As Schools Reopen, Who Protects Students From Teacher Influencers Who Turn Them Into Content? [Op-Ed]

As a new school year begins, districts across the country will restrict students’ cellphone and social media use in classrooms. But what happens when the adult holding the camera phone is a teacher-influencer with a large social media following and districts pay little, if any, attention to what educators disclose about students online?

That question became urgent in Houston’s Fifth Ward just days into the school year at the historically Black Phillis Wheatley High School. A new teacher who had already built an online following as a food influencer posted a tearful video complaining that his predominantly Black and Brown high school seniors could not complete a basic reading-and-writing exercise. The students’ faces were not shown nor were they named, but the teacher disclosed enough information for viewers to identify their school, grade level, and community. 

Over three days, one teacher’s video racked up nearly 5 million views and sparked yet another national panic about literacy and a sweeping indictment that fed the usual racist assumptions about Black and brown students’ intelligence, parenting, culture, and communal failures..

While a former Wheatley English teacher disputed the claim that the students she taught are illiterate, several students told Houston Public Media they resented Williams for broadcasting the claim. One student called the crying teacher a liar and said, “Why would you embarrass somebody’s kids? Because if you know kids can’t read, can’t write – why would you go on social media and embarrass the whole kids like that? That’s not right.”

The rise of teacher-creators, which predates TikTok, exploded during the pandemic when remote instruction moved school life onto screens. Teachers originally used social platforms to exchange lesson plans and teaching tips online. But now this social media genre has evolved into a lucrative content economy built around teachers’ personalities and stories about encounters with students and parents who never agreed to become part of anyone’s brand. Some educators command audiences ranging from a few thousand to millions under hashtags such as #Teacher and #TeachersOfTikTok.

Federal privacy law and district policies have not necessarily kept pace with an online culture that encourages educators to convert classroom experiences into social media content.

We do not know whether those Houston students understood the assignment, whether the directions were clear, whether some had learning disabilities, whether they were anxious on the second day of school, or whether the exercise accurately measured their abilities. Nor do we know what it felt like to watch their classroom become evidence in a national indictment of America’s struggles over literacy, which the government has documented extensively since the late 1960s.

And all that uncertainty is precisely the point. The teacher controlled the camera, the framing, and the narrative. But his students had no comparable power to explain themselves. The Houston Independent School District issued a public response acknowledging the controversy and that some students have entered its school below grade level, but it has not disciplined the teacher or accused him of violating district policy.

The controversy is bigger than one teacher or one viral video, and it raises an urgent question: Who protects young people’s ability to safely make mistakes, learn, and grow in schools? Especially Black and brown children whose schools suffer from decades of chronic divestment, discrimination, punitive discipline practices, and political attacks.

Concerns about educators sharing classroom content have become widespread enough that districts across the country have adopted restrictions intended to protect students’ identities, images, and work. 

Districts in Minnesota, Montgomery County, Maryland, New York City, Dothan City in Alabama, Georgia’s DeKalb County and North Carolina’s Columbus County have policies ranging from requiring written parental consent before posting student images to prohibiting employees from sharing student work or details that would allow community members to identify a child. And some districts bar educators from turning classroom content into personal profit.  

Still, the rules and enforcement remain uneven because many policies were written for an earlier social media era. Even where policies exist, some may regulate photos and recordings but don’t address how teachers can describe students and classroom interactions online. The presence of a camera changes the classroom, and even if it is pointed only at the teacher, students can still be exposed collectively, as we witnessed with the Houston high school.

Not to mention, the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, better known as FERPA, restricts the disclosure of students’ personally identifiable information such as grades and school assignments, disability information, and disciplinary records without authorization. But FERPA does not guarantee privacy for everything that happens in a classroom or for information shared online based on a teacher’s personal observation.

Children should be entitled to learn freely in humiliation-free educational environments and be taught by educators who use the classroom as a protected place for asking questions and even failing instead of a content studio exploiting children’s vulnerability for attention and profit.

Children cannot meaningfully consent to becoming part of a teacher’s social media brand when that teacher controls their classroom and grades their work. So how can we expect them to learn freely in educational spaces where they must calculate whether their questions and mistakes might be shared with millions of strangers online?

Policies that only address the exposure of students’ faces, names, or official records do not go far enough to protect students. Stricter professional standards are needed that explicitly prohibit school employees from using classroom interactions without consent to grow personal platforms.

Yes, teachers should absolutely expose educational failure, especially in marginalized communities where schools have been battered by chronic racism and divestment for decades. But that scrutiny should be upward at institutions and powerbrokers, not down at our children, who possess the least power.

Our children’s struggles should be allowed to remain ordinary instead of serving as proof of everything America loves to believe is uniquely pathological about Black people.

SEE ALSO:

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