, why would they be taking it? And so those are kind of the, the major dimensions. There are other types of, of pro- platforms.

Obviously you've got AI now. You've got programs where kids have to check in and out to go to the bathroom, and the amount of time, like their cumulative bathroom time over the course of the semester is, is part of their behavior reports that, you know, schools can then give back to parents of like, "Well, if your kid wasn't in the bathroom so much, they'd be learning more."

So it's just these, these total technologies of just complete surveillance and control over kids at school that none of us had to grow up with. That's wild, and what you're making me realize is maybe there's just a kind of a bureaucratic affinity between the two because tech companies want data, they want control, they want these things.

Schools want data, they want control. And so when they see each other, they're like, "Oh." Is that what's happening, do you think? Or do you think it's still this kind of Pollyanna, it's important for kids to understand the tools of the modern workplace, and we're like helping prepare them for something, and so let's put computers in every classroom?

Or like how do you, how do you piece th- and to what extent do these incentives matter? I, I think all that plays a part, right? I, I, I, I really do. So I, I've, I've had the displeasure of getting to know superintendents all across the country, and there definitely is a personality type. And, you know, I, I, I think there are way more school districts than there are prisons in this country, but there are way more people who wanna run jails than, than there are available opportunities.

And so a lot of those people, a lot of those men, 'cause they're all men, go on to be superintendents. And so there is this idea that, or just this personality type of, you know, I wanna be in charge, I wanna, I wanna have control, I wanna be respected, and they see themselves on the same level as these tech CEOs.

But they know they're not, right? They, they know that like well I'm, I'm making a public servant's salary. But there is this just like pathetic grasping insecurity with all of these guys. Uh, we saw it with, um- The, the, the former superintendent of LAUSD most, most notably, right? This guy who just wanted to be tech's best friend and just got rooked over and over again by these fraudulent products.

Um, and, you know- Millions and millions and millions of dollars just, like, flushed down the toilet Of public dollars. Yeah. Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, and, and, and, you know, again, there are people in that district who are now under indictment, um, and, and he's under investigation although he's no longer with, with the district.

And so you have a lot of people, um, you know, in, in the superintendent population that are just really ripe for, for exploitation. And even if you're well-intended, right, even if you're, like, the most virtuous and, uh, empathetic person on the planet, you are tasked with running a big bureaucracy, and you are held to account, and you do need data and numbers, and that is how you're kind of trained to think of things.

The industry's gotten really good about this, this pitch about, I mean, the, the things they love to say, that they love, love to repeat are 21st century skills, closing the digital divide, and equity. Those, those are the things they wanna talk about The problem is all that's BS because, you know, 21st century skills, first of all, what does that even mean?

But we do know that kids now are less computer literate today than they were 10 years ago. You know, you don't learn c- computer skills by osmosis. They have to be taught, and kids don't know how the internet works. They don't know how computers work. You can't really take them apart like they-- like we could when we were kids.

I mean, I, I coded a bunch of stuff. I mean, I'm not even like some computer whiz, but I, I, I coded my own websites. I built things, you know, using, using tools, and that's really not available to kids now. And then there's the digital divide and equity, right? That basically... And th- this was much more prevalent 15 years ago, but it still is a narrative of, well, the whole world's online now.

Haven't you heard all of the great connecting potential of the internet? But you would deny this to poor people, and you deny this to people of color. And so, you know, because computers are expensive, the internet's expensive, so it's, it's your, your job as schools to make sure that someone in the household has connection to the internet.

And so we, you know, Google are gonna come in and give this, this, you know, this, this free computer or this cheap computer to kids and therefore family members and that they can use for whatever they want. Well, there's a million problems with that. Number one, as I said, you know, Chromebooks are surveillance tools.

That's, that's all they are. Like, th- this is not a computer that's private. And so you're giving the, you know, the, the poorest and most vulnerable people the worst possible version of, of a computer. That's not fair at all. And then on, on top of that, I don't think it is public school's duty to do that sort of thing.

I think it's public school's duty to educate people, and you need to design for the least in your community. Every, every school district has homeless students, you know, p- p- people who don't have a stable place to live. And if you have to have a computer and access to electricity and access to the internet in order to access your education, you're, you're really discriminating against those people.

And, and we saw this fall apart during, during COVID when if we were designing for the least resourced people in the community, then we would be thinking about, well, how, how does a kid who doesn't have a stable place to live still do their homework and access their education? And that could be, you know, through printed material because a book doesn't go away when you don't have a place to plug it in, and you can still turn your homework in by writing it down and handing it over.

