Parents’ Consent at the Heart of Ed Tech Lawsuits

Linda Jacobson — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 10:30:00 +0000

The uprising against ed tech received a boost from the federal government last month when the advised schools to “help reduce the role of screens in the lives of our nation’s children.”

To Lila Byock, one of two California moms suing Curriculum Associates over its product i-Ready, the advisory was the right move. Thousands of school districts use the program, with its animated alien characters, to give students practice in math and reading.

“Excessive classroom screen use is a public health crisis,” she said, adding that district leaders should “reduce the use of individual devices, reinvest in paper curricula and stop letting Big Ed Tech exploit our kids for profit.”

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Districts like and , are already rethinking their use of i-Ready or in response to growing backlash from parents. , led by the Austin-based EdTech Law Center, could be one reason. The complaint argues that the company gained “virtually unfettered access” to children’s personal information, like birth date, gender, race and disability status, and shared it with “myriad third parties.”

Curriculum Associates denies the accusations.

“Curriculum Associates takes student data privacy extremely seriously, and the claims in this litigation are without merit,” a spokesperson told ��. “We do not sell student data, use it for advertising, or create commercial profiles of students. All use of student information is limited to supporting the educational services requested and authorized by schools and districts in compliance with applicable federal and state laws.”

Ed tech vendors rely on long-standing federal that says “schools may act as the parent’s agent,” provided the data they gather is for educational, not commercial, purposes.

The lawyers taking ed tech companies to court are challenging that guidance. Linnette Attai, a data privacy consultant and founder of Playwell, LLC, said the complaint over i-Ready is based on “a lot of speculation,” but it has still put vendors and education leaders on alert.

“Curriculum Associates is facing significant legal bills, but also a public relations and customer retention issue. The industry is sitting up and taking notice,” she said. But she said the issues the complaints raise are “better suited for legislators and not a courtroom.”

‘Theories of consent’

Congress passed the in 1998, requiring online sites to verify parents’ approval before they collect, use or share information from children under 13.

Last , the Federal Trade Commission’s FAQ on the law says that schools “can consent under COPPA to the collection of kids’ information on the parent’s behalf.”

But with that put students’ privacy at risk and that digital tools benefit kids, the attorneys representing parents like Byock hope to defeat that interpretation of the law.

“These theories of consent that companies rely on in order to bypass actual consent from parents are all bogus,” said Andrew Liddell, one half of the husband-and-wife legal team behind the EdTech Law Center. “They have no basis in the law whatsoever.”

Andrew and Julie Liddell run the EdTech Law Center, which has sued Curriculum Associates and other companies with products widely used in the nation’s schools. (Courtesy of Julie Liddell)

The FTC updated its COPPA regulation in early 2025, but left the school consent issue alone. The agency, however, it was “concerned about the use of and other engagement techniques to keep kids online in ways that could harm their mental health.”

Last summer, the FTC submitted an in support of EdTech Law Center in a separate , an online learning platform used by more than 18 million students. The Liddells sued on behalf of three Kansas families who said the company uses “deceptive design techniques” to keep kids hooked and shares their data with a “host of private companies.” The families have asked for monetary damages.

The law, the FTC wrote, does not create an “agency relationship between schools and the parents of school children.”

The Liddells say the brief is the most definitive statement yet that parents, not schools, have the final say over what data ed tech vendors can access. But the FTC hasn’t changed its existing guidance, and other student privacy experts say schools can continue to it.

A spokesperson for the FTC told �� it doesn’t “have anything to add to the amicus brief.”

‘The long game’

Meg Leta Jones, founder of the Center for Digital Ethics at Georgetown University, said there is tension in Washington over this issue. On one hand, the administration is “trying to be pro-AI,” she said. First lady Melania Trump entered a White House education summit in April alongside a saying, “The future of A.I. is ‘personified,’ ”

At the same time, Republicans support parental rights, and a few months earlier, a Senate committee held to examine the harms of ed tech.

