The need for a comprehensive education data governance – the regulation of who collects what data, how it is used and why – continues to grow. Technologically, data can be collected by third parties, rendering schools unable to control their use. Legal frameworks partially achieve data governance as businesses continue to exploit existing loopholes. Education data use practices undergo no prior ethical reviews. And at a personal level, students have no agency over these practices. In other words, there is no coherent and meaningful oversight and data governance framework that ensures accountable data use in an increasingly digitalised education sector. In this article, I contextualise the issues arising from education data transactions in one school district in the United States. The case study helps to contextualise what needs governance, who may access education data and how the district governs data use and transactions, emphasising the need for a coherent education data governance but also the limitations of such isolated efforts.

In this chapter, we discuss the impact of digitizing education, the risks of datafication, data privacy loss, and surveillance, and their implications for children’s fundamental rights and freedoms. While debates around digital media’s impact on children’s health and development have grown, our goal is to present the most pertinent concerns emerging from the use of education technologies (edtech), focusing on data collection and surveillance in Anglo-American (Western) contexts. We shed light on the gaps in literature and provide recommendations addressing education stakeholders.

This paper addresses families’ perceptions of corporate influence in career and technical education (CTE) through market-driven policies that enable data extraction for student profiling and seek to align K-12 education with business-driven needs. Aligning education with business needs can offer early employment, however, accelerating technological developments risk subjecting hyper-specialised individuals to highly unpredictable labour markets and ultimately job insecurity. Using grounded theory, we conducted in-depth interviews with families across the United States, to obtain their views on the hyper-specialisation in CTE. The emerging discourse is that powerful corporations offer makeshift hyper-specialisation curricula that fit their business needs and do not necessarily reflect, or indeed, consider children’s best interests. This research contributes to scholarship by elucidating the views of families affected by the corporate influence in CTE. The collected stakeholder accounts suggest the need for more in-depth research on individuals who rely on CTE for future employment.