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I’ve been reporting on kids’ mental health for over a year now, and one concern keeps coming up in my interviews with parents and experts: school apps. Blackboard, Schoology, ClassDojo, the list goes on — these apps help teachers communicate with families and parents and other caregivers monitor their children’s learning. Well, isn’t it?
Kind of.
These tools started appearing in the early 2010s but really took off in the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic, when millions of schoolchildren were forced to adapt to learning from home, says Leah Plunkett. Shareholderhood: Why we should think before we talk about our kids online and a faculty member at Harvard Law School.
Some, like Blackboard or Google Classroom, act as “open grade books,” where parents and kids can see each assignment’s grade as a teacher enters it. Others, such as ClassDojo, allow families to monitor children’s behavior at school. Can still be used to send messages to others or manage curriculum such as band or sports.
Apps are now ubiquitous — Open Grade Book tools are being used in most public and private high schools in America, Gail Cornwall The Cut Report. These tools are an improvement on the system many millennials remember, where students and parents didn’t find out about their grades until the school quarter or semester was almost over.
By then, “sometimes it’s too late to bring those grades up,” said Meg Saint-Esprit, a Pittsburgh-based journalist and content creator whose middle school of her nearly 13-year-old son uses Google Classroom and Power School. Now kids and parents can track their progress — and their difficulties — together
But the apps have raised privacy concerns, with some experts fearing that sensitive data about children could fall into the hands of cybercriminals or later be used to limit children’s access.
Others fear that by encouraging parents to monitor every fluctuation in their children’s grades, the tools are fueling an achievement-obsessed culture that can cause stress and unrest among children. “It can feel like you’re always plugged in,” says Saint-Esprit. “It can feel a bit like a rush culture.”
School apps are helpful — and stressful
If you don’t have school-age children at home, you might be surprised by the number of apps that include contemporary education.
Saint-Esprit, who has four children including middle-schoolers, uses not only Google Classroom and PowerSchool but also Seesaw, Remind, Bloomz, ClassDojo, PowerSchool, PaySchools Central, CutTime and TeamSnap. The notifications alone can be a time-suck for parents: I got at least one every time I called for this story.
Still, for many families, apps are a more efficient mode of communication than a flyer in a kid’s backpack. Parents often appreciate the transparency of the Open Grade Book app, as well as the ability to quickly message a teacher instead of setting up a conference during the workday (some teachers Appreciate the flexibility, too). “It’s fundamentally good and constructive for school systems to have real-time, reliable ways to communicate with parents and guardians,” Plunkett said.
Phone apps are not a reliable means of communication for everyone. Some families No smartphone. Some don’t have the extra time required to navigate a veritable forest of login and setup instructions, some of which can be confusing even for relatively tech-savvy parents (I’m not speaking from experience, by any means).
With open grade book tools and other school communication tech, “there are clear ways that privileged parties benefit and others don’t,” says Kathryn Shelton, an assistant professor of educational technology at Northern Arizona University. EdWeek said.
App developers are aware of these concerns and some have taken steps to address equity issues. ClassDojo and SeesawFor example, allow teachers to translate messages into a student’s home language.
Beyond accessibility, apps bring other issues. Showing every assignment grade on a phone or computer screen and knowing your parents will see it can be anxiety-producing for kids. Saint-Esprit’s son recently got a low grade on an assignment and “he was worried about it while we were waiting for that grade to pop up,” Saint-Esprit said.
“Google Classroom is a source of stress for me,” her son, Eli, told me in an email. “It’s hard to navigate.”
Apps can encourage an obsessive focus on grades at the expense of learning. “He’s constantly like, ‘Did they grade that test? Did they grade that essay?'” Parents of a 12-year-old Kat said.
Emily Weinstein, its lead author Recent reports Regarding teen stress and burnout, said apps and the environment of “constant quantification” they can create may contribute to the high levels of academic stress felt by today’s youth. Other experts have argued that the ability to track children through apps has led to a hypervigilance among parents that leads them to limit their children’s autonomy — which in turn can harm children’s mental health and prevent them from developing important social and cognitive skills.
“We’ve got this idea right now that the closer we keep our kids, the more information we have, the more direction we have, the more control, the better off our kids will be,” says Lynn Lyons, a therapist who specializes in anxiety disorders. Told me last year. “And research shows the opposite.”
Apps also raise privacy concerns
In addition to mental health concerns, some experts worry that the apps leave schools and families vulnerable to hackers. Some apps are used to communicate pickup plans, which may include a child’s geographic location, Plunkett said. “If there’s a breach of that app, then suddenly, whoever’s getting that information, has access to where every child in that school or school district is going.”
Meanwhile, students’ records of behavioral challenges in school can come back to harm them later in life, Plunkett said. And the use of AI by schools and districts is betting on all conversations about student data A school can use behavioral data to deny a student a letter of recommendation, Plunkett said, but “I’m more concerned about those instances where there can’t necessarily be a human review,” where data can be aggregated and analyzed to make predictions about students or Computer to draw conclusions.
Schools have long kept data on student grades and test scores But the apps used today raise the possibility of collecting and storing a larger, more granular data that can be used in ways that students and families may not realize until the proper railroading is in place.
Updated federal youth privacy laws would be a start, Plunkett said. App developers are required to provide schools with “nutrition label-style information” about what data their apps collect and how it can be used, he said.
Schools, meanwhile, can prevent app overload by communicating really important information — a sick child, a serious behavior problem — via email, phone or face-to-face meeting, Saint-Esprit said.
Parents should aim to get “enough information to know what’s going on,” but not so much that “there’s this constant state of looking over the child’s shoulder,” Plunkett said.
“There was something to be said for the brick-and-mortar days” of the ’80s and ’90s, he added. “We went to school and our parents didn’t necessarily know what we did there every day, and I think that was probably good for everybody.”
what am i reading
A increasing numbers of States Considering legislation to protect the privacy or compensation of child abusers.
More states are using opioid settlement money to help “grandfather” — Grandparents raising children whose parents struggle with substance abuse.
Young people today love visuals Gummy Halloween Candy Chocolate option, which is a wrong opinion.
My older kid and I just finished Erie Elementary series, about a bad elementary school that eats children (a premise that really resonates with kids who have mixed feelings about school). Now we need to start a new book series — I’m taking recommendations.
from my inbox
“The high school (and even middle school!) student experience has become much more rigorous and demanding,” a 17-year-old reader wrote to me in response to last week’s newsletter about teen stress and burnout. “Pursuing my field of interest requires me to do a tremendous amount of work just to apply to a reputable institution and find a flood of essays waiting for me — Caltech alone has nine. In these past four years, I have done research competitions, non-profit work, math competitions, astronomy competitions, and quiz bowls just to make my application competitive. I’m still worried about the future because I’m not sure if what I’m doing will matter.”
That’s a tough thing to hear from a young person, but what the researchers found confirms it their report. It’s a reminder of the need to examine the economic and cultural pressures that children feel they have to achieve at such a young age.
Finally, I’d love to hear from families and teachers about apps — do you, your students, and/or the kids in your life use them to keep track of grades and extracurriculars? Do you love them, hate them, or both? Contact anna.north@vox.com.