“It’s hard to move when both of those things are happening,” Jones said. The lawsuits are important, she said, because they take the issue out of federal officials’ hands. “Clarity around this consent issue is what will come in the long game.”

A yard sign in Pennsylvania’s Lower Marion Township reflects the demands of some parents to allow ed tech opt outs. (Courtesy of Yair Lev)

Outside the courts, the litigation has inspired more parents to push for restrictions on i-Ready and other ed tech platforms. Parents in New York City’s District 4, on Manhattan’s East Side, noted the i-Ready lawsuit in a calling for screen time limits.

Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, a mom of two who chairs the Community Education Council for District 4, has already opted her kids out of i-Ready and NWEA’s MAP tests. But she said she remains “a thousand percent” concerned about her 14-year-old’s use of programs like Google Classroom, IXL and JumpRope, a grading platform.

The resolution cited a recent finding 141 data breaches or “unauthorized data releases” between 2023 and 2025. The district, the New York comptroller’s office said, doesn’t have an “accurate inventory” of all of the software programs schools use or the privacy risks involved.

“It’s like ed tech on steroids,” said Salas-Ramirez, also a neuroscientist who trains future doctors. “We don’t have the data to validate that these quote unquote tools, instruments or assessments provide us anything worthwhile.”

‘Administrative nightmare’

Ed tech experts say schools wouldn’t be able to function if vendors had to get consent directly from parents for all the online products students use in the classroom.

It’s an “administrative nightmare” said Mark Williams, a California attorney who specializes in ed tech contracts and student privacy. “Throw that out the window; it doesn’t work.”

Vendors share data with third parties. That part isn’t in dispute. The question is if it’s being shared, as the FTC says, “for the use and benefit of the school” or falling into the hands of companies that use it for marketing or targeted ads based on students’ characteristics.

A last year offered another look into what happens when kids click answers or type personal information into a program. The state board turned to , a nonprofit that tests software products, to investigate 100 apps commonly used in the state’s schools.

The review found that over a third shared student information with advertisers. shared data with six advertisers. Others shared data with dozens of advertisers as well as with sites like Google and Microsoft.

The report stressed that the “presence of sharing alone does not necessarily constitute a contract violation.” Some sharing is necessary for an app to function properly, the authors wrote.

It’s “common sense” for a vendor to share data they collect to fix bugs or security flaws, said Steve Smith, executive director of , a global network of vendors and schools. But legally, it’s “a little bit of a stretch” for a company to create a new program with that information.

Vendors go too far when they share “incredibly sensitive student data” from a school monitoring app to develop a new product, said Amelia Vance, president of the nonprofit Public Interest Privacy Center. Many schools use such programs to monitor for online threats or risks of self harm.

“The companies have everything the kid has done online, everything that they’ve written in the Google Drive,” she said. “You can think about that extremely personal information then being used to create a personalized learning platform that they sell back to schools.”

‘Pretty opaque’

Inspired by Utah’s work, Access4Learning is developing a tool that districts can use to track what vendors do with student information. Leaders expect to launch it later this year.

But that might not satisfy the concerns of some parents leading the charge against ed tech. They often point out that such organizations or have received funding from some of the very companies the screen-free lobby opposes. The growing mistrust surfaced at last December that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration held to discuss kids’ “excessive screen time.”

“Ed tech is so devious that it’s created dozens of nonprofits cloaked as online safety organizations,” Lisa Cline, a Maryland parent who has advocated against screens in the Montgomery County Public Schools, said at the event. “Some of them are here today. Look closely. These guys are bankrolled by big tech and frankly, they mock the work that unpaid people like myself do to educate parents.”

While the lawsuits between parents and vendors could drag on for a while, districts should at least be transparent about the products they’re using, said Williams, the California attorney.

Parents are allowing districts “to collect and give to a third party data that they would not otherwise be entitled to,” he said. In return, educators should explain what data they take and what they do with it. “Unfortunately, that process can be pretty opaque.”