What are the ethical implications of NOT using student learning data to support student learning? How will this ruling affect the development of adaptive or personalized learning systems? How will it, for instance, affect the ability to identify learning gaps at scale based on race or gender?

A kid’s world is overloaded with advertising optimization in their games, videos and online experiences. It happens whenever kids don’t announce themselves as kids. I’m worried that this ruling won’t do anything about hyper optimized advertisements but will create meaningful barriers to the data-driven improvement of educational software.

Keep in mind that most edtech companies are decades behind other technology companies in their use of user data. That’s because the kids don’t pay, so optimizing their experiences or learning outcomes don’t meaningfully affect the bottom line. In this context, framing the use of student learning data as “surveillance” is very cynical.

To give an example, this ruling appears to forbid the use of formative assessment data (patterns of what students know or don’t know) to build adaptive learning systems. If so, that would significantly impair edtech innovation.