Dive Brief:

• Last week, the student privacy startup Clever announced that its system is now in use in roughly a third of all public and private schools in the U.S., or 44,000 schools in total.
• Clever offers a simple interface for students to use to log into all of their classroom-related apps, while strictly controlling and protecting student data releases to third-party vendors.
• The company was founded three years ago and was initially designed to help teachers integrate technology.

Dive Insight:

Parent privacy concerns have mounted in recent years, as more teachers and districts turned to technology to support student learning. Those concerns could soon result in major policy changes. This year, state legislators in 46 states introduced 182 bills directed at protecting student data and privacy. Meanwhile, the trend toward personalized learning may be exacerbating the situation as vendors look for increasingly detailed information about students in order to tailor their content. That can include social-emotional learning metrics that can provide a detailed portrait of a student's character, on top of their academic performance.

That has raised concerns about intentional data releases by vendors selling the information for marketing purposes. But it has also raised concerns about unintentional releases, either from sloppy school systems or insecure vendor software, as corporate data hacks have become more common.

Clever is supposed to help districts solve some of those issues by vetting apps' security and limiting the data they handle. But it also eases the time and resource burdens new apps can place on districts; Clever handles the legal documentation, allows students and teachers to login in to dozens of apps with a single username and allows administrators to easily add apps. And it only charges the private vendors, not the districts, an added bonus for cash-strapped public school administrators.