Is that as administratively convenient as doing it, you know, through the cloud? Maybe not, but it certainly was good enough for us. But more to the point, it's a really robust and, um, not brittle system like, like the one that, that we've built. And then just looking at the devices themselves, this idea that, you know, a whole family would use it, well, first of all, I think that, you know, most people have phones now, right?

I mean, that, that's really not something that, that is really a true problem to be solved anymore. But these devices are so controlled and surveilled that, you know, even like a parent doing things that an adult is legally allowed and, and may be required to do on a school computer, um, well, if that's tied to a kid, they could get in trouble.

And so, you know, there, there's just a lot of, as soon as these assertions come under any scrutiny at all, they, they collapse immediately. And so, you know, the, the real, the real pitch, whether it's, you know, received or not, is these are tools for a- administrative convenience, and these are tools to expand the, the, the audience of, of companies.

It's a way to capture attention, to capture users that were formerly off-limits. They were formerly protected behind the schoolhouse walls for seven hours a day. But now they are available to, to exploit during that time through these, through these devices. It's dark. Okay. Um, well, I'm glad that, dark as that is that you're trying to actually make it different.

So do you wanna talk a little bit about the cases you all have brought or where you want to intervene legally to start building a legal framework that protects kids so that they're not being exploited like this? There's a lot of places that we are wanting to intervene, but I'll focus on, on three. So this is a business model problem first and foremost.

If, if, if, you know, we think about surveillance capitalism and the internet, all of that basically is premised on wide, you know, just massive scale invasions of people's privacy. Those are only not legally actionable because we consent to the behavior. Companies put up terms of service and, you know, at least in the eyes of the law, we consent to those terms of service by using the platform.

The law says, "If you don't like it, don't use it." No big deal. You, you don't, no one's saying you have to be on Google. You, you can go and live your life without it. Practically speaking, obviously a lot of problems with that. I'm hoping that the law starts to catch up. And we actually have seen some, some positive movement, believe it or not, in the Supreme Court around, around these issues, you know, that basically the Supreme Court recently acknowledged that a cellphone is, you know, a, a necessary appendage to modern life, and you don't surrender your expectation of privacy just by having one.

And so the idea of like a geofence warrant is not something that is constitutionally permissible. So we're not quite there yet, but, but, but the idea is pretty much the law says notice and consent is the framework. The industry has contrived to eliminate the, the ability to consent at school. But that's not real.

Like, these, these, these aren't real defenses. They're not getting actual consent from, from parents, which are the, you know, legally they're the adults and they're the only ones with the legal capacity to consent to all these practices on behalf of their kids. And so really what you have is a surveillance company operating without a terms of service.

And so I'm not agreeing to any of this, and you're just coming and taking all this information from my kid without my permission, without compensation. You're sharing it widely. You're using it to profit yourselves, and, and that's a problem. And so we have these data privacy lawsuits, um, against companies that just go straight on and attack the business model.

And we've been getting some good traction there to try and knock down some of these just totally bogus defenses around, around consent. So that's, that's one place that we're, that we're intervening. The, the second place, and that's really, you know, where parents are experiencing the most pain and kids are suffering the most, are, you know, device-based harms that are happening in school.

We hear from countless parents where horrible things have happened to their kids on their school computer. And so what I like to tell people is, imagine the worst thing that can happen to a kid on the internet, it's happening to a kid on the internet at school. And so we have, you know, clients whose, you know, young daughters have been connected to people that they thought were peers and wound up being predators who then sexually abuse them in person.

We have people who have been sexually extorted through their school computer. We have, you know, young people who have been groomed and attempted to be abducted by, by predators. We have people who at a very young age were exposed to violent content that led to PTSD, to pornography that led to, you know, very problematic sexual behaviors, and we don't know how common that is.

Um, I've, I've been in touch with all of the, you know, mainstream, credible organizations that investigate and work, um, on, you know, abuse of children online, and nobody is collecting data on, you know, when a, when a devi- an electronic device, a computer is involved in a crime against a child, how did that device come to be in the child's life?

Was it a phone their parents gave them or a tablet? Was it something they bought themselves or, or got without their parents' knowledge, or was it a device at school? We don't know that, and I've, I've been on, kind of on a campaign to try and start collecting that data because anecdotally, I've, I've been asking these investigators.

