Larry Cuban was asked this question by a reporter. His answer was no, because part of the job of a teacher is to conduct surveillance of students and to monitor their work.
“..Maintaining order and constant surveillance of students has been, historically, what teachers have to do in order for students to learn. Before there were computer devices and monitoring software, teachers walked up and down aisles of desks and around the perimeter of the classroom inspecting what students were doing.
“It was the job of the teacher to know that students were working on what the teacher asked them to do.
“In my judgment, when a teacher looks at student screens while a lesson is underway, there is no invasion of student privacy. It is simply what teachers do as part of their role in guiding student learning.”
He does not engage in the issues that most concerns readers here: the mining of student data collected by the software corporation as students work and the relentless drive by tech companies not only to monetize personally identically information, gathered without the knowledge or consent of students, but the effort by those corporations to replace expert teachers with technology.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
With, or without, technology, the surveillance of students has never helped them to learn.
Here is one piece explaining why;
http://carolblack.org/the-gaze/
Yes, data-mining is the unacknowledged issue here. Also: is the teacher a warden or an educator? Wardens surveil their charges closely to confirm student compliance with directives. Educators model activities, pose problems which capture student interest and imagination, and integrate themselves into the learning process students display when they accept the project. The representation of the teacher as marching up and down aisles to supervise conduct is why Foucault proposed schooling as a discipline apparatus to normalize students into docile and productive compliance.
Interesting. I would be very concerned if the tech industry, and its many loyal fans in the press, were trying to conflate student privacy with classroom management. Let’s not start telling teachers to stay away from students. I’m sure tech companies can get purer data (and more social networking data) without a teacher’s involvement, but data mining is not what school is intended to be. I have always been struck by how many techies have asked me to allow tweets and surveys in class, the most data rich uses of tech. No, students do not have a right to privacy from a teacher to look at whatever they want on their desks; they have a right to privacy from outsiders like Microsoft, Google, Facebook… Cambridge Analytica. (They also have a right not to be recorded or filmed.)
Simple analogy before I head to school:
Schools have the responsibility to oversee students while out at recess, but outsiders do not have the right to fly a drone or helicopter over the schoolyard during recess.
The United States lacks the political will to regulate Silicon Valley. Too many of our representatives are beholden to tech companies. They refuse to protect consumers and students. They refuse to hold Silicon Valley responsible for their off-shore tax avoidance schemes. They allow tech companies to insert themselves into legislation.
The EU has done a much better job protecting its citizenry. They recently passed a sweeping privacy law that essentially gives consumers ownership of their data. The US has little interest in passing a comparable law. https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/internet-telecoms/data-protection-online-privacy/index_en.htm
YES. Not only does the nation lack the political will to regulate Silicon Valley, over time Silicon Valley has been very strategically changing up the very “will” of the people through its control over the tech world (a world both created and “normed” by a select few views and voices).
Eventually, the tech companies like Fakebook and Google will possess so much private information about everyone including politicians that no one will be able to control them.
Effectively, the entire population will become subject to a sort of blackmail –techmail.
We may actually have already reached that point, but if not, it won’t be long.
and what bothers me the most is that those who will be controlling society through technology aggressively approach problems using only one side of the brain (statistical/algorithm), along with typically understanding only one idea of culture (patriarchy) and one idea of social value (upper middle class trying to become top 1%)
SDP, yep, you got that right.
And people take Cuban seriously? Even if we accept his terms – that teachers monitoring students for learning is equivalent to “surveilling” students, what does Cuban think would happen to any teacher who used the data collected that way to sell it for profit?
What a ridiculous argument. Cuban should be embarrassed. (I know, I know, that’s not possible for rephormers.)
The monitoring is not the main issue. The sale of students’ data to third party vendors without knowledge or consent is the real problem.
You are right.
It’s yet another strawman.
Deformer arguments are a veritable cornfield stretching to the horizon and filled with strawmen.
Each time you think you have slain one of the strawmen, another one pops up.
Here is the new development.
The reformers now know that what they have to offer doesn’t make schools better, hurts public schools, but they don’t care.
Why do they keep doing what doesn’t work?
For the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks.
That’s where the money is.
Diane
Don’t you know that the term reformers hurts their feelings?
You should really be more considerate of these fragile wallflowers (which might be a good new name for them)
I guess I need to take my own advice.
From here on in I will call them the fragile wallflowers.
Why not the Disrupters?
Disruptor still has a hurtful connotation.
Perhaps The Fragile WallStreetflowers?
How about this, SDP?
PearlClutchers.
Fragile pearlclutching Wallstreetflowers, aka reformers aka Deformers aka educraterers, aka Mister Ed
In the mind of people like Larry Cuban, there is no such thing as student privacy so invasion of student privacy is an impossibility. QED
Every time you touch a computer key while online your keystrokes are mined, parsed by an algorytm, saved in the cloud and sold to anyone interested, ….your life is your online life, short of coops of carrier pigeons … “privacy” is an archaic word.
There’s a difference between having your head buried in a book vs a screen:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mental-wealth/201402/gray-matters-too-much-screen-time-damages-the-brain%3famp
I’d add my own concern which, if it’s not already happening, is way too enticing for Big Data to ignore: tracking user eye movements to ensure “proper” focus.
Not Sci-Fi. Definitely there. If it’s implemented we’ll be taking one more giant step against mankind, further squelching the imagination and natural needs of our kids’ developing minds.
Wow…and here it is:
Not sure how long it’ll be up for…but there ’tis.