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"The current system places too great a burden on individual faculty who would, under the circumstances, appear to have perverse incentives: Pursuing these matters lowers course evaluations, takes their severely limited time away from research for promotion, and unfortunately personalizes the issue when it is not personal at all, but a violation against the university."

In the humanities, professors have found technological tools to check for blatant copying on essays, and have caught so many culprits that the practice of running papers through plagiarism-detection services has become routine at many colleges. But that software is not suited to science-class assignments.

a "studio" model of teaching

The parents paid tuition in cash

The idea that students should be working in a shell is so interesting. It never even occurred to me as a student that I shouldn't work with someone else on my homework. How else do you figure it out? I guess that is peer-to-peer teaching. Copying someone else's work and presenting it as your own is clearly wrong (and, as demonstrated above, doesn't do the student any good), but learning from the resources at hand ought to be encouraged. Afterall, struggling through homework problems in intro physics is how you learn in the first place.

Something that's not purely digital but also that the efficiency of the face-to-face time is much greater

Can we transform this credentialing process? And in fact the ideal would be to separate out the idea of proving your knowledge from the way you acquire that knowledge

Employers have decided that having the breadth of knowledge that's associated with a four-year degree is often something they want to see in the people they give that job to. So instead of testing for that different profession, they'll be testing that you have that broader exposure

that failing student is a disaster for everyone

What is it that we need to do to strengthen this fundamental part of our country that both in a broad sort of economic level and an individual-rights level is the key enabler. And it's amazing how little effort's been put into this. Of saying, OK, why are some teachers at any different level way better than others? You've got universities in this country with a 7-percent completion rate. Why is it that they don't come under pressure to change what they're doing to come up with a better way of doing things?

We bet on the change agents within the universities. And so, various universities come to us and say, We have some ideas about completion rates, here are some things we want to try out, it's actually budget that holds us back from being able to do that. People come to us and say, We want to try a hybrid course where some piece is online, some piece is not, and we're aiming this at the students that are in the most need, not just the most elite. So that's who we're giving grants to, people who are trying out new things in universities. Now the idea that if you have a few universities that figure out how to do things well. how do you spread these best practices, that's a tough challenge. It's not the quite same way as in the private sector that if somebody's doing something better, the price signals force that to be adopted broadly. Here, things move very slowly even if they are an improvement.

Q. Some of what you've been talking about is getting people to completion by weeding out extraneous courses. There's a concern by some that that might create pressure to make universities into a kind of job-training area without the citizenship focus of that broad liberal-arts degree.

it is important to distinguish when people are taking extra courses that broaden them as a citizen and that would be considered a plus, versus they're just marking time because they're being held up because the capacity doesn't exist in the system to let them do what they want to do. As you go through the student survey data, it's mostly the latter. But I'm the biggest believer in taking a lot of different things. And hopefully, if these courses are appealing enough, we can get people even after they've finished a college degree to want to go online and take these courses.

Other countries are sending more kids to college. They're getting higher completion rates. They've moved ahead of us

There's nothing that was more important to me in terms of the kind of opportunity I had personally. I went to a great high school. I went to a great university. I only went three years, but it doesn't matter; it was still extremely valuable to me to be in that environment. And I had fantastic professors throughout that whole thing. And so, if every kid could have that kind of education, we'd achieve a lot of goals both at the individual and country level

One of the strengths of higher ed is the variety. But the variety has also meant that if somebody is doing something particularly well, it's hard to map that across a lot of different institutions. There aren't very many good metrics. At least in high schools we can talk about dropout rates. Completion rate was really opaque, and not talked about a lot. The quality-measure things are equally different. We don't have a gold standard like SAT scores or No Child Left Behind up at the collegiate level. And of course, kids are more dispersed in terms of what their career goals are at that point. So it's got some things that make it particularly challenging, but it has a lot in common, and I'd say it's equally important to get it right

When Dapier talks with other teen librarians about the issue of school surveillance, “we’re very alarmed,” he said. “It sort of trains the next generation that [surveillance] is normal, that it’s not an issue. What is the next generation’s Mark Zuckerberg going to think is normal?

“It’s the school as panopticon, and the sweeping searchlight beams into homes, now, and to me, that’s just disastrous to intellectual risk-taking and creativity.”

“They’re so unclear that I’ve just decided to cut off the research completely, to not do any of it.”

“They are all mandatory, and the accounts have been created before we’ve even been consulted,” he said. Parents are given almost no information about how their children’s data is being used, or the business models of the companies involved. Any time his kids complete school work through a digital platform, they are generating huge amounts of very personal, and potentially very valuable, data. The platforms know what time his kids do their homework, and whether it’s done early or at the last minute. They know what kinds of mistakes his kids make on math problems.

Felix, now 12, said he is frustrated that the school “doesn’t really [educate] students on what is OK and what is not OK. They don’t make it clear when they are tracking you, or not, or what platforms they track you on. “They don’t really give you a list of things not to do,” he said. “Once you’re in trouble, they act like you knew.”

As of 2018, at least 60 American school districts had also spent more than $1m on separate monitoring technology to track what their students were saying on public social media accounts, an amount that spiked sharply in the wake of the 2018 Parkland school shooting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive advocacy group that compiled and analyzed school contracts with a subset of surveillance companies.

Many parents also said that they wanted more transparency and more parental control over surveillance. A few years ago, Ben, a tech professional from Maryland, got a call from his son’s principal to set up an urgent meeting. His son, then about nine or 10-years old, had opened up a school Google document and typed “I want to kill myself.” It was not until he and his son were in a serious meeting with school officials that Ben found out what happened: his son had typed the words on purpose, curious about what would happen. “The smile on his face gave away that he was testing boundaries, and not considering harming himself,” Ben said. (He asked that his last name and his son’s school district not be published, to preserve his son’s privacy.) The incident was resolved easily, he said, in part because Ben’s family already had close relationships with the school administrators.

there is still no independent evaluation of whether this kind of surveillance technology actually works to reduce violence and suicide.

Certain groups of students could easily be targeted by the monitoring more intensely than others, she said. Would Muslim students face additional surveillance? What about black students? Her daughter, who is 11, loves hip-hop music. “Maybe some of that language could be misconstrued, by the wrong ears or the wrong eyes, as potentially violent or threatening,” she said.

The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy was founded in 2014, in the wake of parental outrage over the attempt to create a standardized national database that would track hundreds of data points about public school students, from their names and social security numbers to their attendance, academic performance, and disciplinary and behavior records, and share the data with education tech companies. The effort, which had been funded by the Gates Foundation, collapsed in 2014 after fierce opposition from parents and privacy activists.

“More and more parents are organizing against the onslaught of ed tech and the loss of privacy that it entails. But at the same time, there’s so much money and power and political influence behind these groups,”

some privacy experts – and students – said they are concerned that surveillance at school might actually be undermining students’ wellbeing

“I do think the constant screen surveillance has affected our anxiety levels and our levels of depression.” “It’s over-guarding kids,” she said. “You need to let them make mistakes, you know? That’s kind of how we learn.”