There, there's a group called Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, and they coordinate with, with the FBI. They try and prevent internet crimes against children. I was having a conversation with, with one of their investigators about this issue, and, you know, it's like, "Okay, we don't collect data, but, like, in your experience, what, what do you...

what, what's your best guess?" And, uh, he's like, "Well, you know, I, I get about 300 of these cases a year, and I would say probably 25 to 50% involve a school computer in some way." And this is one guy in one county outside of Kansas City, right? So you have 150 cases of hands-on sex crimes against children involving a school computer.

I hope to God that's not, you know Something that we can just extrapolate out. But even if it's, you know, a, a fraction of that, it's still an extraordinary number of people who are being affected by this and, and we, and we don't even know it. Because our brains are addled by the technology industry's job of convincing us that most of the problems that technology creates can be solved by more technology.

So I can imagine some people hearing that and being like, "Well, then isn't it great that there's surveillance on these devices so that we can then have schools monitor for these situations and then prevent them from happening or deal with them when they arise?" 'Cause I imagine that you're not thinking that the school should be in a position of sharing devices that are not sufficiently controlled in the first place, um, having surveillance, uh, capabilities within those devices, and then when something goes wrong, being like, "Let's use those surveillance capabilities for good to, like, protect the kid."

Um, but, like, what are your thoughts on the kind of solution set around these, these types of issues? So that, that problem is, you know, e- exactly that. I, I completely agree that more surveillance is not the answer. More technology is, is not the answer. There is this layer... We talk about surveillance capitalism, the business model of the internet, but then there are companies, ed tech companies that operate as a explicit surveillance layer that purport to let school officials see what kids are doing on their school computers.

The problem is those things are snake oil. I mean, they, they, they, they really are. They're both over-inclusive and under-inclusive, and I've talked to whistleblowers from inside these companies that basically say, "Our sales and marketing team is, you know, four times our, our safety team, and we miss stuff all the time."

And, you know, to, to the point where, well, one of the whistleblowers missed a suicide, and they were a week late because they were so stacked up on tickets that they couldn't get to it in time. And when they, when they tried to intervene, they, they, they were told by the school official, "This, this is... It's, it's, it's too late.

It didn't actually work." But, you know, schools have this false sense of security where, oh, we, we, we've, we've got these, we've got these tools and our kids are gonna be safe, but then also can be used in this really coercive and, you know, punitive ways of surveilling every single thing a kid does on their computer.

And so, you know, it's, it's affecting what kids feel free to think and say and express and look at, and it's, it's really, really problematic from that end of it too, because it makes kids way more likely to conform and keep their head down and not challenge authority when they're under constant surveillance.

And so the surveillance is ineffective at preventing harm, but it's very effective at, um, you know, disciplining and, uh, quieting unwelcome, um, thoughts and behavior. Wild. Um, okay. What else are you guys working on? So we don't know how many of these, you know, horrible acute harms there are, but there, but there, there are a lot, a lot more than people probably expect, and families are usually bullied and shamed into silence when, when these bad things happen or, or, you know, made to blame themselves or even blame, blame- The, the thing I think that, that will really resonate with a lot of parents is the pervasive distraction.

The, the idea that my kid, you know, they say they're doing homework, but they're just screwing around on YouTube. They're playing Fortnite, whatever. You know, we don't do devices at home, but now they're, they're suddenly doing all of this gaming and chatting and stuff at school. They're on social media.

They're buying things, and that's just not how we wanted to raise our kid, but here we are. And again, you know, what, what I like to say is, uh, what students experience as distraction, Google experiences as profit They make money by following you around on the internet. They want you to be on the internet.

That's what, I mean, that's why they're there. They are there in school, in part, to harvest, you know, a reservoir of attention that was previously unavailable to them. And, you know, we know, thanks to the social media cases, that, um, executives at YouTube viewed this as a problem. W- what they call the 80 million hour gap between any given Thursday, when kids are at school and not watching YouTube, and any given Saturday, when they're at home watching YouTube.

There's an 80 million hour difference, and they thought, "By golly, we, we gotta close that gap." 'Cause they're watching that much YouTube on Thursday and not when they're at home? They're watching that little on Thursday and that much on Saturday, and they wanna get those numbers up. Oh, man. They, they, they, they want kids watching 80 million more hours during, during the school day than on a weekend day.

And so they, they connived and contrived to get YouTube, you know, there in front of kids. And so YouTube comes in a h- uh, at least for a long time, came active by default. You know, nevermind the, um, the terms of service that say you gotta be 18 or have parents' permission. Nevermind all the commercial aspects of it.

