In-person teaching has resumed in the US – but electronic snooping hasn’t stopped

‘The boom in student monitoring software is a depressing reminder of how little society values teachers and how much it fetishizes technology.’ Photograph: Dean Lewins/AAP

Surveillance software is outing students

Getting your kid ready to go back to school in the US? Well, you’re going to need all the essentials then: a bulletproof backpack and a school-issued tablet or laptop, pre-programmed with creepy spyware. During the pandemic, remote schooling led to a boom in surveillance software which let teachers monitor everything kids were doing on school-issued devices. Now that in-person teaching has resumed, however, the electronic monitoring hasn’t stopped. Rather, it has increased. According to a new report from the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), 89% of teachers have said that their schools will continue using student-monitoring software, up 5% from last year.