What Minneapolis Public Schools learned from six months of monitoring student communications

[WhiskeyGrinder]

https://www.minnpost.com/education/2021/09/what-minneapolis-public-schools-learned-from-six-months-of-monitoring-student-communications-inside-and-outside-school-hours/

Nearly a year after The 74 submitted public records requests to understand the Minneapolis district’s use of Gaggle during the pandemic, a trove of documents offer an unprecedented look into how one school system deploys a controversial security tool that grew rapidly during COVID-19, but carries significant civil rights and privacy implications.

The data, gleaned from those 1,300 incident reports in the first six months of the crisis, highlight how Gaggle’s team of content moderators subject children to relentless digital surveillance long after classes end for the day, including on weekends, holidays, late at night and over the summer. In fact, only about a quarter of incidents were reported to district officials on school days between 8 a.m and 4 p.m., bringing into sharp relief how the service extends schools’ authority far beyond their traditional powers to regulate student speech and behavior, including at home.

Now, as COVID-era restrictions subside and Minneapolis students return to in-person learning this fall, a tool that was pitched as a remote learning necessity isn’t going away anytime soon. Minneapolis officials reacted swiftly when the pandemic engulfed the nation and forced students to learn from the confines of their bedrooms, paying more than $355,000 — including nearly $64,000 in federal emergency relief money — to partner with Gaggle until 2023. Faced with a public health emergency, the district circumvented normal procurement rules, a reality that prevented concerned parents from raising objections until after it was too late.

With each alert, Matlock and other district officials were given a vivid look into students’ most intimate thoughts and online behaviors, raising significant privacy concerns. It’s unclear, however, if any of them made kids safer. Independent research on the efficacy of Gaggle and similar services is all but nonexistent.

[Klaralven]

1. It looks like Gaggle only analyses what kids say on their school accounts

Not on their own Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, etc. accounts.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

2. That's correct, but "only" is doing a lot of work in that statement.

[Klaralven]

3. It seems similar to employer work accounts -- if someone else provides the account, it's not private

[WhiskeyGrinder]

4. Right, it's not private. But the issue here is that a separate, private company that parents

know little about is the one monitoring student communication, and then that company is sharing the info it wants to share with the school district, with little transparency about their processes around collecting, analyzing, storing and distributing that information.

[Igel]

5. Except that Gaggle sounds like MIR here.

They're content moderators.

Imagine if homophobic comments are posted on a school-sponsored communications board. Or Nazi "kill the Jews" sort of things. Or utterly racist in the more usual anti-black or anti-Latino ways.

You'd want somebody to monitor this, flag it, and possibly delete it.

My district used Gaggle for a while (disclaimer: I never used it because I found no use for it). It was clear that the school effectively owned it and disclaimers abounded that it would be moderated. It wasn't like Gaggle did things on its own, without district knowledge: District read the contract, signed the contract, and provided input as to how to manage inappropriate speech. Engage in hate speech on a district-sponsored platform and it was the district's responsibility to educate you about the proper norms for public discourse on that platform.

There's no need for transparency. Everything you type in Gaggle (or similar services) is processed, as expected, through a central server (probably several, but they're linked so let's just call it one). It's checked by machine algorithm. If flagged, it's checked by a human--maybe at Gaggle, maybe in district. Maybe it's just flagged and nobody actually checks on the speech, they just hope it's all okay.

My district uses Google apps for all kinds of things. And we make it clear every year, repeatedly, that the server space is not theirs but the district's. You put stuff on the server you have no right to privacy. Their school tablets? Same thing: They're subject to being seized and analyzed at any time. In fact, we have monitoring software so that teachers can do the same thing to prevent cheating. And while that software *could* work when students are at home doing the remote "thang" it was deemed inappropriate to monitor them outside of school hours. But if we suspected anything, their computers would be blocked until they turned them in on campus and had them checked.

[Volaris]

6. Maybe I'm too much a libertarian for my own good,

But if my kid had this for classwork, I'd just tell them to use it for classwork only, and if u wanna flirt with girls or boys just do it on your own phone or face to face.

Because OF COURSE its run by Dirty Snitches lol!!

(On Edit) I will say this: districts checking PERSONAL social media pages that ARE NOT related to Districr Content, and then using THAT against educators pisses me off to no end. If I'm a grown ass adult, and I'm on vacation, I'm ALLOWED to have on a bikini with a drink in my hand. If that's NOT posted to District Content, the District can go fuck themselves. Are students gonna see it? Yeah, maybe. But so what?

[iemanja]

7. That's what they do instead of educating students

From one of the worst performing school districts in the country.