It was just there and available to kids to close the gap, to, to make sure that, you know, really when you should be at school and learning, that you're actually there watching, watching YouTube. That's just so gross. It's super gross, yeah. And they might have been delusional enough to think that, like, YouTube was this empowering force in kids' lives or whatever.

God help 'em if they believe that. But, um, but, but, but at the end of the day, that's... I mean, these are businesses. They are trying to grow, you know? I mean, th- there is nothing stopping a company in the absence of regulation, in the absence of, you know, jail time and laws and everything else. You know, a, a capitalist enterprise, they want to grow and make money, period.

And that's what they're going to do. They're gonna find new markets wherever, unless it becomes more expensive to be in those markets than, than not. So this is all by design. I mean, whe- whether, you know, how intentional it is remains to be seen, but certainly it is an aspect of the product design, that these, these are not products that were designed from the ground up of what does a kindergartner need from an electronic device to make sure that they're learning and that they're safe and that their body is healthy?

What would that device look like? How would that be different for a second grader? How would that be different for a fourth grader? How would that look different middle school or in high school? That's not how any of this worked. Google had a crappy computer that nobody wanted and found a, a market of dupes to, to buy it I mean, it's, it's just, it's, it's really that simple.

You know, they, they thought they had the MacBook killer, uh, back in 2011, and it flopped because it turns out adults need to save stuff locally, and we like having, you know, programs that can run on, on locally on a machine. Uh, there's a lot of software that, that, that you need to download. Uh, they can't all just be web-based apps.

Also, Google has more money than anyone, but all of their products suck, and they can't even do formatting right. Like, the... it's, it's a very difficult and unpleasant, um, experience for, for professional users. And so nobody wanted it, but they were able to dump it into schools under this guise of 21st century skills and closing the digital divide and everything else.

And so as part of that, you know, they, they want the data, they wanna collect information about people, and that pain the parents are feeling, that is a f- designed feature of this whole digital ecosystem that Google has, has unleashed in schools. Was there a third area? So the third kind of... the, the, the biggest looming threat is AI Right.

And, and this is something that has been, you know, just forced on, on young people, and it's present in the classroom, and there are a million reasons why it's a horrible idea to have AI in school. And so, you know, again, you've got kids having access to AI they would not have had access but for their school computer.

You know, and we've got clients much like the, the well-publicized cases where, you know, they had no access to AI, but they got on YouTube, saw a video for character AI, developed one of these horrible parasocial relationships, developed eating disorder, developed all of these awful things that we've already seen, you know, play out in, in the press, and that wouldn't have happened but for their school computer.

We have, you know, AI programs that Google itself is pushing into school computers that, you know, groups like Common Sense Media, which I have major, major, um, critiques of, uh, in terms of their relative c- closeness to the tech industry, even they are saying this is unacceptably dangerous for kids to use.

You know, Google's AI overviews, um, that, that just show up in chat, those are unacceptable for kids under 18 to use. The only reason Gemini is not also unacceptable is because theoretically it can be turned off, although Google sounds like it's making moves to remove that capability and just have Gemini on by default for every, every kid on every Chromebook.

These things, again, these chatbots, they're not designed for safety. They're not designed to help kids. They're designed to be parasocial. They are just another evolution in data extraction. I mean, I, I, I view the chatbot interface more than anything else as the next evolution of persuasive design, the next evolution of surveillance capitalism, right?

Making more human behavior legible, so you have to infer less, and then allowing you to infer ever richer, you know, make ever richer inferences. And thinking about, you know, the evolution from Google Search, where you typed a few things and some behavior could be inferred, to social media, where there's a lot more legible information that allowed more inferences to be made.

And then now it's like these things are enticing people to pour their guts out, and so you don't even have to think about, or you don't have to guess at their psychological state. You can just collect that directly and then make all these other inferences about that. And so it's all the same stuff. Um, it's all bad for the same reasons, and that's before we even get to things like cheating and cognitive offloading and, you know, basically replacing the knowledge acquisition that's supposed to occur at school with, with these devices.

And so, um, it's horrible. We're seeing the harms already. I expect the harms will only increase as, you know, the- these remain available, um, unless, you know, schools take a really concerted effort to say, "No. No to AI." It's totally hostile to the idea of education entirely. This just... Whatever its merits outside the classroom, and I think there are basically none It does not belong in the classroom.

