Educators Aim to Seek Consent Without Overwhelming Parents

“I'm a Black mom of Black kids, and so I'm super critical and super suspicious of systems and organizations because many of them were not designed thinking about how to protect me or my girls,” said panelist Imani Goffney, a math educator at the University of Maryland. “I'm going to ask a lot of questions, and my stance is to be critical instead of trusting.”

But on the flip side, “consent fatigue is so real,” said Ava Smithing, advocacy director at the Young People’s Alliance. “Also, the more times you have to click a box, the less time you're going to spend reading every single one of those boxes.”

Many school systems seek consent each time an app or piece of technology is used, said Noelle Ellerson Ng, associate executive director at the School Superintendents Association (AASA). When parents don't opt in to every tech item, students may experience education differently “because some of that administrative burden was placed back onto a parent,” she said.

In some cases, school superintendents seek best practices where parents can provide blanket consent, said Ellerson Ng. "It's not blanket consent for all of your children's data to go everywhere, but ‘Yes, this is my consent for my child to opt in to all educational platforms that are virtual based, consistent with the district's policy,’" she added.

In addition, Ellerson Ng noted parents could grant consent for Medicaid for a child for one year and sign off on how the school nurse will handle and process over-the-counter prescription meds that a child might need.

Frequently asking for consent can overwhelm parents, disproportionately affecting those who may not have time to go through all the consent paperwork, Ellerson Ng said. “You might have a home where you can go, and your parents can pay attention, and you can have a conversation,” she said, or one “might have children whose parents are working three jobs and the stack of papers gets left until a week [later]. It's really important to think about what meaningful parent engagement looks like.”

This also factors into the idea of “minority rule,” Goffney said: Don't let parents who have the time to yell at people dominate the conversation about what consent practices.

School superintendents “have an obligation to respect and honor your child's rights and every other child's rights in that classroom," Ellerson Ng said. The minute we have a conversation about consent, you have to note "it's an important role of public education to serve all of those kids, and to protect and provide" rights and ensure educational opportunity to all of them, "and consent is an important part of that."

Parental Consent: Cultural Phenomenon

Another panel noted that the idea of parental consent is a very American concept, and how parents are viewed in the context of children's rights varies from country to country.

"What is good for children and equally, what is harmful, is very culturally dependent," said Duncan McCann, tech and data lead at the U.K.-based Good Law Project. "The parental aspect allows for some of that. But ... from an EU, U.K. context, it's just really not the lens that we start from; we start from the children. And then the parents actually help children actualize their rights, rather than imposing their own rights and obligations on the child."

Nichole Rocha, a privacy attorney with Rocha Public Affairs, worked with McCann at the international organization 5Rights, where, she said, the international team was shocked to discover how big parental rights were in the U.S. "Parental rights are way more political than children's rights," she said. "The children's rights, as they're viewed in the U.K., in Europe, it's a universal thing," she said. "They have the right to expression, they have the right to association, they have the right to all of these things. And in the U.S., you have the right to be free from neglect and abuse."

Rihoko Kawai, privacy and technology law professor from Toyo University, said Japan respects children's rights, but, given the interconnected world that exists, is influenced by other countries. "Society decides [a] sort of compromise," she said. "As a result, we have children's rights and parent consent."

Cobun Zweifel-Keegan, managing director at IAPP, said though the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in the U.S. is often spoken about as if it's a privacy statute for children, it's really a parental rights statute.

Rocha agrees. "Parental rights are way more political than children's rights," she said. With COPPA, parents with kids younger than 13 can consent to their children's data being used, but only if the website is directed at kids or if the site had actual knowledge that a child is on the site, Rocha said.

"The age-appropriate design code, which started in the U.K., flips that and says if you are a site that's likely to be accessed by children, then you need to have these privacy and safety protections by default, and adults basically toggle that off," she said. "This idea of 'likely to be accessed by children' instead of 'directed at children' is taking the states by storm" as it changes the age in which privacy and safety should be prioritized online from 13 to 19, "which seems to track more with our understanding of how the internet works now."

This different way of viewing children's privacy and safety online is directly at odds with COPPA, said McCann. "The principle of the age-appropriate design code is that children need to be protected where they are, not where [we] parents think they should be."