Yeah, I mean, I was very happy to see Norway has just basically said no f- to it in, um, I think primary school, which I don't know if that precludes them saying no in secondary school. But, um, it feels like there is a wave of energy that is kind of taking a clear-eyed look at technology that might be put into schools, and then saying, "Actually, maybe we should reconsider."

What do you think the mood is with policymakers and schools in terms of considering the role technology might play moving forward? Policymakers are more receptive than they've ever been. Um, I still don't think they get it, right? I still, I still think that there is... Or more to the point, I still think they're mostly captured by industry and, and industry narratives.

And so th- there, there's still going to be, you know, the, the, the pivot is now going to be, "Well, there's good uses of technology and bad uses of technology, but we have-- But technology is inevitable, right? And we ha- we have to train kids. We ha- we have to help them learn. And all of the stuff you guys are complaining about, well, that's the bad stuff, and that should never have happened."

But it's like, well, it happened 'cause of you guys. Like, it's, it's, it's your fault if all this bad stuff is happening. And so we're already seeing that, that turn. You know, I don't really have a lot of hope in superintendents doing the right thing just 'cause of their own willpower. I think what's gonna happen, and what we're seeing, is these grassroots parent resistance movements and mobilizations that are happening all over the country, and it's been...

I mean, it, it's been an overnight occurrence, uh, seven or eight years in the making, right? I mean, I've, I've been involved with the Screens in Schools group and, and Fairplay. I think that that incubated a lot of this. It was started a year before I joined. I want to give credit to all of my colleagues and friends and organizers there, I mean, almost all of whom are women and moms.

And, you know, I, I think that that should not go overlooked, that this really is a movement of active women and moms who, who have been doing the organizing. Um, I've been, you know, fortunate to be able to work alongside them. And on the other side are a lot of men, you know, technologists and, and superintendents who are mostly men, and who just write them off as just hysterical women who don't know anything about technology, which couldn't be further from the truth.

It's like so many people are so accomplished and, you know, have backgrounds in this. But there is just this, "Well, parents complain. Who cares? Forget them." And what we're seeing is not only mobilizing, but then turning that into political power and understanding that, you know, school boards, those are democratic institutions.

You know, by, by and large. In some cities, they're appointed by the mayor, but most places you can run for school board. And we are seeing, you know, these communities build up candidates and, and run and win. And if, you know, kind of the During the, you know, COVID crazy school board takeover by this right-wing movement was the dark side of this.

This is kind of the light side of that, right? This is like actual democratic responsiveness of people saying, "Well, this does matter." You know, this, th- it's not that politics is for somebody else. W- we don't have the luxury of that anymore, and I've been really heartened to see several of, you know, people, m- my friends who have gone from being activists to school board members, now even being on the legislatures in their various states, and so it's a really inspiring thing, and I think that's what's gonna change it.

That's what's gonna change it is, is, is democratic response. Also, changing material conditions. You know, the, the one good thing I can say about AI is they have made chip costs so expensive that Apple has had to surprise school districts with, "Well, guess what? iPads cost $100, you know, more each this year."

You know, which is a massive burden on a school district to have a surprise bill for a quarter million dollars or a million dollars that you can't negotiate. And so, you know, I, I do think that the, uh, the false promise of cost savings is gonna be laid bare, and eventually we're gonna stop trying to invent the teacher-replacing machine and just hire enough teachers, um, 'cause that's really...

You know, people are afraid of political power, but, um, we need teachers. We need qualified, well-paid, you know, well-taken-care-of teachers, and we need to let them have room to do their jobs. And I would like to see, you know, labor leaders in, in the education movement be much more militant around this stuff.

You know, it is not okay for Silicon Valley, and to, to contrive with a couple of, you know, Amway billionaires from Michigan to try and replace your jobs just because they don't like labor. That's ridiculous. Like, know what you're doing when you invite this stuff in. It is not empowering anybody. Um, and if you look at all of these tech CEOs and how they're raising their kids, they'll be fine.

Those kids are not on the internet. They're not on computers. They're, they're doing stuff in real life, and if it's good enough for Zuck's kids, and Sam Altman's kids, and Sundar Pichai's kids, why isn't it good enough for our kids? If you are trying to talk to someone who's, like, thinking about this topic, they're, maybe they're a parent, what's something that you want them to know about edtech?

Nothing that your kid uses in school was designed for their benefit. Not a single piece of technology or, or software platform was designed to keep your kid safe or help them learn. Wow. Okay, that's a good one. What would you encourage them to do? Like, are there any universal steers you give parents that want to engage on these topics or, or, um, do something to take action?

I would say fi- find your people. Find people in your community. If you are worried about this, s- so are a lot of your neighbors and friends. Um, it can be uncomfortable to have these first conversations, but, you know, starting with, you know, "Have you noticed this? I, I've noticed this with my kid. I don't like it.

What do you think? Is this a problem in your house?" Wh- whatever it is, and then find, find your people. And when you do, don't feel like you need to reinvent the wheel. You know, there, there has been grassroots organizing around this for a long time, and what we want is to welcome people into the movement as quickly as possible and get up to speed as quickly as possible.

And so there's a handful of groups that I'd like to mention that all, and, and we're all allied and all kind of work together, um, in, in different ways. Find the ones... You know, there's different chapters, different places that may, you know, have more or less density. I gotta shout out Fair Play and, uh, the Children's Screen Time Action Network, which is my organizing home, that's incubated a lot of these other great groups.

They're incredible, and so you can go to fairplayforkids.org and find out how to get involved there. There's also the Phone Free Schools movement, and then also Schools Beyond Screens. These, these are groups of, you know, active, organized parents that... I mean, really, we talk about screens, talk about phone free.

The, the leadership of this movement, um, understands very, in a very sophisticated way what the problem is, right? But, um, parents for, you know, for establishing surveillance capitalism exclusion zones, that's not quite as pithy. Um, and people may not quite understand what you're talking about. But when we talk about phone bans, that's really what people are talking about, is kids should have a physical space in their life to be free from the imperatives of the surveillance capitalist economy.

They should be free to not be surveilled and observed. They should be free to be their authentic selves. They should be free to have a childhood that's not used against them now or for the rest of their lives. That's what these movements want. It's not just, you know, a bunch of, you know, reactionaries who don't like phones.

It, it's much more sophisticated than that. There's another group, um, Mothers Against Media Addiction, and that's more focused on, uh, social media stuff, but they, they've been really good about mobilizing families whose children have suffered online harms, you know, whether it's, um, suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, and they've been really good.

If you want to, like, get out and take it to the streets, they've had a lot of, um, in-person mobilization efforts. And so start there. Those are four great groups to get started with, but don't suffer in silence. Don't try and do it alone. Don't try and reinvent the wheel. And then I guess the, the other, other call to action would be if your kid has been hurt by any of this stuff, come to our website and see if we can help you.

So we're, we're the EdTech Law Center Edtech.law is our website. And we, you know, so we are a for-profit law firm, but we don't charge out of pocket for our services. And so we, we do things on contingency. We get paid only if we win. We wanna help people. You know, this is the most fulfilling job I've ever had by a mile.

And then my, my last plug is if you're really concerned about unaccountable AI, we are working up an action that would vastly financially incentivize these companies to, um, self-police the safety of the, uh, users on their platform. And so if you're, uh, the parent of, of a kid under 18 who's used the major platforms, you know, ChatGPT or Gemini, and are interested in, um, AI accountability, please reach out.

We, we are looking for people, um, pretty urgently for, for that one and are very excited about it. I can't say more right now, but if you want to do your part to impose accountability on the AI industry, re- reach out through our website as well, and that, that could be an opportunity to, um, take some power back.

A huge thanks to Andrew for sketching out the scale of this issue and for continuing to fight for the kids who can't consent and the parents who don't find out what's happening until it's way too late. If you think your kid has been hurt by edtech in their schools, don't hesitate to reach out to the EdTech Law Center.

In fact, just right now, Andrew's team is looking to hear from concerned parents whose kids are using AI chatbots like ChatGPT. If you live in California, it's very specific, um, and have a story or a worry to share, get in touch with them because they are trying to find people that might want to join part of a class action lawsuit, and we will drop the link to that in the show notes.

And if you're just watching this episode and wondering, what do we know about the way that edtech works or doesn't work for kids' cognitive development and educational outcomes, be sure to go back and listen to the rest of our back to school series. We've heard from Dr. Jared Horvath, who broke down the science behind exactly how technologies fail kids in schools, and the force that is Ifeoma Ozoma, who shared her personal fight to get AI out of her local school's classrooms.

Tune in next week for our final back to school episode, where we're going to be tackling an even stickier subject, child safety and age verification online. Thanks as always to the podcast team, Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout, for making this happen every week, and we will see you next time.